Word: grasses
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...America's Greatest Poet." the publishers call him without equivocation; certainly he was the most American poet. From its publication in 1855, Leaves of Grass has been acknowledged by convert or critic as signaling something new and distinctively American. It has been an emancipation proclamation for later generations of U.S. writers as apparently diverse as Thomas Wolfe, Saul Bellow, Henry Miller, James Agee and Jack Kerouac-and for writers anywhere who have felt inhibited by form and classic restraint. Whitman tapped a gusher, and no one reading the letters can doubt that he knew just what he was doing...
...totality in itself. In one of the oddest letters ever written by a poet (it is in the third person), he sent to an admirer a blurb for his work, intended to be passed on to his publisher. "Personally," wrote Walt, "the author of Leaves of Grass is in no sense whatever the 'rough,' 'eccentric,' 'vagabond' or queer person that the commentators persist in making him . . . always bodily sweet & fresh, dressed plainly & cleanly, a gait & demeanor of antique simplicity ... an American Personality, & real Democratic Presence, that not only the best old Hindu, Greek...
...added as key terms that would "unlock" Leaves of Grass the words modernness, which could stand today, and ensemble, a word which today seems to belong to the cloak-and-suit trade, but which Walt intended to mean "the idea of Totality, of the All-successful, final certainties of each individual man, as well as the world he inhabits." Many people, to their peril, have taken the flatulent old Faust at his own measure. Were it not for the genius of Leaves of Grass, this sort of thing would have been buried mercifully for the flapdoodle it is. But then...
...Grass Roots Grow. Though Fall River citizens have reason to envy a good education-only 3% are college graduates, and almost 40% never finished grammar school-Fradkin at first doubted that many could spare even $1. The average annual salary in the town, a once flourishing cotton manufacturing center, was $3,000. But in the first year he raised $4,500 to finance 24 scholarships...
...brings groups from the Soviet Union, Great Britain, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, India, Ireland, Uruguay, Chile, Egypt and South Africa. Just before returning to the U.S., the State Department-sponsored troupe that included Helen Hayes, June Havoc, Leif Erickson and Helen Menken did The Skin of Our Teeth and The Grass Menagerie there. And this week Manhattan's Living Theater group arrives at the Théâtre des Nations with Bertolt Brecht's In the Jungle of Cities and Jack Gelber's The Connection...