White Heat Quotes

“We talk of literature as if it were a mere matter of rule and measurement, a series of processes long since brought to mechanical perfection: but it would be less incorrect to say that it all lies in the future; tried by the outdoor standard, there is as yet no literature, but only glimpses and guideboards; no writer has yet succeeded in sustaining, through more than some single occasional sentence, that fresh and perfect charm. If by the training of a lifetime one could succeed in producing one continuous page of perfect cadence, it would be a life well spent, and such a literary artist would fall short of Nature’s standard in quantity only, not in quality.”
― Brenda Wineapple, White Heat

“Birds, flowers, the shifting quality of light and of mind thus constitute her faith. Personal, pantheistic, and paradoxical, it was seldom tranquil: “Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly” as Melville explained, “this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye.”
― Brenda Wineapple, White Heat

“the first reading of these four poems as it is now, after thirty years of further knowledge; and with it came the problem never yet solved, what place ought to be assigned in literature to what is so remarkable, yet so elusive of criticism.” This was not the benign public verse of, say, John Greenleaf Whittier. It did not share the metrical perfection of a Longfellow or the tiresome “priapism” (Emerson’s word, which Higginson liked to repeat) of Walt Whitman. It was unique, uncategorizable, itself.”
― Brenda Wineapple, White Heat