Word: whitmanic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...eagerness to pardon military deserters (the mothers of the country, he argued, should not be made to suffer more than they had), and for the "exhibitionistic and self-destructive impulses" reflected in a recurrent dream that he would be assassinated before his second term was out. As for Walt Whitman, he would never have poured so much sexuality into his poetry and realized it so imperfectly in his life (he was impotent, with strong homosexual inclinations) if he had not been so strongly attached to a mother who was illiterate and unable to understand him or his literary ambitions...
...resonances somehow develop with rereading. Then Roethke's driest lines can blossom as unexpectedly as the desert cactus. One of his repeated, even self-conscious influences in such passages is Walt Whitman ("Be with me, Whitman, maker of catalogues / . . . the terrible hunger for objects quails me"). But for Roethke, "all finite things reveal infinitude," and . . . if we wait, unafraid, beyond the fearful instant...
...Beyond Whitman, the poems poignantly betray Roethke's consciousness, like Andrew Marvell's, of "Time's winged chariot hurrying near," and Roethke cannot even playfully think of love without remembering death. The Wish for a Young Wife is characteristic...
...Indiana is primarily known for his emblematic circles set in plane-geometry shapes like road signs. Their bright, unmixed colors are so unpainterly that his brush stroke cannot be detected, because, as he says, "impasto is visual indigestion." Usually they are ringed with inscriptions: phrases from Melville and Whitman, or commands in broken stencil type such as EAT, HUG, LOVE, DIE, or ERR. These curt verbs, he believes, represent the vocabulary of the American dream, the "optimistic, generous, and naive" philosophy of plenty that is often mistaken for all the philosophy that the U.S. lives...
Other officers include Jane Mansfield '66, of Whitman Hall and Akron, Ohio, secretary-treasurer; and Sylvia Cox '67, of Briggs Hall and Columbus, Ohio, hostess...