Wilson was a visionary who liked to identify himself with "forward-looking man"; Harding ... was as old-fashioned as those wooden ...Indians which used to stand in front of cigar stores.... Wilson thought in terms of the whole world; Harding was for America first. And, finally, whereas Wilson wanted America to exert itself nobly, Harding wanted to give it a rest.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The short story is at an advantage over the novel, and can claim its nearer kinship to poetry, because it must be more concentrate...d, can be more visionary, and is not weighed down (as the novel is bound to be) by facts, explanation, or analysis. I do not mean to say that the short story is by any means exempt from the laws of narrative: it must observe them, but on its own terms.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is no shadow of protection to be had by sheltering behind the slender stockades of visionary speculation, or by hiding behin...d the wagon-wheels of pacific theories.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The American doctrinaire is the converse of the American demagogue, and, in this way, is scarcely less injurious to the public. Th...e first deals in poetry, the last in cant. He is as much a visionary on one side, as the extreme theoretical democrat is a visionary on the other.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Public morning diversions were the last dissipating habit she obtained; but when that was accomplished, her time was squandered aw...ay, the power of reflection was lost, [and] her ideas were all centered in dress, drums, routs, operas, masquerades, and every kind of public diversion. Visionary schemes of pleasure were continually present to her imagination, and her brain was whirled about by such a dizziness that she might properly be said to labor under the distemper called the vertigo.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There should be a sympathy with freedom, a desire to give it scope, founded not upon visionary ideas, but upon the long experience... of many generations within the shores of this happy isle, that in freedom you lay the firmest foundations both of loyalty and order.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And such are we-- Unreasoning, sanguine, visionary--... That I can hope Health, love, friends, scope In full for thee; can dream thou'lt find Joys seldom yet attained by humankind!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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 »