Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction
- 1 Leaves of Letters – Walt Whitman
- 2 The Dream of a Ridiculous Writer – Fyodor Dostoevsky
- 3 Through the Jabber – Lewis Carroll
- 4 The Drunken Inkwell – Arthur Rimbaud
- 5 In Search of Lost Allusion – Marcel Proust
- 6 Writers and Lovers – D. H. Lawrence
- Conclusion
- Works Cited
- Index
1 - Leaves of Letters – Walt Whitman
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction
- 1 Leaves of Letters – Walt Whitman
- 2 The Dream of a Ridiculous Writer – Fyodor Dostoevsky
- 3 Through the Jabber – Lewis Carroll
- 4 The Drunken Inkwell – Arthur Rimbaud
- 5 In Search of Lost Allusion – Marcel Proust
- 6 Writers and Lovers – D. H. Lawrence
- Conclusion
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
I have never understood why he should be called ‘the good gray poet.’ The color of his language, his temperament, his whole being is electric blue. I hardly think of him as poet. Bard, yes. Bard of the future.
– Henry Miller, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird (1962)In Henry Miller (1963) Kingsley Widmer calls Miller a ‘compatriot of Emerson and Whitman’ and ‘a twentieth-century urban Thoreau’. It is also here that he coins the now famous moniker for Miller, the ‘rebel-buffoon’. However, as mentioned in the Introduction, this type of labelling only takes intertextuality in Miller's work as far as any biographical analysis can. Widmer's focus is Miller's personal affinities, as seemingly manifest in his texts, with these ancestral authors, without really addressing the complexity of form in Miller's work. In ‘The Legacy of Henry Miller’ (1963) from Three Decades of Criticism (1971), Widmer sums up his critique as follows: ‘In short, Miller's American ordinariness does qualify him from the extreme explorers of sensibility; he is a buffoonish version of the great tradition.’ Widmer does not paint a very positive picture of Miller's talents, because he bases his judgement on Miller's ability (or lack thereof) to partake in an unspoken tradition. Yet, Miller's complexity of form is also at the heart of this network of Romantic affinities, and any critique of it demands moving beyond basic tradition-oriented comparisons.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Henry Miller and How he Got That Way , pp. 19 - 41Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2011