Whitman Notes Presentation

]]> http://singley.lookingforwhitman.org/2009/10/28/new-york-times-coverage-of-whitmans-funeral/feed/ 0 http://singley.lookingforwhitman.org/2009/08/01/whitman-and-edith-wharton/ http://singley.lookingforwhitman.org/2009/08/01/whitman-and-edith-wharton/#respond Sat, 01 Aug 2009 16:38:54 +0000 http://singley.lookingforwhitman.org/?p=67 Edith Wharton greatly admired Whitman. Her parents forbade her to read him when she was a child, considering him (and Poe) dissolute Bohemians. Wharton writes in her memoir, “A Further Glance,” that Leaves of Grass was “kept under lock and key, & brought out, like tobacco, only in the absence of the ‘the ladies'” (21). Wharton’s love of Whitman is evident in her published writings, especially her novel Summer, letter, and notes. She planned to write an essay about him and made notes, which are included in Wharton Archive at the Beinecke Library, Yale University. The record may be viewed through the following link.

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A PROMISE to California,
Or inland to the great pastoral Plains, and on to Puget sound and
Oregon;
Sojourning east a while longer, soon I travel toward you, to remain,
to teach robust American love,

For I know very well that I and robust love belong among you,
inland, and along the Western sea;

For these States tend inland and toward the Western sea, and I
will also.

Walt Whitman (1819-1892).  Prose Works. 1892.
I. Specimen Days
199. The Women of the West
Kansas City.-I AM not so well satisfied with what I see of the women of the prairie cities. I am writing this where I sit leisurely in a store in Main street, Kansas city, a streaming crowd on the sidewalks flowing by. The ladies (and the same in Denver) are all fashionably drest, and have the look of “gentility” in face, manner and action, but they do not have, either in physique or the mentality appropriate to them, any high native originality of spirit or body, (as the men certainly have, appropriate to them.) They are “intellectual” and fashionable, but dyspeptic-looking and generally doll-like; their ambition evidently is to copy their eastern sisters. Something far different and in advance must appear, to tally and complete the superb masculinity of the West, and maintain and continue it.

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Image credit:  “Walt Whitman’s House” by bart

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