| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"maff" |
| Date: |
29 Aug 2005 03:52:12 PM |
| Object: |
OT: Walt Whitman |
Walt Whitman: American Innocence
http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/features/article305865.ece
New York was Walt Whitman's Jerusalem - the poet was ravished by its
buildings, its boats and, occasionally, its citizens. Now 21st-century
Gotham City is re-igniting its love affair with the 19th-century
visionary, says Philip Hoare - and not a moment too soon...
Published: 14 August 2005
At my bedside New York public radio issues vague reports of explosions
in London. Still jet-lagged, it's 5.30 am, I blearily turn on the TV,
and for the next three hours watch, with mounting horror, scenes from
the city I have just left. Tearing myself away, I leave the Soho Grand
Hotel in lower Manhattan for the overheated streets outside; the subway
entrances are already guarded by police with machine guns. Walking
south through the Financial District, a BBC journalist vox-pops me at
Ground Zero. Wall Street is flanked on one side by militia, and on the
other by the media, in the shape of CBS and NBC's outside broadcasting
vans.
There has to be an antidote to the louring doom of this morning. And I
find it at the end of the street, at the water's edge. Here, where
renovated 19th-century schooners stand with their rigging archaic
against steel and glass, South Street Seaport Museum is celebrating 150
years of a text whose optimism is an implicit rebuttal to the awful
start we've made to the 21st century. But is the exhibition's title -
"Walt Whitman and the Promise of Democracy" - anything more than an
ironic phrase in 2005?
Walt Whitman
http://news.google.com/news?q=%22Walt%20Whitman%22&num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&sa=N&tab=gn
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