Word: whitmanic
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...TIMES OF MELVILLE AND WHITMAN (489 pp.)-Van Wyck Brooks-Dutton...
...filling in the gap between The Flowering and Indian Summer, comes The Times of Melville and Whitman, a rich portrait of U.S. literary life shortly before & after the Civil War. Hopping nimbly from region to region, Brooks lovingly sketches their literary manners-the rash of reform movements in New York, "attractional harmony and passional hygiene . . . water cure and Graham Bread"; the burly tall tales of the Far West where Joaquin Miller, "the greatest liar living . . . half a mountebank and all the time a showman," turned out crude, vigorous sketches of pioneer life; the sad whimsies of the post bellum South...
...while lighting up obscure corners of the past and its unremembered versifiers and belle-lettrists, Brooks seems unable to evoke the accumulating tension of U.S. life during the '50s and '60s. The Civil War itself plays no role in his book except insofar as it impinges on Whitman's personal development. In his eagerness to recreate the fragrance and colors of the past, Brooks impatiently skips those struggles of the mind and body that comprised its substance. There is more in this book about Miss Woolson's literary mannerisms than Lincoln's world-shaking ideas...
Characteristically, Brooks is far more successful in bringing to life Whitman's optimistic, spacious, fervent democratic faith than Melville's tortured, Jacob-like wrestling with his own soul. He casts a wishful haze over mid-19th Century American life...
Police lines quickly tightened around Annev buildings after the "incident" to curb further disturbances. An hour later the law was reported to have flushed another undergraduate hurling rocks at a Whitman Hall upper window...