In 1828 and 1832 James Fenimore Cooper visited England. He expected hostility because he had just written Notions of the Americans which was intended to correct the erroneous statements of British travellers about the United States, but during his visits he was well received and managed to meet many leading literary and political figures. Yet everything was wrong. In 1837 he published a book based on these visits and expressed his dismay at ‘the extent of the malignancy, or the nature of the falsehood, that are industriously circulated here at the expense of America’. It was, he wrote, a country that I could fain like, but whose prejudices and national antipathies throw a chill over all my affections; a country that unquestionably stands at the head of civilization in a thousand things, but which singularly exemplifies a truth we all acknowledge, – how much easier it is to possess great and useful, and even noble qualities, than to display those that are attractive and winning; – a country that all respect, but few love.

Horace Mann was flattered to be offered the opportunity to succeed the venerable John Quincy Adams in the House of Representatives. Adams's long and distinguished service in the House, to which he went after his defeat for a second term in the presidency, was nationally recognized. It would be difficult to fill the shoes of ‘Old Man Eloquent’. The Whigs of the Eighth Congressional District of Massachusetts had to choose a figure of some fame and reputation. Horace Mann's several years of residence in West Newton qualified him for nomination.

The Housing Act of 1949 established in Title I the goal of ‘a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family’. To achieve this goal the Federal Government was to support, by grants and by its legal powers to acquire land, a massive programme of public housing: ‘…it was the first and, until the Act of 1968, the only public housing measure that authorized action that bore some reasonable relation to need’. Nevertheless, the targets set by the 1949 Act for 1954 have still not been reached. Subsequent legislation shifted the emphasis of the programme from public housing to broader schemes of urban renewal, including non-residential development and middle- and high-income housing. The most serious aspect of this neglect of the needs of the poor has been the inadequate management of relocation for those displaced by renewal. For many slum-dwellers in the 1950s ‘urban renewal’ came to mean ‘Negro removal’.

‘I believe’, Swinburne wrote in 1875, ‘you know my theory that nothing which can possibly be as well said in prose ought ever to be said in verse’. The clarity of the distinction between prose and verse, though in practice a little wobbly, was felt to be actual in Victorian critical thought. It was not the long narrative poems (Maud, The Ring and the Book, Sordello, The Idylls of the King, The Prelude, Amours de Voyage) which undermined the distinction, but the exquisite poëmes en prose of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarmé. To blur the lines between die different kinds of art one wrote poems titled ‘Symphony in Yellow’ (Wilde), ‘Pastel’ (Symons), ‘Prose pour des Esseintes’ (Mallarmé), titled paintings ‘Nocturne’ (Whistler), or created an art form designed to absorb and surpass all others (Wagner). In Marius the Epicurean Walter Pater proved that there was no viable distinction between the language of poetry and language of prose, and in so doing created a language which was richly and grotesquely unique. To talk of poetry in terms of dance, music and painting was to neutralize the pressure of moral judgement, but this did not efface the idea of the ‘poetic’ as something, in some sense, distinct from prose. Though the lines between the two were softened, they did not disappear, becoming, for the following generation, an increasingly problematic aspect of their own art.

My major concern in this essay is with the poetry and prose of Charles Olson. However, I wish to approach his work by way of comments passed upon it by both Gabriel Pearson and Martin Dodsworth in a recent critical anthology, edited by the latter, and entitled The Survival of Poetry. In the course of an essay on Robert Lowell, Mr Pearson mounts an attack on what he takes to be Olson's characteristic position, and many of the points that he makes are echoed by the editor in his introductory remarks. It will be my concern to show that neither of these critics deals justly with the scope of Olson's work, or with the vision of man in America that we find in it. Attention in England had been focused almost exclusively on the manifesto ‘Projective Verse’. However, we now have enough texts available to us to be able to set that single work in a wider context, and this is the task that must be achieved if Olson's work is not to suffer the premature dismissal that these critics seem eager to mete out to it. In his essay,‘The Black Mountain Poets’, in the same book, Donald Davie begins this work, but there is much more to be done.

In 1938, a play by Arthur Miller, They Too Arise, won a WPA award. The plot focuses upon the personal and political tensions between two brothers and their father, a middle-class manufacturer. In 1968, the first Broadway performance of The Price demonstrated a remarkable continuity which includes All My Sons and Death of a Salesman. For here, in this Ibsenite domestic tale, the disposal of the family furniture becomes another occasion for revealing the relationships, past and present, of two brothers, and the nature of their respective stances towards their father.