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“... connected with the idea of home as a shelter – against many things, including dirt.’ For Walt Whitman, ‘this compost’ was simultaneously vile, the stuff of putrefaction and ‘distemper’d corpses’, and redemptive: ‘It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions … it distils such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor.’ This ...”

“... child of the great 19th-century American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson and his admirer the poet Walt Whitman. Bloom inherited rhetorical tics from Emerson, in particular a penchant for the resounding statement that hypes its own grandeur to the skies. He also took from him intellectual priorities: a cultural omnivorousness combined with a determination ...”

“... utterly past the past is, how historical it is, how even the worst horrors lose their sting. As Walt Whitman wrote of the Civil War: Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must                                in time be utterly lost, That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again and ...”

“... Cervantes, Montaigne and Molière, Milton, Johnson, Goethe (Aristocratic Age); Wordsworth, Austen, Whitman, Dickinson, Dickens, George Eliot, Tolstoy, Ibsen (Democratic Age); and Freud, Proust, Joyce, Woolf (Orlando), Kafka, Borges, Neruda and Pessoa, Beckett (Chaotic Age). As you might expect, these essays are opinionated, sometimes contrary, and often very ...”

“... Emerson could awaken the strongest affection and admiration in people as different as Carlyle and Whitman. But I came away from this book still not completely sure that Emerson ever really liked, never mind really loved, anyone (his loyalties and fidelities are not in question). Richardson would certainly disagree, and he has the ...”

“... Louis Sullivan to Henry Hobson Richardson, both of whom were as American as Mom, apple-pie and Walt Whitman. From the time that intelligent Europeans like Adolf Loos and C.R. Ashbee began to acquire first-hand knowledge of American architecture around the turn of the present century, it became increasingly pointless to draw hard-and-fast lines between ...”

“... of Paris’. But his patriotic heart is with ‘the perennial and democratic concretes’ of Walt Whitman. ‘If Whitman is really the kind of poet their critical view implies,’ he thunders against literary opponents, ‘God help the Republic. The Republic’s not finished yet, and no one knows what it’s going ...”

“... returns to the Langhe, this time from the United States. Pavese wrote his thesis at university on Walt Whitman, and said he ‘admired and feared’ Whitman’s free verse; for the bulk of his own poetry he adopted a tamed analogue of it: long, anapaestic four or five-stress lines, unrhymed. This form risks ...”

“... King’s new oral biography, Travels over Feeling, the 15-year-old Russell is already referring to Walt Whitman, John Cage and Allen Ginsberg (prefiguring later, more explicit involvements with queer sexuality, paganism and utopian politics). There is also an Alan Watts name-drop and a lot of talk about Buddhism.It isn’t easy, reading the early pages of ...”

“... he knew, in his lifetime – and a number of poems, ‘Adam’ and Ode to Walt Whitman among them, address the theme of homosexual love. Lorca also expressed his admiration for the courage of Cernuda, one of the other outstanding poets of his generation, in giving poetic form to his predicament as a homosexual. Would it not have ...”

“... was invented by Dashiell Hammett in the Twenties. And the dominant aesthetic in American art, from Walt Whitman to Lou Reed, has always been most powerful when adopting the perspective of outsider, underclass and little people: precisely the perspective needed for socially engaged crime. Engaged writing, classical realist writing and writing rich in ...”

“... for the title of ‘most important and significant figure of the 19th century’ (the other was Walt Whitman). Chesterton appreciated Wallace’s enigmatic mix of materialism and mysticism: Wallace, he wrote, has simultaneously ‘been the leader of a revolution and the leader of a ...”

“... that honours party figures, the nominee must also stress his ties with ordinary Americans. Like Walt Whitman, he might list them in occupations – workers, teachers, farmers, small businessmen and so on. For if it is important for the candidate to sound statesmanlike and even Olympian, to place himself in a historic succession of party and national ...”

“... shared alienation. He doesn’t like dogs; Vanessa loves them but forgives him. He lectures on Walt Whitman and ‘the idea that people contain multitudes and contradictions’, and on Robert Frost – ‘The Road Not Taken’, according to Strane, ‘isn’t meant to be a celebration of going against the grain but rather an ironic performance about ...”

“... face cream, wore a notorious ‘platinum slave bracelet’ (Natacha’s gift), and considered Walt Whitman his favourite poet. (Rudy himself published a poetry book, Day Dreams, containing lyrics ‘psychically received’ through automatic writing.) So connected was Valentino, in the public eye, with masculinity’s questionable outer limits, that a ...”