Whitman comes to mind while reading “PrairyErth (a deep map),” the new book about Kansas by William Least Heat-Moon, author of the best-selling “Blue Highways.” Melville and Emerson come to mind too. Walt Whitman wrote: “The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature.” Every nation, every epoch, has had its Americans, Whitman says: You can tell the writers among them by their encyclopedic souls, even if they often look like cranks. It means that American writers-those who work the grand vein of letters in this country-like to leave no terrain unclaimed. This doesn’t mean that America is a nation of eccentrics. It is part of the national character of American writers to take pride in their eccentricity and to claim at the same time that they are representative men and women.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |