John Sundman > Recent Status Updates

Wrapping up on Whitman. Discussion of Whitman and USian painters of his era, such as Mount & Eakins. Whitman compared & contrasted with Wordsworth. Whitman's foundational & passionate commitment to the dignity & worth of ordinary people gives force & urgency to his poetry but often leads to 'types' & generalizations rather than portraits of actual individuals. Even Thoreau was better than Whitman at that.

Boy, he really doesn't have much love for Walt Whitman, does he?

Deep into Melville now; this is the good stuff and the whole book up to here is kind of preparation for the discussion now. Matthiessen is making the case that Melville's binging on Shakespeare in the year before he wrote Moby-Dick is key to understanding how the author of Mardi and Typee, etc, worthy but not spectacular books, could create Moby-Dick, an indisputable masterpiece.

Hawthorne and history, Hawthorne on how Puritanism's stifling aftereffects lasted for centuries in New England. Great stuff.

Snuck in a whole chapter on Melville in the Hawthorne section, then a chapter on how Hawthorne influenced Henry James.

How Hawthorne thinks about imagination & his idiosyncratic definition of the "romance" (which is what he called The Scarlet Letter) as distinct from the "novel". More on allegory, symbolism, metaphor, & related.

Hawthorne & Melville (and Poe, others) on the differences & overlaps of symbolism & allegory. In theory & practice.

Hawthorne now. His sense of tragedy/human complexity that Emerson & Thoreau clearly did not have. His literary style was more classical than E & T's; more abstract when discussing the natural world. So Hawthorne both more & less modern than E &T. A harsh & funny critic of his own short stories. Funny private comments by Hawthorne & Melville about E & T.

Now we're entering the darker worlds of Hawthorne & Melville. Having spent so much time (close to 200 pages) getting really familiar with the thinking & writing of Emerson & Thoreau pays off now that we can read what Hawthorne thought of each of them. Great gossip (and insight). I'm really enjoying this.

Very interesting discussion of Thoreau's craftsmanship, and how he came closer to making is own art (his books) conform to his stated philosophy than did either Emerson or (sculpter) Horatio Greeenough.

For various reasons I got away from this for a month or more, but I've resumed. Reading now the fascinating chapter on Horatio Greenough. His argument is that Greenough's writings crystalized many of the ideas that were present but unformed in works of Emerson & Thoreau, but that ironically enough, Greenough's sculptures fail to come close to matching his theories of art.

Now he's talking about how Emerson & Alcott & other transcendentalists looked to Elizabethans (Donne, Browne, Herrick, Herbert, & to some extent Shakespeare for inspiration, (also Milton, somewhat). They skipped over English writers between 1620 & Coleridge in 1840's because they were too abstract & wrote in stilted, high-falutin' language.

Out of Emerson, into Thoreau.

Wish this book didn't have so many (tiny) footnotes. Just about everything in the footnotes could have been incorporated into the text pretty seamlessly.

First read this as a senior in college. Interesting to see some of my comments in the margins.

Now on about page 80. Very dense stuff, but illuminating. One key theme that Matthiessen keeps coming back to is that its hard to understand what the fuck Emerson is even talking about, since (a) he often gets very vague (as lampooned by E.A. Poe!), (b) he often contradicts himself, and (c) his poetry mostly sucks.

First read this as a senior in college. Interesting to see some of my comments in the margins.

Now on about page 80. Very dense stuff, but illuminating. One key theme that Matthiessen keeps coming back to is that its hard to understand what the fuck Emerson is even talking about, since (a) he often gets very vague (as lampooned by E.A. Poe!), (b) he often contradicts himself, and (c) his poetry mostly sucks.

First read this as a senior in college. Interesting to see some of my comments in the margins.

I first read this about 50 years ago, before I was 20, and was amazed. That's pretty much all I remember about it, other than the general subject matter/story and show-offy virtuosity. I don't know if I'll get around to reading it again -- I'm reading about 7 books at present, with a very enticing "to be read" pile beckoning. But I was cleaning the basement today & came upon my old copy. Hence this placeholding note.

Forming his cabinet.

Read it in college 40 years ago. Only 5 pages in. It's propulsive.

This is one powerful writer.

Closing in on Lee near Appomattox.

Atlanta is ours and fairly won.