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Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays 30 0 Browse Search
Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 3 (ed. Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950.) 12 0 Browse Search
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book 12 0 Browse Search
Laura E. Richards, Maud Howe, Florence Howe Hall, Julia Ward Howe, 1819-1910, in two volumes, with portraits and other illustrations: volume 1 10 0 Browse Search
Jula Ward Howe, Reminiscences: 1819-1899 10 0 Browse Search
Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 1 8 0 Browse Search
Mary Thacher Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson: the story of his life 6 0 Browse Search
Lydia Maria Child, Letters of Lydia Maria Child (ed. John Greenleaf Whittier, Wendell Phillips, Harriet Winslow Sewall) 6 0 Browse Search
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature 6 0 Browse Search
John Harrison Wilson, The life of Charles Henry Dana 6 0 Browse Search
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Browsing named entities in Bliss Perry, The American spirit in lierature: a chronicle of great interpreters. You can also browse the collection for Victor Hugo or search for Victor Hugo in all documents.

Your search returned 3 results in 3 document sections:

Bliss Perry, The American spirit in lierature: a chronicle of great interpreters, Chapter 8: Poe and Whitman (search)
like his own immediate master, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Whitman is a mystic. He cannot argue the ultimate questions; he asserts them. Instead of marshaling and sifting the proofs for immortality, he chants I know I am deathless. Like Emerson again, Whitman shares that peculiarly American type of mysticism known as Transcendentalism, but he came at the end of this movement instead of at the beginning of it. In his Romanticism, likewise, he is an end of an era figure. His affiliations with Victor Hugo are significant; and a volume of Scott's poems which he owned at the age of sixteen became his inexhaustible mine and treasury for more than sixty years. Finally, and quite as uncompromisingly as Emerson, Thoreau, and Poe, Whitman is an individualist. He represents the assertive, Jacksonian period of our national existence. In a thousand similes he makes a declaration of independence for the separate person, the single man of Emerson's Phi Beta Kappa address. I wear my hat as I please
Bliss Perry, The American spirit in lierature: a chronicle of great interpreters, Chapter 9: Union and Liberty (search)
on of mature literary art and impressive general ideas is comparatively rare. There are single poems of Whittier, Lowell, and Whitman which meet every test of effective political and social verse, but the main body of poetry, both sectional and national, written during the thirty years ending with 1865 lacks breadth, power, imaginative daring. The continental spaciousness and energy which foreign critics thought they discovered in Whitman is not characteristic of our poetry as a whole. Victor Hugo and Shelley and Swinburne have written far more magnificent republican poetry than ours. The passion for freedom has been very real upon this side of the Atlantic; it pulsed in the local loyalty of the men who sang Dixie as well as in their antagonists who chanted John Brown's body and The battle Hymn of the Republic; but this passion has not yet lifted and ennobled any notable mass of American verse. Even the sentiment of union was more adequately voiced in editorials and sermons and o
Bliss Perry, The American spirit in lierature: a chronicle of great interpreters, Chapter 10: a New nation (search)
novation. Imagism itself is hardly as novel as its contemporary advocates appear to maintain, and free verse goes back far in our English speech and song. But the new generation believes that it has made a discovery in reverting to sensations rather than thought, to the naive reproduction of retinal and muscular impressions, as if this were the end of the matter. The self-conscious, self-defending side of the new poetic impulse may soon pass, as it did in the case of Wordsworth and of Victor Hugo. Whatever happens, we have already had fresh and exquisite revelations of natural beauty, and, in volumes like North of Boston and A Spoon River Anthology, judgments of life that run very deep. American fiction seems just now, on the contrary, to be marking time and not to be getting noticeably forward. Few names unknown ten years ago have won wide recognition in the domain of the novel. The short story has made little technical advance since the first successes of 0. Henry, though