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the experience of reading in Britain, from 1450 to 1945...

Reading Experience Database UK Historical image of readers
 
 
 
 

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Walt Whitman

  

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Walt Whitman : 

'Emrys Daniel Hughes, [an] imprisoned CO and son of a Tonypandy miner, learned that the authorities were not unaware of the subversive potential of great literature. Following a Home Office directive to examine prisoners' books, the chaplain confiscated a volume of Shelley, though not before Hughes had a chance to read and discuss it. The padre also apparently removed Tristram Shandy from the prison library: Hughes found it whilst cleaning the chaplain's rookm and had read it on the sly... In More's Utopia he discovered a radical rethinking of criume and punishment. The World Set Free, in which HG Wells predicted the devastation of nuclear war, naturally spoke to his antiwar activism, and he was greatly impressed by the Quaker idealism in George Fox's journal, a biography of William Penn and Walt Whitman's poems.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Emrys Daniel Hughes      Print: Book

  

Walt Whitman : 

'In 1898 Armstrong organised the Ashington Debating and Literary Improvement Society, and his reading broadened out to Shakespeare, Burns, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Byron, Whitman, Wordsworth, Scott, Robert Browning, Darwin and T.H. Huxley. Robertson Nicoll's British Weekly had introduced him to a more liberal Nonconformity that was hospitable to contemporary literature. The difficulty was that the traditional Nonconformist commitment to freedom of conscience was propelling him beyond the confines of Primitive Methodism, as far as Unitarianism, the Rationalist Press Association and the Independent Labour Party. His tastes in literature evolved apace: Ibsen, Zola. Meredith, and Wilde by the 1890s; then on to Shaw, Wells, and Bennett; and ultimately Marxist economics and Brave New World'.

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Chester Armstrong      Print: Book

  

Walt Whitman : 

'[Helen Crawfurd] derived lessons in socialism and feminism from Carlyle, Shaw, Wells, Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett, Ibsen's Ghosts and A Doll's House, Dickens, Disraeli's Sybil, Mary Barton, Jude the Obscure, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Under the Greenwood Tree, Tennyson's The Princess, Longfellow, Whitman, Burns, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, George Sand, the Brontes, Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Helen Crawfurd      Print: Book

  

Walt Whitman : poetry

"Before she came into contact with Suffragism ... [Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence] felt her political outlook ... had been conditioned by reading Morris, Carpenter, and Whitman's poetry."

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence      Print: Book

  

Walt Whitman : Leaves of Grass

"Harriet Shaw Weaver, as an adolescent, found Leaves of Grass 'a liberating influence and could even read it on Sundays as it wasn't a novel!'"

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Harriet Shaw Weaver      Print: Book

  

Walt Whitman : [unknown]

'Charlie Chaplin was a classic autodidact, always struggling to make up for a dismally inadequate education, groping haphazardly for what he called "intellectual manna"... Chaplin could be found in his dressing room studying a Latin-English dictionary, Robert Ingersoll's secularist propaganda, Emerson's "Self- Reliance" ("I felt I had been handed a golden birthright"), Irving, Hawthorne, Poe, Whitman, Twain, Hazlitt, all five volumes of Plutarch's Lives, Plato, Locke, Kant, Freud's "Psychoneurosis", Lafcadio Hearn's "Life and Literature", and Henri Bergson - his essay on laughter, of course... Chaplin also spent forty years reading (if not finishing) the three volumes of "The World as Will and Idea" by Schopenhauer, whose musings on suicide are echoed in Monsieur Verdoux'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Spencer Chaplin      Print: Book

  

Walt Whitman : [unknown]

'I spent the morning reading dramatists, to qualify myself to teach English Literature [...] while in the evening I read Walt Whitman's last book aloud to Alice, thus establishing myself as a (qualified) Whitmaniac.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Sir Walter Raleigh      Print: Book

  

Walt Whitman : [unknown]

'After Stalingrad, [Bernard Kops] immersed himself in Russian literature. A GI dating his sister introduced him to Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Bernard Kops      Print: Book

  

Walt Whitman : Song of the Open Road

'14th March 1929. I had the ?Open Road? in my pocket, and we [G.M. and a friend, Miss Mundel] read bits together, and talked of ?Wander-thirst?, of Stevenson, of gardens, of tobacco, and (with E.V.L. in our minds) of ?Punch?. I recommended some of the glorious days I have passed in the country beyond St. Cloud with this book for company, and recited Stevenson?s ?Requiem? which Miss M?ndel liked and copied. The Websters gave me three numbers of ?Punch? for my week-end reading.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Gerald Moore      Print: Book

  

Walt Whitman : probably Leaves of Grass

'I have read aloud my death-cycles from Walt Whitman this evening. I was very much affected myself, never so much before, and it fetched the auditory considerable. Reading these things that I like aloud when I am painfully excited is the keenest artistic pleasure I know: it does seem strange that these dependant arts ? singing, acting and in its small way, reading aloud ? seem the best rewarded of all arts. I am sure it is more exciting for me to read, than it was for W.W. to write: and how much more must this be so with singing!'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Louis Stevenson      Print: Book

  

Walt Whitman : Leaves of Grass

'Last night, after reading Walt Whitman a long while for my attempt to write about him, I got the tete-montee, rushed out up to Magnus Simpson, came in, took out Leaves of Grass, and without giving the poor unbeliever time to object, proceeded to wade into him with favourite passages.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Louis Stevenson      Print: Book

  

Walt Whitman : Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking

'However I forgave him, and read him that bit of Walt Whitman about the widowed bird, which I thank God affected him quite tolerably.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Louis Stevenson      Print: Book

  

Walt Whitman : 

'F.E. Pollard gave some account of Walt Whitman's Life indicating the variety of livelyhood [sic] & of expression which he sought he also told us something of the leading ideas expressed in his work "The Splendour of Life" World wide Comradeship Immortality Freedom Broad Vistas. Geo Burrow read from the poem Memories of President Lincoln. After supper R.B. Graham read Captain, My Captain & Manhattan Faces. F.E. Pollard sang "Ethiopian Saluting the Colours". R.H. Robson amused us by reading passages showing Whitman's fondness for lists. In the discussion which concluded the evening it was concluded that whilst Whitman is often effective his poems are often not poetry.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Francis Pollard      Print: Book

  

Walt Whitman : 'Memories of President Lincoln'

'F.E. Pollard gave some account of Walt Whitman's Life indicating the variety of livelyhood [sic] & of expression which he sought he also told us something of the leading ideas expressed in his work "The Splendour of Life" World wide Comradeship Immortality Freedom Broad Vistas. Geo Burrow read from the poem Memories of President Lincoln. After supper R.B. Graham read Captain, My Captain & Manhattan Faces. F.E. Pollard sang "Ethiopian Saluting the Colours". R.H. Robson amused us by reading passages showing Whitman's fondness for lists. In the discussion which concluded the evening it was concluded that whilst Whitman is often effective his poems are often not poetry.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: George Burrow      Print: Book

  

Walt Whitman : 'O Captain! My Captain!'

'F.E. Pollard gave some account of Walt Whitman's Life indicating the variety of livelyhood [sic] & of expression which he sought he also told us something of the leading ideas expressed in his work "The Splendour of Life" World wide Comradeship Immortality Freedom Broad Vistas. Geo Burrow read from the poem Memories of President Lincoln. After supper R.B. Graham read Captain, My Captain & Manhattan Faces. F.E. Pollard sang "Ethiopian Saluting the Colours". R.H. Robson amused us by reading passages showing Whitman's fondness for lists. In the discussion which concluded the evening it was concluded that whilst Whitman is often effective his poems are often not poetry.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: R.B. Graham      Print: Book

  

Walt Whitman : 'Manhattan Faces'

'F.E. Pollard gave some account of Walt Whitman's Life indicating the variety of livelyhood [sic] & of expression which he sought he also told us something of the leading ideas expressed in his work "The Splendour of Life" World wide Comradeship Immortality Freedom Broad Vistas. Geo Burrow read from the poem Memories of President Lincoln. After supper R.B. Graham read Captain, My Captain & Manhattan Faces. F.E. Pollard sang "Ethiopian Saluting the Colours". R.H. Robson amused us by reading passages showing Whitman's fondness for lists. In the discussion which concluded the evening it was concluded that whilst Whitman is often effective his poems are often not poetry.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: R.B. Graham      Print: Book

  

Walt Whitman : 

'F.E. Pollard gave some account of Walt Whitman's Life indicating the variety of livelyhood [sic] & of expression which he sought he also told us something of the leading ideas expressed in his work "The Splendour of Life" World wide Comradeship Immortality Freedom Broad Vistas. Geo Burrow read from the poem Memories of President Lincoln. After supper R.B. Graham read Captain, My Captain & Manhattan Faces. F.E. Pollard sang "Ethiopian Saluting the Colours". R.H. Robson amused us by reading passages showing Whitman's fondness for lists. In the discussion which concluded the evening it was concluded that whilst Whitman is often effective his poems are often not poetry.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Reginald Robson      Print: Book

  

Walt Whitman : [poems on the sea]

'Meeting held at 39, Eastern Avenue: 24. 11. 39.
    A Bruce Dilks in the chair.

1. Minutes of last [two meetings] read & approved.

[...]

7. F. E. Pollard gave a brief introduction to American literature, introducing a large number of names including Benjamin Franklin, John Woolman, Tom Paine, Washington Irving, Fennimore Cooper, the poet Bryant, the historians Bancroft, Prescott and Motley, Louisa M. Alcott, Emerson, Longfellow & Whittier, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Thoreau, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Hermann Dick, J. R. Lowell, Walt Whitman, Henry Hames, Winston Churchill, O. Henry, & Mark Twain. He attempted very briefly to assess the place of these & some others.

8. C. E. Stansfield read from the Autocrat at the Breakfast Table an extract in praise of Meerschaums, Violins & Poems. We felt from the caressing tones of his voice that like the Autocrat he gave pride of place to the Meerschaums.

9. A. B. Dilks, after a brief reference to the career and mystical experience of Walt Whitman read from his Poems on the Sea.

10. R. D. L. Moore read a dramatic passage from the ‘Bridge of San Luis Rey[’], describing the last hours of Brother Juniper.

11 We were, finally, introduced to Babbitt – those of us who had not previously met him — by R. H. Robson. We were suitably amused at the manner in which St.Clair Lewis makes his hero rise and shave.


[signed] R. D. L. Moore
19.XII.39'

Unknown
Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Bruce Dilks      

  

Walt Whitman : (Poems)

‘Your parcels have arrived … You have my deepest assurances that the pleasure caused by your kindness has been considerable…. The reason I dared to ask for all these things is—we have been so busy and so much in the trenches, that it has been impossible to get these things ourselves, in the towns and villages. As for our canteen, the only one is certain of getting, is bootpolish … But now—the books. Shelley was very nice to get. Keats I haven’t touched yet. But O—Walt Whitman! I never dreamed he was so good … it has annoyed me to find so much in so tiny a book. I will go as far as to say that no present has very given me so much pleasure … Pip is a jolly book, and full of good descriptions of sport (O, what would a clean hit for four feel like now?) But there is [no] need to send me such … One can only read them once, then hand them on. True, a lot of men see them. But Walt Whitman—why he has after some fashion renewed me.’

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Ivor Bertie Gurney      Print: Book

  

Walt Whitman : 'Beat! Beat! Drums!'

‘We are on a long march and I’m writing this on the chance of getting it off; so you should know I received your papers and also your letter … The Poetry Review you sent is good—the articles are too breathless, and want more packing, I think. The poems by the soldier are vigorous but, I feel a bit commonplace. I did not like Rupert Brooke’s begloried sonnets for the same reason. What I mean is second hand phrases “lambent fires” etc takes from its reality and strength. It should be approached in a colder way, more abstract, with less of the million feelings everybody feels … Walt Whitman in “Beat, drums, beat”, has said the noblest thing on war.’

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Isaac Rosenberg      Print: Book

  

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