Word: thoreau
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...poets ranging from Conrad P. Aiken ’12 to former U.S. Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz ’26. Harvard’s golden age of poetry has been lauded in numerous publications, and its early years were in part defined by the presence of power roommates Thoreau and Emerson. But how have more recent alumni authors been faring? As a case study, examine the class of 2004, which produced successful alumni novelists from both schools. In the Yale corner is Natalie Krinsky, author of “Chloe Does Yale,” which chronicles the exploits...
...Comes to a not very nice end. This kid's survival skills are about what you'd expect of a nice middle-class boy, who may have read his Thoreau, but who neglected to cultivate a Ralph Waldo Emerson he could count on for a warm bath and square meal when he really needed them. And despite the best efforts of Emile Hirsch, there's something annoying about him, too. He's too secure in his self-righteousness, too smug in his conviction that his is the only viable path to self-fulfillment. A lot of the dropouts he encounters...
Modern American culture was dawning too. Walt Whitman and Nathaniel Hawthorne had started work on Leaves of Grass and The Scarlet Letter, respectively, and Herman Melville was preparing to write Moby Dick. Henry David Thoreau, laying the groundwork for environmentalism, was altogether disgusted by the new Zeitgeist and gimcracks. "I delight to come to my bearings," he writes in Walden, which he began in the late '40s, "not walk in procession with pomp and parade, in a conspicuous place ... not to live in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century, but stand or sit thoughtfully while it goes by. What...
Nevertheless, two of the most influential early American poets—Henry David Thoreau 1837 and Ralph Waldo Emerson 1821—went to Harvard, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was a professor here for years. Harvard was the most obvious college for the second great generation of American poets. One of T.S. Eliot’s cousins was Charles Eliot 1853, President of Harvard, and E.E. Cummings’ father was a professor...
...behind this style of all hype and no substance. In a delivery disastrously aimed at the hip-intellectual readership, Susan Cheever’s “American Bloomsbury” reduces Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau to a group of 19th Century Bennifers and Brangelinas. Cheever aims to make “Bloomsbury” a colorful yet historically accurate piece of literary criticism, and her ostensible desire to liberate her subjects from the stuffy realm of academia and to recapture the vibrant intellectual community they created is certainly laudable...