Word: wyck
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...FLOWERING OF NEW ENGLAND- Van Wyck Brooks-Button...
...money, brains and background is Dr. Michael Hoke of Atlanta. His father. Robert Frederick Hoke. a Major General in the Confederate Army, prospered during Reconstruction by pushing what is now the Seaboard Airline Railroad through North Carolina to Atlanta. Dr. Hoke's mother was a New York Van Wyck. One of his uncles. Robert Van Wyck, was elected mayor of New York City in 1898. Same year, another uncle, Augustan Van Wyck, was defeated for Governor of New York by Roosevelt I. General Hoke wanted his son to become a civil engineer like himself. "Mike" obeyed, took...
...Critic Brooks's history is not only to re-examine the productions themselves, but to visualize the social conditions that nourished them, to study the men who created them, to summon up what was good in that society for its measure of guidance for the present. Van Wyck Brooks sees art as a normal function of men and communities. If men of genius are frustrated in their struggles to release their creative faculties, their tragedies are reproduced in the lives of anonymous thousands for whom no records are kept, and, in the words of one of his followers...
Dramatizing this point of view in The Flowering of New England, Van Wyck Brooks has unobtrusively created a new type of critical literature that meets Thoreau's exacting standard of excellence. Thoreau said that at first reading a book should be impressive for its common sense; at the second, for its truth; at the third, for its beauty. Into a crowded and shifting background, made up of hundreds of minor, typical, New England figures, Mr. Brooks has woven the lives of his heroes, picturing them in the cities, the country, the seaport towns, studying the books they read...
Brilliant and full of meaning as these portraits are, the great achievement of The Flowering of New England lies in the beautiful discussions of Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau. There is a sunlit, morning mood in all Van Wyck Brooks's writing on Emerson, but he has never equaled his new picture of the unself-conscious Sage of Concord who, with his inexhaustible buoyancy and courage, found in the simple life, in disregard for riches, the secret that unlocked his creative genius Of Hawthorne, Mr. Brooks draws a bolder and darker portrait, seeing him as the link between New England...