Word: thoreau
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...solid to this rather debatable conception of German history. He has found in the Romantic movement of the nineteenth century both a detour from the main path of Western rationalism and the roots of Nazi philosophy. Romanticism, Viereck believes, is the expression of maladjustment. Whatever its various forms, whether Thoreau or Schlegel, Romanticism is the rebellion of those who can't solve their problems in the forms society prescribes. Ardent seekers after "the full life" may be a Faust or a white collar girl reading pulp magazines. "Freud after all had a word for it," Viereck comments shrewdly. Considering...
...pages long, and weighs three and three-quarters pounds. It covers American literature from "Mourt's Relation" (1662) to "For Whom the Bell Tolls," from the "American Magazine" (1741) to PM. Walt Whitman gets more space than anyone else (two full pages), closely followed by Henry James, Thoreau, Emerson, and Poe. Nicholas Murray Butler, who usually gets more space in "Who's Who" than any other man, gets only 17 lines here. And the height of degradation for Mr. Butler is that he is followed by "Butler, Rhett, character in 'Gone With the Wind...
...will always be recognized by the elect." Among the great quotations the elect may recognize: II Corinthians iii, 17; John viii, 32; Psalm 140; the Golden Rule; Patrick Henry on liberty; the Declaration of Independence; Rule, Britannia; Byron's Sonnet on Chilian; Shelley's Masque of Anarchy; Thoreau's On the Duty of Civil Disobedience; The Battle Hymn of the Republic...
Between 1850 and 1855, five Americans published seven books which made that half-decade the most explosive in American cultural history. The men: Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman. The books: Representative Men, The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, Moby Dick, Pierre, Walden, Leaves of Grass. "You might search all the rest of American literature without being able to collect a group of books equal to these in imaginative vitality...
...never wrote a "masterpiece"-"the sentence was his unit"-but his theory of expression "was that on which Thoreau built, to which Whitman gave extension, and to which Hawthorne and Melville were indebted by being forced to react against its philosophical assumptions." Thoreau had Emerson's Nature solid underfoot to start his life on. In an analysis of Walden's quietly magnificent form, Teacher Matthiessen passes Thoreau on Coleridge's test of "the organic principle" -that form must arise out of the properties of the material-and names him one of the ancestors of modern functionalism...