The Fight of a Book for the World: A Companion Volume to Leaves of Grass

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Stonecraft Press, 1926 - 304 pages
Manuscript title of work is "Reader's Handbook to Leaves of Grass."
 

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Page 186 - Swiftly I shrivel at the thought of God, At Nature and its wonders, Time and Space and Death, But that I, turning, call to thee O soul, thou actual Me, And lo, thou gently masterest the orbs, Thou matest Time, smilest content at Death, And fillest, swellest full the vastnesses of Space.
Page 164 - Passing, I leave thee lilac with heart-shaped leaves, I leave thee there in the door-yard, blooming, returning with spring.
Page 23 - O strong-winged soul with prophetic Lips hot with the bloodbeats of song, With tremor of heartstrings magnetic, With thoughts as thunders in throng, With consonant ardours of chords That pierce men's souls as with swords And hale them hearing along...
Page 282 - The vocabulary of an omniscient man would embrace words and images excluded from polite conversation. What would be base, or even obscene, to the obscene, becomes illustrious, spoken in a new connection of thought.
Page 179 - COME, said my Soul, Such verses for my Body let us write, (for we are one,) That should I after death invisibly return, • Or, long, long hence, in other spheres, There to some group of mates the chants resuming, (Tallying Earth's soil, trees, winds, tumultuous waves,) Ever with pleas'd smile...
Page 55 - One book last summer came out in New York, a nondescript monster which yet had terrible eyes and buffalo strength, and was indisputably American...
Page 190 - 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 valved voice.
Page 37 - Surely whoever speaks to me in the right voice, him or her I shall follow, As the water follows the moon, silently, with fluid steps, anywhere around the globe.
Page 37 - I should have otherwise thought it worth while to have a new page, not because the motto itself is objectionable to me, — it was one of the finer things which had clung to me from among his writings, — but because, since I quote so few poets, my selection of a motto from Walt Whitman might be taken as a sign of a special admiration, which I am very far from feeling.
Page 33 - Leaves of Grass," a book of singular service, a book which tumbled the world upside down for me, blew into space a thousand cobwebs of genteel and ethical illusion, and, having thus shaken my tabernacle of lies, set me back again upon a strong foundation of all the original and manly virtues.

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