Word: whitmans
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...present them to the external phenomenal world and end this constant division between inside and outside--that's the great function of art. And I think that's revolutionary in itself in that it contrasts manipulativeness and public speech with the candor of interior music. That's what Walt Whitman asked for. His word was candor and I don't think that can be emphasized enough...
...That which shows God in me, fortifies me. That which shows God out of me, makes me a wart and a wen." A century after Emerson, his heirs have decided that self-fortification can come through sex -- gay or straight, married or un-. Today's Romantics say, with Walt Whitman, "God comes a loving bedfellow and sleeps at my side all night...
...foreign masters of despair -- Mishima, say, or Celine -- Miller could not help remaining a fearlessly joyous soul, "100% American," as he put it, right down to his repudiation of America. No one ever embraced life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness more lustily. An Emersonic boom was his, and Whitmanic energy. Like Emerson, he saw the Greek roots in enthusiasm -- the word means divine possession -- and knew that the poet "speaks adequately only when he speaks somewhat wildly . . . Not with intellect alone, but with intellect inebriated by nectar." And like Whitman, his fellow rhapsodist of Brooklyn, he sang only...
...prose that seems so stabilizing in the late 20th. Ralph Waldo Emerson is good to have beside the bed between 3 and 6 in the morning. So is the book of Job. Poetry: Wallace Stevens for his strange visual clarities, Robert Frost for his sly moral clarities, Walt Whitman for his spaciousness and energy. Some early Hemingway. I read the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam (Hope Against Hope; Hope Abandoned), the widow of Osip Mandelstam, a Soviet poet destroyed by Stalin. I look at The Wind in the Willows out of admiration for Mr. Toad and for what...
...Voice of a Woman Pharaoh: New Poems a reading by Ruth Whitman at 7:30 p.m. in the Bunting Institute...