Hawthorne--like Poe--became a kind of virtuoso in the fiction of the inner life: the only novelist from New England as subtle as E...merson and Dickinson. He was able to present in the current style the extraordinary burden on the New England mind of the past, its moral introspection, its unending self-confrontation. Poe, his only equal in the "tale," was really a convert to aesthetic medievalism, an apologist for slavery, order, and hierarchy, a writer of "grotesques and arabesques" who saw the power of blackness as personal damnation and a way of practicing literary terror. It is the force of the repressed that Poe made his drawing card, the power not of the past but of the dead, as phantoms preying on unsleeping guilt. Hawthorne remained a child of Puritanism, rooted in the village, the theocracy, the rule of law, the numbing force of convention. Poe, by contrast, is forever homeless, landless, seeking a visionary home in some Platonic heaven of eternal Beauty, writing his most poignant poems out of a profound homesickness that operated as a curse.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The nearest analogy to Dreiser's "personal realism" is to be found in the painter Edward Hopper, who shares Dreiser's passion for ...transcendent writers, for images of trains and roads. Despite his similar choice of "ordinary" subjects, Hopper has written that his aim "has always been the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impressions of nature." ... One feels in the awkwardness, the dreaming stillness of Hopper's figures, the same struggle to express the ultimate confrontation of men and things that one does in Dreiser's reverent descriptions of saloons, street-cars, trains, hotels, offices.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ishmael's thought consciously extends itself to get behind the world of appearances; he wants to see and to understand everything.... Ahab's drive is to prove, not to discover; the world that tortures Ishmael by its horrid vacancy has tempted Ahab into thinking he can make it over. He seeks to dominate nature, to impose and inflict his will on the outside world--whether it be the crew that must jump to his orders or the great white whale that is essentially indifferent to him. As Ishmael is all rumination, so Ahab is all will. Both are thinkers, the difference being that Ishmael thinks as a bystander, has identified his own state with man's utter unimportance in nature. Ahab, by contrast, actively seeks the whale in order to assert man's supremacy over what swims before him as "the monomaniac incarnation" of a superior power.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Blake is very much like Beethoven in his artistic independence and universality. Like Beethoven, he is a pioneer Romantic of that ...heroic first generation which thought that the flames of the French Revolution would burn down all fetters. Like Beethoven, he asserts the creative freedom of the imagination within his work and makes a new world of thought out of it. There sounds all through Blake's poetry ... that lyric despair mingled with quickness to exaltation, that sense of a primal intelligence fighting the mind's limitations, that brings Beethoven's last quartets so close to absolute meditation and the Ninth Symphony to a succession of triumphal marches. What is nearest and first in both men is so strong a sense of their own identity that they are always reaching beyond man's conception of his powers. In both there is a positive assertion against suffering, an impa tience with forms and means. As Beethoven said of the violinist who complained of the difficulty of one of the Rasumofsky quartets--"Does he really suppose I think of his puling little fiddle when the spirit speaks to me and I compose something?"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »