WESTWARD THE COURSE . . .
Whitman, "Song of Myself," [Section 38, 1855 Text]
I troop forth replenished with supreme power, one of an average unending procession,
We walk the roads of Ohio and Massachusetts and Virginia and Wisconsin and New York and
New Orleans and Texas and Montreal and San Francisco and Charleston and Savannah and Mexico,
Inland and by the seacoast and boundary lines . . . . and we pass the boundary lines.
Our swift ordinances are on their way over the whole earth,
The blossoms we wear in our hats are the growth of two thousand years.
Whitman, "Song of Myself," Section 38, [1891-1892 Text]
I troop forth replenish'd with supreme power, one of an average unending procession,
Inland and sea-coast we go, and pass all boundary lines,
Our swift ordinances on their way over the whole earth,
The blossoms we wear in our hats the growth of thousands of years.
Eliot, The Waste Land, Section 5
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal
NATURALISM WITHOUT SOCIALISM . . .
Crane, The Red Badge of Courage, opening paragraph
The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched
out on the hills, resting. As the landscape changed from brown to green, the army awakened,
and began to tremble with eagerness at the noise of rumors. It cast its eyes upon the roads,
which were growing from long troughs of liquid mud to proper thoroughfares. A river, amber-
tinted in the shadow of its banks, purled at the army's feet; and at night, when the stream had
become of a sorrowful blackness, one could see across it the red, eyelike gleam of hostile
camp-fires set in the low brows of distant hills.
|