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“... for doomed youth is in the refrain of ‘Don’t Get Around Much Any More’: a combination of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and the more candid letters of Wilfred Owen. Palimpsest fills in the blanks. For half a century, Gore Vidal has been living selfishly and hedonistically, because all this time he has been living for two.It is via the Jimmy Trimble ...”

“... one point, after Walter has saved his own life at the expense of his agape soulmate, the gentle, Walt Whitman-quoting meth cook Gale, Hank, who is investigating the murder, shows him the dead man’s notebook and at a family dinner proclaims Gale a drug genius – intolerable to Walter’s scientific pride, since the recipe Gale was making notes on is ...”

“... Ethel Mannin, for instance, who tells her that love is ‘the greatest human happiness’ or Walt Whitman, who advises that life is best seen as ‘a series of episodes’. Her youth – she was born in 1909 – is overshadowed by the memory of the First World War and its heroicised losses. But is life, she asks herself, really a matter of giving ...”

“... authors into redskins and palefaces. Redskins are bearded bards and pagan guzzlers of experience (Walt Whitman, Henry Miller, the Beats, and that honorary American, D.H. Lawrence); palefaces, the tightly-buttoned patrician ministers of culture, society and manners (William Dean Howells, Henry James, T. S. Eliot). Although Moody tries to ride the wild ...”

“... star Irène Bordoni:Which life is for meThe peaceful or the stormy?Which is the right manWalt Whitman or Paul Whiteman?Given the options of gay or straight, tempestuous or dependable, cruising or monogamous, Porter tended to chose both. He married Linda in 1919; they soon became ‘Les coleporteurs’, star turns on the Continental social ...”

“... Howard Sturgis, Housman, J.A. Symonds, Pater, the always dependable Shakespeare and Michelangelo, Whitman, Marlowe and Henry Scott Tuke, the painter of bathing boys. Three or four are mere suspects, followed by question marks: Samuel Butler? Luca Signorelli? Forster had presumably seen those great paeans to the male buttocks, Signorelli’s frescoes in ...”

“... to Harrison, of finding out what Camden had done by way of commemorating its well-known resident, Walt Whitman. We paused at a bar and made friends with some relaxing locals; within the hour Harrison had gone off with a woman. I failed in my Whitman researches, never arduously prosecuted, and walked back across the ...”

“... Richard MabeyThe Stonemason, Andrew ZiminskiKiss Myself Goodbye, Ferdinand MountWhat Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life, Mark DotyPastoral, James RebanksPhilip Roth, Blake BaileyWilliam Golding, John Carey17 June. Rupert’s birthday. Rupert goes into the office for a meeting with the management of Condé Nast and, after 21 years as editor of World of ...”

“... the poems and differentiate them from the work of other soldier-poets of the First World War. Like Walt Whitman before him – whom, oddly, he seems never to have come across – Owen fashioned from battlefield carnage a homoerotic sublime. ‘Red lips are not so red/As the stained stones kissed by the English dead’ ‘Greater Love’ begins, and goes ...”

“... sceptical and abstractly poetic, closer to Wallace Stevens (‘Poetry is not personal’) than to Walt Whitman, with whom he has so often been paired (sometimes by himself). ‘I guess I’m deeply in love with America, really,’ Evans said later in his life. And then, by way of qualification, ‘Anyway, traditional, old-style America.’By ...”

“... in air through the window. William’s ‘Is Life Worth Living?’ quoted an exclamation from Walt Whitman: ‘To breathe the air, how delicious!’, suggesting that ‘if moods like this could be made permanent’ then the problem of life’s value would disappear. James failed to make such a mood permanent for himself but returned, whenever he ...”

“... pamphlet. Instead, he wrote some poems in English and read Mallarmé, Verlaine and Rimbaud, and Whitman.He wrote his first two homoerotic poems not long after this, in 1912. He called one of them ‘Sonnet That Shouldn’t Have Been Written (but That Was Written in the Café A Brasileira on February 11, 1912)’. The poem, Zenith writes, ‘winces with ...”

“... for Stonewall Jackson assumed cultic proportions that still resonate today. In sermons, in poems (Walt Whitman is the most important of the hundreds of writers who made death their subject), in objects, in rituals and in diaries, hundreds of thousands of ordinary people went through the process of accepting that someone they had loved was dead. Suffering ...”

“... sweetness the independence of solitude.’ From here it is but the turn of a wheel before we reach Walt Whitman and his songs to the open road. Seiler’s argument is strong and elegant because it raises a point of wonder: how did a people, so rash and so blunt in many ways, manage to live out their desires in broad daylight to the extent that they did ...”

“... of Johnson’s prose remains as unstable as his characters’ minds. In the title story, Bill Whitman seems at first to be the anti-Fuckhead: a successful 62-year-old ad man, educated at Columbia, who worked for the New York Post and spent years making TV commercials ‘just off Madison Avenue’ before moving to San Diego. The story starts by ...”