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“... make a great scene of the killing. The rage of Lincoln’s adherents has been vividly described by Walt Whitman, with the cry of ‘Murder!’ ringing through the playhouse, the white-faced widow shouting in her box, the silly-looking theatregoers rushing on stage: ‘a dense and motley crowd, like some horrible carnival – the actors and actresses all ...”

“... To these questions from the fourth fragment, I’m tempted to answer that the voice is that of Walt Whitman, the great self-styled ‘bard’ who classed Ossian with the Bible, and who thought that Red Jacket, one of the great Iroquois orators, was ‘like one of Ossian’s ghosts’. Whitman grew his long lines out ...”

“... of the present. Not surprisingly, for an author who has for long been afflicted with what Walt Whitman called ‘the disease of historic nostalgia’, the first part of this book – wanting the past – claims the most space. Nostalgia provides the opening theme. But nostalgia is rarely memory without pain. Dreams can be transformed into ...”

“... closing a circle, people I should have loved but wouldn’t, leaving me no way back, and took Walt Whitman and Raymond Chandler and Laurence Sterne, who hitch-hiked with me through France and Italy and down to Greece, the four of us with our toes at the utter brink of a strip of dual carriageway a mile beyond the city limits, backed by ...”

“... of apparent homoeroticism in the verse, nothing in Halleck’s life and career (unlike, say, Whitman’s or Melville’s) is particularly helpful to the reader who wants to reconstruct him as a gay writer. As a consequence, the over-extended effort of Hallock’s critical approach gives rise to frequent moments of absurdity. For instance, a female ...”

“... version of the first lines of Song of Myself, and treats the salon to a garbled reworking of Walt Whitman. No one spots the fraud. ‘The evening was considered a triumph,’ he explains, ‘and for the next period of my life I devoted most of my energies to maintaining the façade of “poet-intellectual” that my mother’s warped pride had ...”

“... from Wordsworth’s tame lakeland to America where, Lawrence announces, he is reincarnated as Walt Whitman. The lustful goat-god becomes the tutelary spirit of American transcendentalism, and is renamed “the Oversoul, the Allness of everything”. In America, Lawrence declares, “Pan is still alive.” ’ As it happens, Lawrence’s ...”

“... residency in Marfa, Texas. He brings only one book with him, his Library of America edition of Whitman’s collected writing, because he’s going to be teaching a course on Whitman the following semester. The choice is fateful. He spends his days sleeping and his nights reading ...”

“... He refused to admit his hero got into bed with men. It was a kind of conspiracy. James, Walt Whitman, even Proust – they were figures of a different age, spoke in a way which suggests sex to us, lived in a world of healthy, masculine intimacy etc etc, but great writers do not go to bed with boys. Jews are never homosexuals (‘except for ...”

“... one more outpost of old oppressions. Americans like Thoreau (and if Thoreau then Emerson and Walt Whitman, to say no more) seem to have lived so intensely or intently within the thought of a possible, and possibly closed, future that a passage like the following would be bound to have struck them as setting an old mood: ‘Everything is worn ...”

“... and windows of his mind’? There was also a prophecy laid out in ‘A Passage to India’ by Walt Whitman, one of Ginsberg’s guiding lights: ‘Passage O soul to India!/Eclaircise the myths Asiatic, the primitive fables.’ America’s very origins were bound up in its mistaken identity with India. Surely, Ginsberg thought, these were signs. The ...”

“... here represented by extracts from Byron’s ‘Detached Thoughts’, Tom Brown’s Schooldays and Walt Whitman, together with many milder examples of such affection. She believed in its opposite, the doctrine as it were of mutual necessity. You don’t choose your friends any more than your siblings, but depend on them while they are there, as they on ...”

“... nom de guerre is Andrea One. I was born in Camden, on Mickle Street, down from where Walt Whitman, the great grey poet, lived, a visionary, a prophet of love; and I loved, according to his poems. I had a vision too, like his, but I will never write a poem like his, a song of myself.Next Stenberg speaks from behind a net curtain. ‘My name ...”

“... Jersey was famous for gangsters way ahead of The Sopranos, and Fort Lee most famous of all. Like Walt Whitman before them, a number of enterprising souls had come over to the ‘Left Bank’ from Brooklyn. Guys like Willie Moretti, Tony Bender and Joe Adonis, né Doto, who took the name Adonis on account he was so fucking good-looking. The ‘Al Capone ...”

“... mostly translated Russian classics: Turgenev, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and sometimes an American like Walt Whitman’. Constantine again: ‘Her poetry has little connection to poetic styles past or present in America, Europe, or the rest of the world.’ Apparently, it isn’t even particularly Albanian either. ‘We have in Lleshanaku a completely original ...”