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Joke Book?

A.D. Nuttall, 23 November 1989

The Anatomy of Melancholy: Vol. I 
by Robert Burton, edited by Thomas Faulkner, Nicholas Kiessling and Rhonda Blair.
Oxford, 675 pp., £70, October 1989, 0 19 812448 1
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... truth. Pleased with the contradictions of others, Burton energetically contradicts himself. Like Walt Whitman, he ‘contains multitudes’. It may be said that the Anatomy is a great feat of Renaissance syncretism – that is, of the putting together of heterogeneous materials in a single system – but even this will not quite do. New York has been ...

I’m not a happy poet

John Butt: Lorca, 1 April 1999

Lorca: A Dream of Life 
by Leslie Stainton.
Bloomsbury, 568 pp., £20, November 1998, 0 7475 4128 0
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... might well have drawn him fatally to the closet heterosexuals among his gay friends. His ‘Ode to Walt Whitman’ in Poet in New York celebrates Whitman’s virile homosexuality, his ‘beard full of butterflies and shoulders of moon-worn corduroy’ against ‘fairies’, ‘pansies’, ‘poofs’ and other ‘queers ...

Magical Realism

D.A.N. Jones, 1 August 1985

The House of the Spirits 
by Isabel Allende, translated by Magda Bogin.
Cape, 368 pp., £8.95, July 1985, 0 224 02231 8
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Linden Hills 
by Gloria Naylor.
Hodder, 304 pp., £9.95, May 1985, 9780340360330
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Careful with the Sharks 
by Constantine Phipps.
Cape, 216 pp., £8.95, May 1985, 9780224023085
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... suitable for Linden Hills. The best man recites a verse during his congratulatory speech. It is by Walt Whitman – ‘Whoever you are, holding me now in hand ...’ – and the best man has changed ‘he’ to ‘she’ throughout. Only young Willie recognises that the bridegroom is being tormented by his ex-lover. Nedeed makes a conventional ...
The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature 
by William Wilde, Joy Hooton and Barry Andrews.
Oxford, 740 pp., £30, June 1986, 0 19 554233 9
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... is something that has not happened in Australia. There is nothing comparable to the influence of Walt Whitman, Henry James or T.S. Eliot, say, on contemporary English practice and critical attitudes, or of Ruben Dario and Luis Borges on the practice of their craft in Spain. Nor is anything of the sort yet in sight. I have perhaps wandered rather far ...

Big Head

John Sutherland, 23 April 1987

Thackeray’s Universe: Shifting Worlds of Imagination and Reality 
by Catherine Peters.
Faber, 292 pp., £12.95, January 1987, 0 571 14711 9
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... not outstandingly big. Turgenev’s, for instance, weighed in at a jumbo 70 oz. On the other hand, Walt Whitman could only claim a measly 44 oz., and to the disgrace of French literature, Anatole France supplied only 36 oz. of grey matter. Peters mounts her investigation into Thackeray by way of a kind of literary brain-scan designed to elicit his ‘way ...

Decay-Prone

Stephen Mulhall: The intolerance of liberalism, 22 July 2004

Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame and the Law 
by Martha Nussbaum.
Princeton, 413 pp., £19.95, April 2004, 0 691 09526 4
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... understanding of the lives of individuals in society. Thus the work of such figures as Lucretius, Walt Whitman and D.W. Winnicott inform her attempt to understand the opportunities and dangers of legislating in ways that draw on responses of shame and disgust, by shaping her sense of the cognitive content – and thus the morally emancipatory or ...

Duas Cervejas

James C. Scott: Ford’s Utopia, 8 October 2009

Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City 
by Greg Grandin.
Metropolitan, 416 pp., $27.50, June 2009, 978 0 8050 8236 4
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... Illinois courtroom, Thomas Edison’s lab, the homes of Patrick Henry, Daniel Webster, Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe, Luther Burbank’s botanical lab, the Wright brothers’ bicycle shop and so on) and a lovingly replicated small Midwestern town complete with a town hall, blacksmith’s shop, schools, fire station, covered ...

Dancing and Flirting

Mark Ford: Apollinaire, 24 May 2018

Zone: Selected Poems 
by Guillaume Apollinaire, translated by Ron Padgett.
NYRB, 251 pp., £9.99, January 2016, 978 1 59017 924 6
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Selected Poems 
by Guillaume Apollinaire, translated by Martin Sorrell.
Oxford, 281 pp., £9.99, November 2015, 978 0 19 968759 6
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... Saint-Charles, where he did well, winning numerous prizes. Apollinaire probably picked up from Walt Whitman his habit of naming himself in his poems: ‘Je me disais Guillaume il est temps que tu viennes’ (‘I said to myself Guillaume it is time that you came’). This trait Apollinaire in turn passed on to Frank O’Hara, who acknowledged the debt ...

Saved by the Ant’s Fore-Foot

David Trotter: Pound’s Martyrology, 7 July 2005

The Pisan Cantos 
by Ezra Pound, edited by Richard Sieburth.
New Directions, 159 pp., $13.95, October 2003, 9780811215589
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Poems and Translations 
by Ezra Pound, edited by Richard Sieburth.
Library of America, 1363 pp., $45, October 2003, 1 931082 41 3
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... to the observer, and seen as apparent, not substantial beings. Substance was precisely what Walt Whitman, Emerson’s disciple and companion in transparency, was to find in the earnest mechanic, the lounger, the beggar, the boys and the dogs all going about their everyday business. Here, Emerson finds something else in them: a puppet-show, an ...

Tomb for Two

Adam Mars-Jones, 10 February 1994

The Father 
by Sharon Olds.
Secker, 88 pp., £6, February 1993, 0 436 33952 8
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The Sign of Saturn 
by Sharon Olds.
Secker, 92 pp., £8, March 1991, 0 436 20029 5
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... Labour turns out to be just such an epic use, and the poem ends:I have done what you wanted to do, Walt Whitman,Allen Ginsberg. I have done this thing,I and the other women this exceptionalact with the exceptional heroic body,this giving birth, this glistening verb,and I am putting my proud American boastright here with the others.This works perfectly ...

Purple Days

Mark Ford, 12 May 1994

The Pugilist at Rest 
by Thom Jones.
Faber, 230 pp., £14.99, March 1994, 0 571 17134 6
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The Sorrow of War 
by Bao Ninh, translated by Frank Palmos.
Secker, 217 pp., £8.99, January 1994, 0 436 31042 2
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A Good Scent from Strange Mountain 
by Robert Olen Butler.
Minerva, 249 pp., £5.99, November 1993, 0 7493 9767 5
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Out of the Sixties: Storytelling and the Vietnam Generation 
by David Wyatt.
Cambridge, 230 pp., £35, February 1994, 9780521441513
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... has been compared with Crane and Hemingway, but the war writer he seems to me most to resemble is Walt Whitman, who set a similar premium on personal engagement: ‘I am the man, I suffered, I was there.’ It is this which enables Herr to mediate the war in terms at once responsive and unflinching. Encounters with casually brutal grunts (‘We had this ...

Pioneering

Janet Todd, 21 December 1989

Willa Cather: A Life Saved Up 
by Hermione Lee.
Virago, 409 pp., £12.99, October 1989, 0 86068 661 2
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... which had given her the idea that a region could be the subject of a book. Heroically titled from Walt Whitman, it concerned Nebraska, seen, as usual, through masculine eyes. The book provided a pastoral celebration of the late 19th-century pioneer centring on an androgynous heroine, the dominating Alexandra, who functions as a kind of life-force ...

Goodbye to Borges

John Sturrock, 7 August 1986

Atlas 
by Jorge Luis Borges, in collaboration with by Maria Kodama, translated by Anthony Kerrigan.
Viking, 95 pp., £12.95, March 1986, 0 670 81029 0
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Seven Nights 
by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Eliot Weinberger.
Faber, 121 pp., £3.95, June 1986, 0 571 13737 7
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... Expressionism which Borges had picked up in Switzerland gave him his entrée there. He was mad for Walt Whitman, for parataxis (he never lost his belief in that: the shock cuts of such enlightened directors as Josef von Sternberg were a chief reason why he loved the movies, and his own finest stories make tremendous if unobtrusive capital out of ...

Acrimony

Nina Auerbach: Feminists Fall Out, 6 July 2000

Critical Condition: Feminism at the Turn of the Century 
by Susan Gubar.
Columbia, 237 pp., £16, February 2000, 0 231 11580 6
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... the oracular priestess, the shaman of America’s commitment to e pluribus unum, a composite of Walt Whitman and Jack Kerouac on the road to becoming a cosmos. I don’t hear so much as a whisper of reconciliation in Deavere Smith’s excoriating re-creation of hate and murder, but in this initial essay, Gubar finds in African American women’s art ...

Burn Down the Museum

Stephanie Burt: The Poetry of Frank Bidart, 6 November 2008

Watching the Spring Festival 
by Frank Bidart.
Farrar, Straus, 61 pp., $25, April 2008, 978 0 374 28603 3
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... earlier poems. This notion of the self as a picture gallery, a comfort to visual thinkers such as Walt Whitman, is a challenge for Bidart, since he can’t alter the pictures: once hung, they are deeds done, completed arcs. ‘The curator, who thinks he made his soul/choosing each object that he found he chose,//wants to burn down the museum.’ The ...

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