Listings for Author:
Walt Whitman
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Walt Whitman :
'Emrys Daniel Hughes, [an] imprisoned CO and son of a Tonypandy miner, learned that the authorities were not unaware of the subversive potential of great literature. Following a Home Office directive to examine prisoners' books, the chaplain confiscated a volume of Shelley, though not before Hughes had a chance to read and discuss it. The padre also apparently removed Tristram Shandy from the prison library: Hughes found it whilst cleaning the chaplain's rookm and had read it on the sly... In More's Utopia he discovered a radical rethinking of criume and punishment. The World Set Free, in which HG Wells predicted the devastation of nuclear war, naturally spoke to his antiwar activism, and he was greatly impressed by the Quaker idealism in George Fox's journal, a biography of William Penn and Walt Whitman's poems.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Emrys Daniel Hughes Print: Book
Walt Whitman :
'In 1898 Armstrong organised the Ashington Debating and Literary Improvement Society, and his reading broadened out to Shakespeare, Burns, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Byron, Whitman, Wordsworth, Scott, Robert Browning, Darwin and T.H. Huxley. Robertson Nicoll's British Weekly had introduced him to a more liberal Nonconformity that was hospitable to contemporary literature. The difficulty was that the traditional Nonconformist commitment to freedom of conscience was propelling him beyond the confines of Primitive Methodism, as far as Unitarianism, the Rationalist Press Association and the Independent Labour Party. His tastes in literature evolved apace: Ibsen, Zola. Meredith, and Wilde by the 1890s; then on to Shaw, Wells, and Bennett; and ultimately Marxist economics and Brave New World'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Chester Armstrong Print: Book
Walt Whitman :
'[Helen Crawfurd] derived lessons in socialism and feminism from Carlyle, Shaw, Wells, Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett, Ibsen's Ghosts and A Doll's House, Dickens, Disraeli's Sybil, Mary Barton, Jude the Obscure, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Under the Greenwood Tree, Tennyson's The Princess, Longfellow, Whitman, Burns, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, George Sand, the Brontes, Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Helen Crawfurd Print: Book
Walt Whitman : poetry
"Before she came into contact with Suffragism ... [Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence] felt her political outlook ... had been conditioned by reading Morris, Carpenter, and Whitman's poetry."
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence Print: Book
Walt Whitman : Leaves of Grass
"Harriet Shaw Weaver, as an adolescent, found Leaves of Grass 'a liberating influence and could even read it on Sundays as it wasn't a novel!'"
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Harriet Shaw Weaver Print: Book
Walt Whitman : [unknown]
'Charlie Chaplin was a classic autodidact, always struggling to make up for a dismally inadequate education, groping haphazardly for what he called "intellectual manna"... Chaplin could be found in his dressing room studying a Latin-English dictionary, Robert Ingersoll's secularist propaganda, Emerson's "Self- Reliance" ("I felt I had been handed a golden birthright"), Irving, Hawthorne, Poe, Whitman, Twain, Hazlitt, all five volumes of Plutarch's Lives, Plato, Locke, Kant, Freud's "Psychoneurosis", Lafcadio Hearn's "Life and Literature", and Henri Bergson - his essay on laughter, of course... Chaplin also spent forty years reading (if not finishing) the three volumes of "The World as Will and Idea" by Schopenhauer, whose musings on suicide are echoed in Monsieur Verdoux'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Spencer Chaplin Print: Book
Walt Whitman : [unknown]
'I spent the morning reading dramatists, to qualify myself to teach English Literature [...] while in the evening I read Walt Whitman's last book aloud to Alice, thus establishing myself as a (qualified) Whitmaniac.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Sir Walter Raleigh Print: Book
Walt Whitman : [unknown]
'After Stalingrad, [Bernard Kops] immersed himself in Russian literature. A GI dating his sister introduced him to Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Bernard Kops Print: Book
Walt Whitman : Song of the Open Road
'14th March 1929. I had the ?Open Road? in my pocket, and we [G.M. and a friend, Miss Mundel] read bits together, and talked of ?Wander-thirst?, of Stevenson, of gardens, of tobacco, and (with E.V.L. in our minds) of ?Punch?. I recommended some of the glorious days I have passed in the country beyond St. Cloud with this book for company, and recited Stevenson?s ?Requiem? which Miss M?ndel liked and copied. The Websters gave me three numbers of ?Punch? for my week-end reading.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Gerald Moore Print: Book
Walt Whitman : probably Leaves of Grass
'I have read aloud my death-cycles from Walt Whitman this evening. I was very much affected myself, never so much before, and it fetched the auditory considerable. Reading these things that I like aloud when I am painfully excited is the keenest artistic pleasure I know: it does seem strange that these dependant arts ? singing, acting and in its small way, reading aloud ? seem the best rewarded of all arts. I am sure it is more exciting for me to read, than it was for W.W. to write: and how much more must this be so with singing!'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Louis Stevenson Print: Book
Walt Whitman : Leaves of Grass
'Last night, after reading Walt Whitman a long while for my attempt to write about him, I got the tete-montee, rushed out up to Magnus Simpson, came in, took out Leaves of Grass, and without giving the poor unbeliever time to object, proceeded to wade into him with favourite passages.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Louis Stevenson Print: Book
Walt Whitman : Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking
'However I forgave him, and read him that bit of Walt Whitman about the widowed bird, which I thank God affected him quite tolerably.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Louis Stevenson Print: Book
Walt Whitman :
'F.E. Pollard gave some account of Walt Whitman's Life indicating the variety of livelyhood [sic] & of expression which he sought he also told us something of the leading ideas expressed in his work "The Splendour of Life" World wide Comradeship Immortality Freedom Broad Vistas. Geo Burrow read from the poem Memories of President Lincoln. After supper R.B. Graham read Captain, My Captain & Manhattan Faces. F.E. Pollard sang "Ethiopian Saluting the Colours". R.H. Robson amused us by reading passages showing Whitman's fondness for lists. In the discussion which concluded the evening it was concluded that whilst Whitman is often effective his poems are often not poetry.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Francis Pollard Print: Book
Walt Whitman : 'Memories of President Lincoln'
'F.E. Pollard gave some account of Walt Whitman's Life indicating the variety of livelyhood [sic] & of expression which he sought he also told us something of the leading ideas expressed in his work "The Splendour of Life" World wide Comradeship Immortality Freedom Broad Vistas. Geo Burrow read from the poem Memories of President Lincoln. After supper R.B. Graham read Captain, My Captain & Manhattan Faces. F.E. Pollard sang "Ethiopian Saluting the Colours". R.H. Robson amused us by reading passages showing Whitman's fondness for lists. In the discussion which concluded the evening it was concluded that whilst Whitman is often effective his poems are often not poetry.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: George Burrow Print: Book
Walt Whitman : 'O Captain! My Captain!'
'F.E. Pollard gave some account of Walt Whitman's Life indicating the variety of livelyhood [sic] & of expression which he sought he also told us something of the leading ideas expressed in his work "The Splendour of Life" World wide Comradeship Immortality Freedom Broad Vistas. Geo Burrow read from the poem Memories of President Lincoln. After supper R.B. Graham read Captain, My Captain & Manhattan Faces. F.E. Pollard sang "Ethiopian Saluting the Colours". R.H. Robson amused us by reading passages showing Whitman's fondness for lists. In the discussion which concluded the evening it was concluded that whilst Whitman is often effective his poems are often not poetry.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: R.B. Graham Print: Book
Walt Whitman : 'Manhattan Faces'
'F.E. Pollard gave some account of Walt Whitman's Life indicating the variety of livelyhood [sic] & of expression which he sought he also told us something of the leading ideas expressed in his work "The Splendour of Life" World wide Comradeship Immortality Freedom Broad Vistas. Geo Burrow read from the poem Memories of President Lincoln. After supper R.B. Graham read Captain, My Captain & Manhattan Faces. F.E. Pollard sang "Ethiopian Saluting the Colours". R.H. Robson amused us by reading passages showing Whitman's fondness for lists. In the discussion which concluded the evening it was concluded that whilst Whitman is often effective his poems are often not poetry.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: R.B. Graham Print: Book
Walt Whitman :
'F.E. Pollard gave some account of Walt Whitman's Life indicating the variety of livelyhood [sic] & of expression which he sought he also told us something of the leading ideas expressed in his work "The Splendour of Life" World wide Comradeship Immortality Freedom Broad Vistas. Geo Burrow read from the poem Memories of President Lincoln. After supper R.B. Graham read Captain, My Captain & Manhattan Faces. F.E. Pollard sang "Ethiopian Saluting the Colours". R.H. Robson amused us by reading passages showing Whitman's fondness for lists. In the discussion which concluded the evening it was concluded that whilst Whitman is often effective his poems are often not poetry.'
