Word: walts
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...When Walt Whitman's Drum Taps, a book of Civil War poems, appeared in 1865, a 22-year-old reviewer named Henry James laced into the good grey poet. "To become adopted as a national poet," wrote young James, "it is not enough to discard everything in particular and to accept everything in general, to amass crudity upon crudity, to discharge the undigested contents of your blotting-book into the lap of the public. You must respect the public which you address; for it has taste, if you have not." To which Whitman, for once laconic, snorted: "Feathers...
James later regretted his brashness, and still later, U.S. readers did adopt Walt Whitman as a national poet, but the clash between the two men dramatized the perennially split personality of American writing. Critic Philip Rahv has aptly defined it as a clash between "paleface and redskin." This is critical shorthand for the interrelated battles of highbrow v. lowbrow, refined sensibility v. raw energy, the tradition-directed writer v. the self-made writer. The palefaces, e.g., Hawthorne, Melville, James, ruled the 19th century; the redskins, e.g., Dreiser, Anderson, Wolfe, Hemingway, Faulkner, rule the 20th. As the first great chief...
...Kiss from Lafayette. Whitman Specialist Allen serves a full-course literary meal, and he takes his time about it, but anyone who sits patiently at his table will leave it fat with facts. Walt Whitman was born in West Hills, near present-day Huntington, Long Island, in 1819, but was taken to Brooklyn at the age of three. His father was a good carpenter but a poor provider, who spouted Tom Paine to his eight children. Walt had a skimpy schooling, and the most dramatic event he later recalled from his childhood was the day Lafayette, on a triumphal visit...
...depression of 1835-36 drove the Whitmans out to Hempstead, Long Island, and Walt took a country teaching post. The hours were hard, the pay small ($35 to $40 for a three-month term). Grown to a husky six-footer, Whitman showed no interest in girls, but he did get so chummy with the son of the farmer with whom he boarded that he was chided for it. This was the first of many close male friendships that have led later critics of Whitman to regard him as at least a crypto-homosexual...
Back in newspaper work, he became editor of the New York Aurora two months before his 23rd birthday, lost the post two months later. Young Whitman's writing was prissy and preachy. His first and only novel was a hack temperance tract. Walt's stock advice: "Swear not! Smoke not! And rough-and-tumble...