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Tradition and The Waste Land

T. S. Eliot’s beliefs, as stated in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" led to the creation of a new poetic form in The Waste Land. The form is based on the work of other poets, as well as a reaction to the failed attempts of earlier writers to voice similar ideas. The Waste Land expresses the sentiments of post World War I life more successfully than other poems of the period because it alludes to and uses the best techniques of earlier works. This allows it to be much more compact than epic poems, yet it is as vivid in abstract imagery as Georgian and trench poetry. By combining the techniques and strengths of various genres such as the epic, the Georgian and romantic poetry in new ways, The Waste Land gives the reader a new experience which captures, in a new voice, what the other works could not—the feeling of disillusionment after the war. Eliot creates the new form by using literary allusions which actually make his footnotes part of the poem. The footnotes add substantial meaning through rich cultural, critical and imagistic connotations.

In "Tradition and the Individual" Eliot explains why it is important to include the canon of past works when writing poetry:

In English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence. We cannot refer to "the tradition" or to "a tradition"; at most, we employ the adjective in saying that the poetry of So-and-so is "traditional" or even "too traditional." Seldom, perhaps does the word appear except in a phrase of censure. If otherwise, it is vaguely approbative, with the implication, as to the work approved, of some pleasing archaeological reconstruction. You can hardly make the word agreeable to English ears without this comfortable reference to the reassuring science of archaeology.

Eliot goes on to state the importance of the cumulative effect of new literature. No poet, Eliot states, " . . . has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation, is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists" (Eliot, 2171) While the essay was written in 1919, it details the philosophy that any new work merely adds and alters, if ever so imperceptibly, the entire collection of literature that preceded it. While Eliot felt that a firm connection with the past is satisfying to readers, he recognized the need for a new genre to deal with the feelings of the post-war world. Simply reiterating or copying older works was not enough, instead, the modern poet of any age must utilize both the "tradition" of those who came before and "the individual talent" of those who would add distinctiveness to the modern work. While The Waste Land was published three years after "Tradition and the Individual Talent," it is the same philosophy that inspires both works. The Waste Land utilizes the sentiments of "Tradition" in that it is highly allusive, yet, simultaneously, it is a new kind of poem, which is clearly different from anything that came before.

Allusions not only require a reader to recognize the past in new ways that add meaning to the present, but it adds layers of connotations that could not be presented in any other manner, except perhaps the epic. The epic has not had the success with modern readers that it had with the ancient Greeks and Romans. With the exception of Ulysses, by James Joyce, and Paradise Lost, by John Milton, the epic in English is a contradiction in terms. While the scale of The Waste Land is epic, its voice is not. Other styles that had followings in both popular and critical circles were the free verse poems of Walt Whitman, the World War I trench poets, and the "neo-romantic" poetry of the Georgians.

The Georgian poets like John Masefield and Rupert Brooke may have had less favor late in the war than they had before the war, they did offer T. S. Eliot something to base his work against, and he did actually share some of their techniques. A typical Georgian poet, Rupert Brooke epitomizes the style in "1914":

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust who England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven. (Brooke, 81)

The sonnet form as well as the abstraction of a pastoral code of honor typify the approach that Eliot was certain would not work for a poem about post-war disillusion. Yet, there is more of Rupert Brooke in The Waste Land than there appears to be on a first reading. An examination of the style of wartime vers libre will help to illustrate the similarities of Brooke to Eliot.

The trench poets, of which Siegfried Sassoon was one of the more successful, defined themselves far away from the Georgians, but while a poem by a trench poet like Sassoon may capture some of the essence of war experience, the experience itself is unique, and cannot be felt by the reader who is not also a trench warrior. The poetry falls back on abstract imagery to make its point. A certain amount of empathy is required for traditional forms and free verse to work when abstractions are involved; this is how the Georgians and the trench poets are similar when compared to Eliot. In Sassoon’s "A Working Party" the opening stanza is an example of an empathetic approach to poetry:

Three hours ago he blundered up the trench,
Sliding and poising, groping with his boots;
Sometimes he tripped and lurched against the walls
With hands that pawed the sodden bags of chalk.
He couldn’t see the man who walked in front;
Only he heard the drum and rattle of feet
Stepping along barred trench boards, often splashing
Wretchedly where the sludge was ankle-deep.

To a fellow trench soldier, the image of walking through the mud during a work party would bring back memories and disturbing images of being in a working party, but the image loses something on the reader who has no conception of living in a trench. What Eliot does to make his work different, is that he uses allusions and images that are firmly grounded in our literature, so much so that there is a "societal memory" of the images. A societal memory is built upon the history, the literature and the experiences of a civilization and its culture—it becomes a part of the people’s collective memory. The dead clich�s and anecdotes of texts from the Bible to Alighieri’s Inferno afford not only an image in the reader’s mind, but they supply a feeling that has been expressed historically through numerous writers and critics. While poets like Sassoon tried to find new voices and poets like Brooke tried to perfect old voices, they were largely writing in the same manner as the poets who came before them, and they were not adding the individual talent that Eliot felt was important. The trench poets merely described more concrete events than the Georgians, but both relied on abstract feelings and empathy to convey their messages.

Eliot combined the power of imagery and abstraction through the use of allusions. The interpretations of classics have been examined and explored to such an extent that the educated reader has as clear of an understanding of them, much like a lawyer understands the obscure judicial language of a courtroom. Eliot demonstrates in The Waste Land that, by using references to works that have a substantial body of criticism, he does not need to explain exactly what it is that he means. Instead of describing an experience or a feeling, he draws on "the tradition" to supply both the image and the feeling which leaves him free to express himself by adding to the images. Eliot is able to say far more, and in a far more precise mode, than anything that has been done during the pre-war and wartime period. Eliot has produced a form that yields more information than a typical poem, yet it is still compact and poetic. The Waste Land has a scope and magnitude of interpretation that is rivaled in English, perhaps, only by Milton and Shakespeare. This is what places The Waste Land between the epics and the trench poets. Remarkable economy of words and true depth of meaning come together in one poem.

Milton, in the writing of Paradise Lost, intended the poem to resonate on many levels with his readers. In order to handle a poetic challenge as immense as God, he needed to extrapolate from the Bible and other texts in order to create his epic. The result was a twelve volume work that attempted to explain a few pages in the Bible. Eliot’s poetic challenge in The Waste Land was to produce a work of epic scope, yet maintain a manageable size. The epic, having fallen out of fashion even before Milton, was no longer a viable form, since other genres, such as the novel, took the place of poetic narrative. Eliot’s use of allusion achieves many of the goals of an epic without requiring a cumbersome investment by the reader. In Paradise Lost, Milton simply spells out most of his points in a didactic lesson rather than attempting an economic use of words. Milton’s sense of poetry came from the sounds and melodies of the words, not their compactness, and his own invocations state his intentions to "justify the ways of God to man." (ll. 25-6) An example of a verbose Miltonian explanation looks like this:

Say first, for heaven hides nothing from thy view
Nor the deep tract of hell, say first what cause
Moved our grand parents in that happy state,
Favoured of heaven so highly, to fall off
From their creator, and transgress his will
For one restraint, lords of the world besides? (ll. 27-33)

Milton explains himself in laborious, yet elegant, language, but the result is clearly a wordy poem that is fairly easy to read, but very long. A close reading of the lines will result in a good understanding of Milton’s concepts, and there are few symbols, allegories or devices that are not easily identified. The words do not carry many connotations that are not far from the surface, and a whole idea may take several pages of blank verse to relate.

While there has been much debate and a variety of interpretations of Paradise Lost, the text is relatively straight-forward in its approach to communicate with the reader. The problem (to Eliot) of this form, is its length and its lack of focus. It is often said that the true hero of Paradise Lost is the reader who manages to complete it. Eliot’s verse is much more compact, and since it says much more with fewer words, it is a more successful poem, by modern standards.

The comparison of Paradise Lost and The Waste Land ends with the observation that Eliot was reacting to the epic form by rewriting it. The Waste Land is as much the "individual talent" altering the genre as it is a new genre of epic. While refreshingly different from Paradise Lost, The Waste Land owes much of its aims, objectives and reader’s patience to the epic form since it attempts the same things. Once the reader has figured out The Waste Land’s meanings, though, it is easy to remember because of its length. It is ironic that Milton took the classic form of Homer and the other ancients and "re-wrote" it to suit his purpose of creating a didactic religious poetry in English, since Eliot then "re-wrote" the Miltonian epic.

While Eliot has not made any direct references to Paradise Lost, it is by omission that it stands out. The Waste Land makes extensive use of Inferno by Dante Aligheri and of the longer works by Ovid, Shakespeare and the Bible, so it can be assumed that he was familiar with Paradise Lost. His omission of any reference to Milton poises a natural question of why it was omitted. Perhaps Eliot’s reaction against the imprecise and tedious language of Milton results in his ultra-compact form in The Waste Land, but also missing are references to Idylls of the King by Tennyson, which seems like a natural reference if one wishes to capture a public recognition of the allusions to King Arthur and the Round Table.

To Eliot, Tennyson is the antithesis of what an individual talent should be, and so he is ignored as a failed branch of talent, left to wither. Tennyson, rather than contributing anything new to the poetic tradition, has instead regressed. By making poetic statements in longer forms and by duplicating the sentiments of earlier poets, Tennyson would be an unlikley candidate for Eliot to refer to. However, Eliot has, in fact, by omission, reacted away from Tennyson in creating The Waste Land, and so Tennyson is present in the "tradition," even in his absence.

Eliot refers to Aligheri’s Inferno, in lines 60-63 of The Waste Land: "Unreal City, / Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, / A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many / I had not thought death had undone so many." The original line from Inferno is:

E io, che riguardi, vidi una ’nsegna
che girando correve tanto ratta
che d’ogne posa mi parea indegna;
e dietro le ven�a s� lunga tratta
di gente, ch’i’ non averi credutto
che morte tanta n’avesse disfatta. (ll. 52-7)

Which translates to mean, "When I looked again, I saw a flag running in circles so rapidly that it seemed to scorn all pause; and after it there came so long a train of people, that I would not have believed death had undone so many." (Alighieri, 57) The line by Eliot refers to a single sestet by Alighieri, and the meaning of it has been the topic of criticism for hundreds of years. Not only has Eliot given the reader a clear image of people traversing a bridge but he also gives the connotations and a critical history of Inferno to enrich and enhance the image. The people on the bridge in The Waste Land now seem like ghosts descending into hell. Cowards, as Alighieri goes on to describe them, because they did not care to be good enough for God, but they displeased God’s enemies as well. The faces, some of which the narrator of Inferno recognizes, are of people who are being stung by wasps as punishment for their cowardice in a life they never truly lived. Eliot recalls, to the educated reader, the scene from Inferno, along with his own words to form a new combination. The "Unreal City" is now a rich image filled with undertones that connect it, not only with Inferno, but with other references in The Waste Land to London Bridge.

In line 427 of The Waste Land, London Bridge brings the poem full circle: "Fishing, with the arid plain behind me / Shall I at least set my lands in order? / London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down . . . " The thematic rhymes of The Waste Land also add not only to an image of "Yeats-ian" or Vorticist cycles, but they add again to the richness of the poem without resorting to clich�d techniques and forms like Tennyson. At yet another level in the poem, the faces of the dead are commuting, much like Walt Whitmans’s commuters in "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" from Leaves of Grass:

Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me!

On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose,

And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose. (ll. 2-4)

Whitman, having the same habit as Milton of writing out long explanations and lists, would seem an unlikely choice for Eliot to include in his poems, but there is evidence which suggests that he was. Eliot wrote primarily in free verse, which in itself denotes Whitman, but the use of lilacs in the first stanza of The Waste Land suggests more: "April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing . . ." The flower that most people of the early 1920s would have picked is the poppy, from John McCrae’s "In Flanders Fields." (McCrae, 85) The deforestation of land in World War I gave enough sunlight to germinate the seeds of poppies which otherwise would not have sprouted. The fact that poppies grew in quantity, feeding on the putrefaction of dead soldiers, was common knowledge, but if Eliot wanted an allusion to flowers, he had one in McCrae. Eliot chooses instead to use the lilac, which grows quickly, but not nearly as fast as the poppy. Lilacs did not grow in abundance on the former battlefields, but they were popularized by Walt Whitman after the death of Abraham Lincoln in "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d:"

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
Ever-returning spring, trinity sire to me you bring,
Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love. (ll. 1-6)

The imagery of the lilac symbolizes hope for the future. The cyclic nature of the lilac’s bloom each year gives the speaker peace, even in the face of heart-breaking anguish. Eliot deliberately recalls this sentiment and then alters it to become his own. He makes use of the allusion and the power it has, but for his own purposes. Whitman, like Milton, gives Eliot the basis to build a new form on, but also something to react against, so that the newness is appreciated as individual talent. Eliot uses the best techniques and the history of author’s previous contributions to improve and to create his own style of writing.

In only a few lines of The Waste Land, there are numerous allusions, some with footnotes, and some without footnotes, and their usefulness to the poem is extraordinary. The more a reader knows about the references, the more is revealed. In this manner, Eliot reaches a very wide audience by appealing not only to the academic, but to the occasional reader of poetry as well. For all of its allusions, The Waste Land is not as difficult to read and gain meaning out of as poems like Ezra Pound’s Cantos or James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, which seem to be obscure only for the sake of being obscure. Eliot is obscure enough to interest the academic, but open enough to entice the casual reader.

Eliot was not the only poet searching for a new style of poetry. The poets who wrote about the war before Eliot, as mentioned earlier, based their works on older techniques as well, and despite their attempt to find new expressions, ultimately, they relied on empathy and abstract feelings. Eliot, by contrast, found a new method of writing that would manifest his thoughts, but he was also aided by the writings of pre-war and early war poets. In comparing Eliot with poets like Sassoon, Charles Hamilton Sorley, or even Rupert Brooke, one can see a common technique that distinguishes the earlier poets from Eliot. In Charles Hamilton Sorley’s poem "When You See the Millions of the Mouthless Dead," the technique he uses is closer to Eliot’s than it appears. It does not draw heavily on specific images and recollections requiring empathy, but it is like Rupert Brooke in that it draws on abstract images to make its point. Eliot combines elements found in poems like Sorley’s to write The Waste Land, so some of the same themes are evident:

When you see millions of the mouthless dead
Across your dreams in pale battalions go,
Say not soft things as other men have said,
That you'll remember. For you need not so.
Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know
It is not curses heaped on each gashed head?
Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.
Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.
Say only this, ‘They are dead.’ Then add thereto,
‘Yet many a better one has died before.’
Then, scanning all the o’ercrowded mass, should you
Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,
It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.
Great death has made all his for evermore. (Sorely, 89)

Mouthless implies that the dead cannot speak which implies a loss, and the passing of something, perhaps tradition, but the image is vague. Sorely emphasizes the inability to speak by making them both dead and mouthless, instead of "silent" or "mute" or "dumb." Eliot would recognize the image, but he would have tried to find a richer metaphor in the shape of an historical or literary reference. Sorely’s poem indicates that, " . . . you’ll remember. For you need not so." The use of the word remember juxtaposed with "need not so" implies that it is useless, in this new world, to remember the past, but the uselessness is not a sensation that every reader can understand or imagine in an abstract manner. It does indicate, however, a cyclic nature to events, but Sorley fails to communicate his point because shared experience is necessary to fully understand the poem. Eliot’s technique in The Waste Land overcomes this obstacle. However, he does borrow a sense of abstraction from the Georgians and even the trench poets to produce a new image that has more capacity for allusion.

Sadly, Sorley falls short in his imagery because it is too vague, and his poems are too short to develop the themes fully. Eliot bypasses the nebulous troubles of language and its misinterpretation by using citation where images and perceptions have been studied and understood for generations. Sorely has some brilliant moments of imagery, but the effect is short lived since it is so brief and easily forgotten. Eliot, however, uses imagery similar to Sorley’s but he adds literary allusion and thematic rhyme to broaden the effect on the poem and the reader. If one wishes to determine what Eliot meant in a particular reference, there is a vast critical body or works for reference. Sassoon, Brooke and Sorley all fall short when compared to Eliot, since they suffer from the pitfalls of an imprecise language and non-epic lengths. Milton falls short because of verbosity.

Perhaps the most important reference in The Waste Land is the powerful epigraph, which also introduces one of the major themes of the poem. In describing the Sibyl of Cumae, who had been granted eternal life without eternal youth, Eliot recalls in the mind of the reader an entire mythic legend to ponder and bear in mind while reading the poem. The Sibyl is a metaphor for society, who, through foolishness and pride fall into a situation without resolution. The na�vet� of the people in pre-war Britain, the lack of foresight, and many other implications are summarized by this simple reference.

Eliot’s vision of the world in The Waste Land is one where no future is known except that it will be known. Like the Sybil, death is not a solution, and regeneration is only an unknown possibility, so the lament of the Sibyl becomes the lament of a civilization whose very structure has been fundamentally changed. The change, comes not only from war, but by an outdated class structure and adherence to old ways. While the Sibyl wishes only to die because of a grave moment of stupidity and pride, the modern world, having made the decision to wage war, does not have the option to simply quit, nor does it have the ability to return to where it was before. So a cyclic and natural series of events is impending. All of these sentiments are based on the simple two-line epigraph.

"The Fire Sermon" of line 173 of The Waste Land adds even more to the sense that the future is unknown by depicting a confused mass of conflicting images centering on Tiresias, the old man, and the typist who engage in an odd, yet non-intimate foreplay as he watches in voyeuristic fashion. Tiresias, who had "suffered all" by experiencing life and sex as both a man and a woman is helpless in his situation—he cannot see his fate—let alone alter it. The image of Tiresias creates discomfort in the reader since the situation is a bizarre mix of prostitution, nihilism, voyeurism and trans-sexuality. By simply referring to Tiresias, and placing him with a typist and pock-marked man, Eliot brings a wealth of perception to a few words.

Eliot did not limit his attention of past artistic tradition to poetry. Many of the methods of analyzing and appreciating art are the same as they are for poetry. Furthermore, many of the same objectives can be attained by both media. The Woodcut Combat by William Roberts, illustrates, visually, the uneasy sensation that Eliot creates in The Waste Land, even though it, too, fails to offer a lasting message. Still, it is apparent that Roberts shared similar visions of the post-war world with Eliot, and it would be na�ve to assume that Eliot had not seen Blast, which his friend and fellow poet Ezra Pound, wrote for. No doubt, the art of Blast helped Eliot to focus his writing style in The Waste Land.

Many of the lines and shapes in Combat (see addendum) are placed nearly, but not quite, in symmetrical positions. This helps to confuse the eye and cause further inspection of the figure. Some of the oddly shaped figures in Combat represent human bodies.

Furthermore, the unnatural positioning of many of the lines is much more like that of corpses than of living soldiers. Combat is replete with images of death and dying, much like Sorley’s "mouthless dead," the sight of separated body parts causes one of the strongest emotional responses in humans. The instinct of self-preservation demands that it disturbs us. Combat mixes disturbing and confusing images which allows for an association that creates instability and uneasiness.

Like The Waste Land, which reveals itself in more detail as more and more of the details of the footnotes are uncovered, the more the observer discovers about the lines in Combat, the more they reveal through a progression of "if/then" logic. If one figure shows legs, then the rest of the figure is a person, if that figure is a person, then other details show his innards, and so on. If there is a theme of water and a lack of regeneration in The Waste Land, then later references to water must be viewed in the same light and the metaphor extended. The images of water should not be viewed as separate metaphors. Eliot creates a sensation of uneasiness in The Waste Land, not by stimulus of the fear reaction, but by cognitive dissonance and confusion—much like the visual uneasiness in Combat.

The Waste Land uses scraps of techniques seen in many other forms of literature and art, and while it could be easy to deny Eliot the status of true genius for his "theft" of so many ideas, it is he who had the wisdom to put it all together. The impact of The Waste Land on modern poetry has been the topic of many academic papers, and it is generally accepted that it has made the single largest difference on how 20th century poetry was written. The source of Eliot’s genius lies in his recognition that modern writers stand on the shoulders of the writers who came before them. By bringing together seemingly unrelated techniques from earlier poets and artists, Eliot found a new way to express a new sensation which had escaped other poets of his age and even beyond. While The Waste Land may not seem to be an entirely original work, it is the bridge that allowed poetry to cross from the 19th century into the 20th. Since The Waste Land, there has not been another poem that has had such a profound effect on the poetic world, nor have there been any substantial changes in form. The Waste Land marks the change of poetry from the past to the present. uses scraps of techniques seen in many other forms of literature and art, and while it could be easy to deny Eliot the status of true genius for his "theft" of so many ideas, it is he who had the wisdom to put it all together. The impact of The Waste Land on modern poetry has been the topic of many academic papers, and it is generally accepted that it has made the single largest difference on how 20th century poetry was written. The source of Eliot’s genius lies in his recognition that modern writers stand on the shoulders of the writers who came before them. By bringing together seemingly unrelated techniques from earlier poets and artists, Eliot found a new way to express a new sensation which had escaped other poets of his age and even beyond. While The Waste Land may not seem to be an entirely original work, it is the bridge that allowed poetry to cross from the 19th century into the 20th. Since The Waste Land, there has not been another poem that has had such a profound effect on the poetic world, nor have there been any substantial changes in form. The Waste Land marks the change of poetry from the past to the present. uses scraps of techniques seen in many other forms of literature and art, and while it could be easy to deny Eliot the status of true genius for his "theft" of so many ideas, it is he who had the wisdom to put it all together. The impact of The Waste Land on modern poetry has been the topic of many academic papers, and it is generally accepted that it has made the single largest difference on how 20th century poetry was written. The source of Eliot’s genius lies in his recognition that modern writers stand on the shoulders of the writers who came before them. By bringing together seemingly unrelated techniques from earlier poets and artists, Eliot found a new way to express a new sensation which had escaped other poets of his age and even beyond. While The Waste Land may not seem to be an entirely original work, it is the bridge that allowed poetry to cross from the 19th century into the 20th. Since The Waste Land, there has not been another poem that has had such a profound effect on the poetic world, nor have there been any substantial changes in form. The Waste Land marks the change of poetry from the past to the present.

 
Combat

Works Cited

Alighieri, Dante. Inferno. Vol. 1. Trans. Robert M. Durling New York : Oxford UP, 1996

Brooke, Rupert. 1914. The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry
Ed. Jon Silken New York : Penguin 1979

Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land. Collected Poems Harcourt : New York, 1963.

Eliot, T. S. Tradition and the Individual Talent. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 6th ed. Vol. 2. Ed. M. H. Abrams New York, London: Norton, 1993.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost. John Milton-A Critical Edition of the Major Works
New York : Oxford UP, 1991

McCrae, John. In Flanders Fields. The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry
Ed. Jon Silken New York : Penguin 1979

Roberts, William. Combat. Blast War Number Ed. Wyndham Lewis
London : Black Sparrow Press, 1915

Sassoon, Siegfried. A Working Party. The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry
Ed. Jon Silken New York : Penguin 1979

Sorley, Charles Hamilton When You See the Millions of the Mouthless Dead.
The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry Ed. Jon Silken New York : Penguin 1979

Whitman, Walt. Crossing Brooklyn Ferry. Leaves of Grass Eds. Scully Bradley,
Harold Blodgett New York : Norton, 1965

Whitman, Walt. When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d. Leaves of Grass
Eds. Scully Bradley, Harold Blodgett New York : Norton, 1965


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