‘May the glory of that pinnacle hold
free men untramelled, free and unenthralled.’
 |
Walt Whitman by Ralph Steadman from Ambit 176 Spring 2004. (With respectful acknowledgements.) |
For another fugitive fragment of verse, see:
Lines rejected by Rainer Maria Rilke
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2016/02/lines-rejected-by-rainer-maria-rilke.html
cf. A Man’s Man.
Compare my mother’s verdict on those self-appointed claimants to wisdom when the writer is a Man’s Man who presumes to write of the ‘qualities and tempers’ of women. In my mother’s time there were two such public men. She called them The Walt Whitmen of Women’s Weeklies. ‘Sentimentalists. They speak for womanhood yet haven’t the beginnings of a clue.’ Then she added darkly, ‘They don’t know the half ot it.’ She was referring to the two mid-20th Century longtime celebrated British columnists, Beverley Nichols of Woman’s Own magazine and his counterpart, Godfrey Winn of Woman magazine. Both men were reportedly lovers of Somerset Maugham. Both magazines are still published.
Moral: An omniscient narrator is an object of profound suspicion.
