POST-MORTEM effects?
But what of Walt Whitman?
The ‘good grey poet’.
Was he a ghost, with all his physicality?
The good grey poet.
Post-mortem effects. Ghosts.
A certain ghoulish insistency. A certain horrible pottage of human parts. A certain stridency … Read the rest
MOBY DICK, or the White Whale.
A hunt. The last great hunt.
For what?
For Moby Dick, the huge white sperm whale: who is old, hoary, monstrous, and swims alone; who is unspeakably terrible in his wrath, having so often … Read the rest
THE greatest seer and poet of the sea for me is Melville. His vision is more real than Swinburne’s, because he doesn’t personify the sea, and far sounder than Joseph Conrad’s, because Melville doesn’t sentimentalize the ocean and the sea’s … Read the rest
You can’t idealize brute labour. That is to say, you can’t idealize brute labour, without coming undone, as an idealist.
The soil! The great ideal of the soil. Novels like Thomas Hardy’s and pictures like the Frenchman Millet’s. The soil. … Read the rest
NO OTHER book of Nathaniel Hawthorne is so deep, so dual, and so complete as The Scarlet Letter: this great allegory of the triumph of sin.
Sin is a queer thing. It isn’t the breaking of divine commandments. It … Read the rest
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE writes romance.
And what’s romance? Usually, a nice little tale where you have everything As You Like It, where rain never wets your jacket and gnats never bite your nose and it’s always daisy-time. As You Like It… Read the rest
POE has no truck with Indians or Nature. He makes no bones about Red Brothers and Wigwams.
He is absolutely concerned with the disintegration-processes of his own psyche. As we have said, the rhythm of American art-activity is dual.
(1) … Read the rest
IN his Leatherstocking books, Fenimore is off on another track. He is no longer concerned with social white Americans that buzz with pins through them, buzz loudly against every mortal thing except the pin itself. The pin of the Great … Read the rest
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN had a specious little equation in providential mathematics:
Rum + Savage = 0.
Awfully nice! You might add up the universe to nought, if you kept on.
Rum plus Savage may equal a dead savage. But is a … Read the rest
CREVECOEUR was born in France, at Caen, in the year 1735. As a boy he was sent over to England and received part of his education there. He went to Canada as a young man, served for a time with … Read the rest