David S. Reynolds > Quotes

“without immortality all would be sham and sport of the most tragic nature.”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

“I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you, And you must not be abased to the other. Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat, Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best, Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvèd voice. I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning, How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn’d over upon me, And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart, And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my feet. Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the art and argument of the earth, And I know that the hand of God is the promise [originally “elderhand”] of my own, And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own, And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers, And that a kelson of the creation is love.”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

“Lincoln found that Shakespeare’s universal appeal lay in his depiction of shared human qualities. Disloyalty, jealousy, revenge, hatred, madness, self-destructiveness, tomfoolery, devotion, faith, depression—they were all there in Shakespeare’s plays, delivered in language so carefully calibrated that they remained under artistic control.”
― David S. Reynolds, Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times

“He would once say that he wanted Leaves of Grass to be published as a pocket book, to be carried around everywhere: “That would tend to induce people to take me along with them and read me in the open air: I am nearly always successful with the reader in the open air.”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

“The cross-fertilization of different images, he hoped, might help to disperse the various ills he and the nation faced.”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

“In one of the rare moments that he discussed his private beliefs, Lincoln declared he would join a church if he found one whose only requirement was to follow the Golden Rule.”
― David S. Reynolds, Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times

“he was mainly a romantic comrade who had a series of intense relationships with young men, most of whom went on to get married and have children. Whatever the nature of his physical relationships with them, most of the passages about same-sex love in his poems were not out of keeping with then-current theories and practices that underscored the healthiness of such love.”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

“American cultural historians long thought that as male and female spheres became separated with the rise of industrialism, men practiced aggressive values in the commercial marketplace while women, confined to the home, took on qualities such as passivity, piety, purity, and submissiveness. To be sure, as Ann Douglas and Barbara Welter show, the ideal of the angelic, submissive housewife was purveyed in many novels and advice manuals. But partly in response to the forces driving women to domesticity and debility, more vigorous roles for women were defined. Nina Baym and others have noted the sturdiness often exhibited by the heroines of domestic novels, and Jane P. Tompkins stresses the power and cultural work achieved by popular writers like Susan Warner and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Frances B. Cogan shows that to counteract signs of sickliness and passivity among women, antebellum health advisers and popular writers held up the ideal of the tough, active woman—what Cogan calls the Real Woman. In health literature, this movement flowered in works like Dr. Dio Lewis’s New Gymnastics for Men, Women and Children (1863). In popular fiction, it gave rise to spirited heroines with the physical capabilities of men. For”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

“Along with sharp criticism, America needed a class of writers that would embrace the country and give it “a national character, an identity” creating “a new moral American continent” without which the physical one was “a carcass, a bloat.”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

“the inundation of the average American’s consciousness with profit-driven spectacles and images would not come until after the Civil War. Before the war, Americans attended to oratory with a seriousness and eagerness that would be frittered away with the advent of “show business,” a term introduced in 1850 but not widely used until the late sixties.”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

“Dear Sir—I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of “Leaves of Grass.” I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy.… I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perceptions only can inspire. I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging.… I wish to see my benefactor, and have felt much like striking my tasks and visiting New York to pay you my respects. R.W. Emerson”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

“Melancholy Shakespearean passages provided him with relief. They offered structured, resonant versions of gloom. They organized sad topics and made them meaningful. Reciting dark writings aloud let him project his depression outward so that it was filtered through the improving lens of poetry. The rhythms and images of verse crystallized his private experience in a manner similar to the way his finest speeches crystallized and uplifted the national experience.”
― David S. Reynolds, Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times

“Exclusive emphasis on either the physical or the spiritual Whitman misses his determined intermingling of the two realms. His earliest notebook poem contained the lines, “I am the poet of the body / And I am the poet of the soul,” establishing at once the interpenetration and cross-fertilization between matter and spirit that is felt in virtually all his major poems. The earthly and the divine, the sensuous and the mystical, are never far from each other in his verse. His images flow rapidly from the minutiae of plant or animal life through parts of the human body to sweeping vistas of different times and places,”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

“As he himself expressed it, his was the greatest of faiths and the least of faiths—the greatest in his belief in God and everyday miracles, the least in his acceptance of any church’s creeds.”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

“The difference becomes clear if we consider Herman Melville’s distinction between a thoughtful response to Shakespeare and that of the mere thrill seeker. Melville contrasted “those mistaken souls, who dream of Shakespeare as a mere man of Richard-the-Third humps, and Macbeth daggers,” with the contemplative reader, who was unconcerned with “blood-besmeared tragedy” for its own sake and attended instead to “those deep far-away things” in the Bard of Avon, “those occasional flashings-forth of the intuitive Truth in him; those short, quick probings at the very axis of reality . . . that make Shakespeare, Shakespeare.”
― David S. Reynolds, Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times

“he allegedly told his host, “If this is coffee, please bring me some tea, but if this is tea, please bring me some coffee.”
― David S. Reynolds, Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times

“In a day before passive spectatorship and the mass media, entertainment was supplied by actual people—not just paid performers but also ordinary people alone or in groups. Whitman’s picture in “I Hear America Singing” of average people singing their “varied carols” was more than just a metaphor. It reflected a pre-mass-media culture in which Americans often entertained themselves and each other. Whitman’s spouting Shakespeare atop omnibuses, declaiming Homer and Ossian at the seashore, and humming arias on the street typified these performances in everyday life.”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

“When I have a particular case in hand,” he explained, “I . . . love to dig up the question by the roots and hold it up and dry it before the fires of the mind.”
― David S. Reynolds, Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times

“In the free, easy social atmosphere of pre–Civil War America, overt displays of affection between people of the same sex were common. Women hugged, kissed, slept with, and proclaimed love for other women. Men did the same with other men.”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

“His chosen medium—writing—had, he believed, a high potential for holding America together. America was a nation of readers, known worldwide for its high literacy rates. At midcentury, a full 90 percent of white American adults could read, as opposed to about 60 percent in England. Whitman crowed hyperbolically: “In regard to intelligence, education, knowledge, the masses of [English] people, in comparison with the masses of the U.S., are at least two hundred years behind us.”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

“Passionate intimacy between people of the same sex was common in pre—Civil War America. The lack of clear sexual categories (homo-, hetero-, bi-) made same-sex affection unself-conscious and widespread.”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

“best poems do not fall into any single—or even double or triple—historical category. The current book tries to overcome piecemeal approaches to literary history by reconstructing the life and times of America’s most representative poet. With a figure as familiar as Whitman, a certain amount of recapitulation or synthesis of known information is inevitable, and I am indebted to many fine studies of him. But the interaction between his life and writings and their historical background has been reported only fragmentarily. Whitman constantly called attention to the historical origins of his poetry. “In estimating my volumes,” he wrote, “the world’s current times and deeds, and their spirit, must first be profoundly estimated.” The poet fails, he wrote, “if he does not flood himself with the immediate age as with vast oceanic tides […] if he be not himself the age transfigured.” In his own copious reading, he had an undying fascination for all aspects of a writer’s contexts”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

“Lincoln managed to both respect religion and parody it,”
― David S. Reynolds, Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times

“In this partisan diatribe, Lincoln spent most of his time attacking Stephen Douglas’s arguments on behalf of the Democratic candidate Franklin Pierce while offering little positive support of Winfield Scott or the Whigs. He decimated many Democratic arguments but replaced them with virtually nothing. To expose Franklin Pierce’s “ludicrous and laughable” record as a brigadier general in the Mexican War,”
― David S. Reynolds, Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times

“Poetry became his favorite genre; he memorized poetic lyrics and recited them often. For him, poetry organized and crystalized experience as no other type of language did.”
― David S. Reynolds, Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times

“the ungirt, the diffuse, the profuse, procumbent, one wide ground juniper, . . . it all runs to leaves, to suckers, to tendrils, to miscellany, . . . formless, has no terrible & no beautiful condensation.”
― David S. Reynolds, Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times

“He decimated many Democratic arguments but replaced them with virtually nothing. To expose Franklin Pierce’s “ludicrous and laughable” record as a brigadier general in the Mexican War,”
― David S. Reynolds, Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times

“In Emerson’s words, “A great style of hero draws equally all classes, all the extremes of society, till we say the very dogs believe in him.”
― David S. Reynolds, Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times

“In Mary’s view, Trumbull should have given Lincoln his votes, not the other way around. Lincoln was relieved that at least the senatorship had gone to the like-minded Trumbull, whom he congratulated and continued to befriend.”
― David S. Reynolds, Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times

“Whitman would be appalled in the 1850s when holiday celebrations began to be mass-oriented spectacles manipulated by professionals. One of his most famous poetic lines—“ I celebrate myself”—can be taken, on one level, as an attempt to restore the idea of celebration, which was fast becoming coldly manipulative, to the personal and genuinely celebratory.”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography