Never was anything more wanted than, to-day, and herein the States, the poet of the modern is wanted, or the great literatus of the modern. At all times, perhaps, the central point in any nation, and that whence it is itself really sway’d the most, and whence it sways others, in its national literature, especially its archetypal poems. Above all previous lands, a great original literature is surely to become the justification and reliance, (in some respects the sole reliance,) of American democracy.
Wonderful, Bill. The master of the long line. And this: "All language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead." - "The Poet," Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Never was anything more wanted than, to-day, and herein the States, the poet of the modern is wanted, or the great literatus of the modern. At all times, perhaps, the central point in any nation, and that whence it is itself really sway’d the most, and whence it sways others, in its national literature, especially its archetypal poems. Above all previous lands, a great original literature is surely to become the justification and reliance, (in some respects the sole reliance,) of American democracy.
- Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas
Wonderful, Bill. The master of the long line. And this: "All language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead." - "The Poet," Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Ironically, I was reading Emerson’s Nature which led me to the Whitman writing. Now I’m going back to “The Poet”.
Cornel West does a wonderful and complex interpretation of Emerson in his classic, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism.