Word: whitmans
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...sensationalist press was in lurid bloom. The Know-Nothing party flourished on nativist paranoias and disgust with immigrants. In a prose tract called "The Eighteenth Presidency!", Whitman referred to politicians as "pimps," "excrement," and "serpentine men." Slavery had the sanction...
...Here is a thought that Whitman - the great American affirmationist, author of the line "The United States themselves are the greatest poem" - offered...
...newspapers Whitman read regularly, the New York Atlas, reported: "Horrible murders, stabbings, and shootings, are now looked for, in the morning papers, with as much regularity as we look for our breakfast." Whitman called New York "crime-haunted and dangerous." He said, "the revolver rules, the revolver is triumphant...
...seem, if not innocuous by comparison, then at least pretty much the same old American thing. The dilemmas remain. The Supreme Court in recent days has handed down decisions on gays in the Boy Scouts, Miranda rights, prayer at high school football games, and - disgracefully - on partial birth abortion. Whitman's day had the Dred Scott decision, which denied American citizenship to blacks. The Supreme Court, never truly the last word on anything, has much to answer...
...course in Whitman's 1850s the United States was a ship on the rocks, breaking apart. The Civil War, the first modern war, with its industrial carnage, was imminent. Whitman cherished a magnificent illusion that he could save the union with a poem - an act of imaginative cohesion that would resolve the great American paradox of individual dignity in democratic mass. His "I" was an immense ego joined to an even larger "we," so that he wrote in Leaves of Grass, "[I am] one of the great nation, the nation of many nations," and in the embrace of his rhetoric...