3,902 words
They were true idealists, from New England. But that is some time ago: before the War. Several years before the War they met and married; he a tall, keen-eyed young man from Connecticut, she a smallish, demure, Puritan-looking young woman from Massachusetts. (more…)
5,206 words
Chapter 12 of Studies in Classic American Literature
POST-MORTEM effects?
But what of Walt Whitman?
The ‘good grey poet’.
Was he a ghost, with all his physicality?
The good grey poet. (more…)
4,893 words
“We can’t go back. We can’t go back to the savages: not a stride. We can be in sympathy with them. We can take a great curve in their direction, onwards. But we cannot turn the current of our life backwards, back towards their soft warm twilight and uncreate mud. Not for a moment. If we do it for a moment, it makes us sick.
2,765 words
“Men are free when they are in a living homeland, not when they are straying and breaking away. Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, Organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom. Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.” — D. H. Lawrence
Andrew Wyeth, The Last of the Mohicans, 1919
5,821 words
Chapter 5 of Studies in Classic American Literature
In his Leatherstocking books, Fenimore is off on another track. He is no longer concerned with social white Americans that buzz with pins through them, buzz loudly against every mortal thing except the pin itself. The pin of the Great Ideal.
James Fenimore Cooper, 1789–1851
3,806 words
Chapter 4 of Studies in Classic American Literature
Benjamin Franklin had a specious little equation in providential mathematics:
Rum + Savage = 0. Awfully nice! You might add up the universe to nought, if you kept on.
4,221 words
Editor’s Note:
The North American New Right is a “metapolitical” not a political movement. There are many ways to draw that distinction, but the most important is in terms of values.
David Herbert Lawrence, 1885–1930
6,137 words
“What then is Moby Dick? He is the deepest blood-being of the white race; he is our deepest blood-nature.
“And he is hunted, hunted, hunted by the maniacal fanaticism of our white mental consciousness. We want to hunt him down. To subject him to our will. (more…)
David Herbert Lawrence, 1885–1930
522 words
Editor’s Note:
The following passage on America is from D. H. Lawrence’s novel The Plumed Serpent (1926). The Plumed Serpent tells the story of Kate Leslie, an Irish widow of 40, who, to escape her unhappy life, decides to travel to Mexico. She is horrified at Mexico’s ugliness, degeneracy, and backwardness. (more…)
