Word: thoreau
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...Alfred Stieglitz; a gustier and guttier five-page blast on aesthetics by e. e. cummings; some subtle war-time letters (1914-19) of the great German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke; excerpts from Andre Malraux and Franz Kafka among others; the studied, furious oration in which individualist Henry David Thoreau in 1859 defended individualist John Brown. Its "Civil Liberties Section" contained Roger Baldwin's On Being a Conscientious Objector (1918-1913)-plus the judge's decision that in 1918 sent Baldwin to jail...
...THOREAU - Henry Seidel Canby,-Houghton Mifflin...
...reasonable account of our "first civilized American." as Charles Edward Russell once called him. . . . Of course, Carl Sandburg's "Abraham Lincoln: The War Years" is the biography of this or, apparently, any other year. A new edition of "The Pratrio Years" is now also available. . . . Henry Seidel Canby's "Thoreau" is a good, solid work on a great American writer. . . . Havelock Ellis' "My Life" is an undistinguished chronicle of a distinguish life. . . Henry F. Pringle makes "The Life and Times of William Howard Taft" a far more appealing and interesting book than one's impressions of the Taft administration would...
Modern readers gauge Thoreau's genius by the qualities his contemporaries disliked. His eccentricities, prickliness, perversities, were in fact the Yankee thorns that protected him against the embrace of the Transcendentalists, the fashionable gentilities of the Lowells and Longfellows, the transient Utopianisms of the Alcotts, the dated rhetoric of his contemporaries. What moderns can see, what his contemporaries missed, is that Thoreau meant what he said. He was, he declared, a "Realometer," working his feet "downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice and tradition, and delusion, and appearance ... to a hard bottom...
...Thoreau's modern reputation is a testament to his Yankee stubbornness in sticking to his realistic problem. "I wanted," said Thoreau, "to drive life into a corner and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it ... of if it were sublime, to know it by experience. ... If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business...