Word: poe
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...this, and that someone, McCullough implies, should have been Teddy. In the Badlands of Dakota, while recovering from the deaths (on the same day) of his mother and first wife Alice Lee, Teddy, at 25, wrote of "melancholy pathless plains" and "deathlike stillness"-the moral geography of Edgar Allan Poe. Here he came as close as he ever would to confessing to his demons...
...something to watch. In air and bearing, she possesses regal command. Her arrant good looks, particularly those thrush-startled violet eyes, fix all other eyes upon her. On glimpsing her, Poe might have written his poem "To Helen" apostrophizing the most beguiling beauty of the ancient world. QE3 (as someone recently nicknamed Taylor) conjures up that grace and grandeur...
...fact, might grow a little tedious, if it weren't for Cross's wonderfully insightful eye. She captures not just the back-stabbing civility of Harvard politics, but the unique pace and style of the University and its city. Cross is best with the little touches that provide what Poe called the potent magic of verisimilitude (each character in this bookish book continually quotes and attributes in mid-sentence). Examples of the Cross eye: a sophisticated senior's statement to a mystified outsider. "Oh, nobody uses money at the Coop": or an accurate assessment of Lamont (squeaky floors) vs. Hilles...
...style seems strangely out of touch with the times, the sentiments behind it are even more peculiarly isolated from what is current. In this respect Helprin sometimes writes like Poe's alcoholic younger brother. Helprin's work lacks all the modern emotions and non-emotions that presumably are the bread and butter of modern writers. Alienation, ennui, and desperation all fail to make appearances in this book. The closest approach to the contemporary is a bittersweet sense of loss and of being lost that deepens the emotions of most of the characters, but it remains whispy and gently...
...there is something objectionable in this softfocused narrative, for Helprin lacks all commitment to the actual world and its psychological dislocations, and in the end his brand of escapism boils down to a complete failure to confront reality. He is the self-absorbed Romantic of the Mc Generation. Like Poe, his stories are elaborate productions conceived in the silent vacuum of an isolated man's innermost thoughts and set in a private, always beautiful, landscape of his dreams. Unfortunately, they bear little relation to the world outside them, even in this time which raises terrible issue for its artists. They...