Word: tennysons
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Like Robert Frost after him, Whitman was first acclaimed in Britain; in the native land he celebrated, he was long left to push his own barrow. In one letter he is found trying to promote a visit to the U.S. of the prestigious Alfred Tennyson. His letter to the poet is curious on three counts. With its evocation of the "seething mass" of America and its "measureless crudity," it gives a prose version of his poetic vision. As such, its effect was only to scare off a poetic grandee, and it showed a naively crude Marxist notion of culture...
...Shaw simply "a little Mozart and water," and he periodically attacked "the absurdity of being the only music-patronizing nation in the world which systematically tolerates opera delivered in a foreign tongue." The composer he most conspicuously failed to appreciate was Brahms, whom he found "just like Tennyson, an extraordinary musician, with the brains of a third-rate village policeman...
...Tennyson's version...
...told a disconcerted aide recently. "You must have leaked that story!") Once, when Jack lost some notes from Tennyson's Ulysses that he wanted to use in a speech, Jackie obligingly quoted excerpts, from childhood recollection...
...instead found him wading in the mud, bossing construction workers. Even old Oxonians now gruffly praise the notion that education can honor "the dignity of labor," and that professors should research sociological and economic problems. Half the country's university students are now studying not Blackstone, Cicero or Tennyson but science and medicine...