Summary
So more out of sentimentality than anything else, I decided to re-read something I hadn't seen since my college days. It was written by one of Lincoln's most ardent admirers on the occasion of that great man's murder - "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom 'd." I've kept all my old text books - figured they'd come in handy sooner or later - and I remembered the piece being in my anthology of American literature (The Norton Anthology, Vol. II, should you care). Most of you will recognize it as a poem written by Walt Whitman, one of the originals in a noble line of American writers and arguably, to this day, the most exuberant soul in that heritage. Whitman was a homosexual. A great, lusty bear of a homosexual. I didn't know about this when I read his poetry 40-plus years ago. My American lit. professor probably knew, but he didn't bring it up while discussing Whitman's work. Even as wild as things were on college campuses in 1967, some roads were more prudently left untaken.
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Extract
150 Years of Reading
Read anything good this year? And before going any further, let us qualify what I mean by good reading. First, at least some small portion of the reading material must have actually been written by the person who claims to have written it. So Going Rogue doesn't count....
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