1984 Foreword (Whitman) Tom wanted to be a poet

[Terrance]

Michael Joseph wrote:
> 
> Though writing in 1855, Whitman is essentially articulating a view of
> America that is consonant with the writings of Emerson, Thoreau, and early
> Melville, a view characteristic more of Jacksonian America than of his own
> melancholy time-which might be your point. 

Certainly a contradiction of some sort ... isn't it? 
Although,  I'm not sure what in heaven's name happened to Walt I'm not
satisfied with the Emersonian reading of the contradiction. 

I did get quite a charge from the mention of Whitman along with F Scott
Fitzgerald, the great American aphorist,  and the Austrian physicist.
Fitz was a favorite of young Tom's. Yogi, if I recall, was mentioned in
one of P's early short stories ("The Secret Integration"). Schrödinger's
cat is also from Tom's younger days. Whitman too. 
I guess what I was trying to say, was not that P could have been
Ginsburg or something, but that it's possible that this Foreword is a
bit, well, dusty. I don't get the impression that it was, all of it, 
written recently. Just speculating you know,  but I kinda agree with
Paul M. (Paul was speculating as well) that P may have had a longer
essay on _1984_ sitting is a shoe box and just pulled it down and dusted
it off. The dust, like the dust (that Dickensian "dust") in the creases
of the elder Tom's face....is there....in the novel too. 

"Some, famously F Scott Fitzgerald, have considered it evidence of
genius. For Walt Whitman ("Do I contradict myself? Very well, I
contradict myself") it was being large and containing multitudes, for
American aphorist Yogi Berra it was coming to a fork in the road and
taking it, for Schrödinger's cat, it was the quantum paradox of being
alive and dead at the same time." 



Higham's famous essay "From
> Boundlessness to Consolidation"  

I'd like to read this, but I'll have to get it. 

Thanks, 

T