No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
It has always been the unique desire of the American artist to attempt to order all experience in terms of the work of art and to make his life continuous and integral with the work. This poses certain problems for the artist for he thus becomes personally responsible not only for his imaginative redefinition of life but also its enactment in plural reality. In singing himself Whitman believed he was singing all America. His declaration that ‘The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem,’ makes the point precisely. But not all have felt the Whitmanian synthesis an easily attainable one. Washington Allston, in his Lectures on Art and Poems, had already stated the problem which was to occupy the American artist throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries:
page 269 note 1 Allston, Washington, Lectures on Art and Poems (New York, 1850), p. 9Google Scholar.
page 270 note 1 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Works, vol. 11 (London, 1899), p. 140Google Scholar.
page 271 note 1 Pierre, pp. 293 f. The edition used is Melville, , Works, (London, Constable, 1921–1922)Google Scholar Page references from this edition follow subsequent quotations.
page 271 note 2 West, Nathanael, Complete Works (London, 1957), p. 78Google Scholar. Page references from this edition follow subsequent quotations.
page 271 note 3 Lorch, T. M., ‘Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts: skepticism mitigated?’ Renascence, 18 (Winter 1966)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
page 272 note 1 The best book on this is Franklin, H. B.'s The Wake of the Gods (Stanford, 1963)Google Scholar.
page 272 note 2 Andreach, R. J., ‘Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts: between the dead Pan and the unborn Christ’, Modern Fiction Studies, 12, no. 2 (Summer 1966), 251–60Google Scholar.
page 273 note 1 Gombrich, E. H., Meditations on a Hobby Horse (London, 1963), p. 123Google Scholar.
page 273 note 2 See, for example, Light, J. F., Nathanael West: An Interpretative Study (Northwestern University Press, 1961), pp. 37–9, 93–7Google Scholar.
page 273 note 3 See Flaxman, 's drawing of Charon the ferryman in The Vision of Dante, or Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise of Dante Alighiere, trans. Cary, Henry Francis (London, 1921), p. 10Google Scholar. Melville's edition was the Philadelphia one of 1822.