Word: walt
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...life and writings of the smuggler Hancock become enshrined in the American Genesis; Daniel Boone becomes the leader of the lost in a new wilderness wandering; and the debates of Congress furnish the tediousness of a new Numbers. But the discussion that is already arising over the proposal that Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" be designated the American Psalms gives an indication of the keen competition that faces aspirants for a position in this modernistic All-American...
...dummy American" manufactured out of whole cloth by Franklin, and the age which produced him, has been bandied about by the subsequent writers until by the time of Walt Whitman there is nothing to do but to paw over the shredded remains. In him Mr. Lawrence finds "all that false exuberance. All those lists of things boiled in one pudding-cloth". Whitman is at the end of the road, at the very verge of the precipice...
...meantime, when Walt is tottering into oblivion with his soul leaking out his every poro, down in the valley Mr. Lawrence is pulling the truth from the bulrushes. This he is presenting us as a gift. But in order that we shall not overlook his gift, he calls attention to the act with a great cracking and smashing of old classics. We must be thankful to this kindly Englishman, doubly so because he has left us so many of our favorite authors untouched...
Such are a few of Mr. Lawrence's more consecutive pronouncements. He proclaims with some justice Melville's Moby Dick the greatest book of the sea ever written. But he says of Whitman: "Walt's great poems are really huge, fat tomb-plants, great, rank, graveyard growths"; and then: " Whitman was the first heroic seer to seize the soul by the scruff of her neck and plant her down among the potsherds." He is even able to read the darkness of acute sensual passion into the Leatherstocking Series...
Gustav Holst's "Dirge of Two Veterans", the words of which were written by Walt Whitman, was the most noteworthy number of the evening. Dr. Davison's inclusion of brasses and drums in this piece was a stroke of genius. As an example of impressionistic music, it is not to be matched in the field of choral singing...