Word: walts
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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This small Walt awes her somewhat. He is affectionate, demonstrative, but utterly imperturbable, even before his father's taciturn anger or tenderness. When, by 16, he has towered up to his father's height and beam, his mother has accepted as inscrutable in him a poise that seems a latent power, like a wind not yet blowing...
...father and George and Jeff, brothers, are delighted, even if Walt does hammer all around his nailheads and sit on a rafter reading Homer and Aeschylus at lunch hour. He has "quit loafing." But the morning comes when he is late for breakfast and they find him sitting up in bed, the floor strewn with loose papers, writing again. They guess he is hopeless...
...Only the mother, Louisa, senses his new, deeper travail. She leaves Walt more alone than ever, except to put food where he can get it and unlatch the kitchen window when he is gone to wander in the night, during months of vision, revision, destruction and creation, months of the purgation, despair, and finally the vehement triumph of a man giving his whole self to his country and his kind...
Emerson writes that silly phrase, "I greet you at the beginning of a great career"?silly because the greatness is complete, the "oneself" has been sung. The rest is controversial and boisterous"Walt the boastful, Walt the Broadway swaggerer. It is splendid and touching?Walt nursing Civil War soldier boys, Walt's seerhood and second childhood in Camden, N. J. But it is all on the down grade, all in the public eye and more or less familiar, all but the peace of Walt's profound epitaph?...
...Significance, the grand thing, is to have made Walt known as a natural force is known, by its unhurried yet manifest effects?by putting the reader into the boots of people who knew and felt Walt, bringing his big frame and nature so close that psychological terms are irrelevant and it is unnecessary even to quote the poems to show why they were written, what they mean. If there is a mite of unction spread through Author Rogers' pages, it is not obtrusive nor out of place in a book that is bound to be laid warmly and strongly...