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Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 3 (ed. Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950.) 20 0 Browse Search
Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 2 (ed. Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950.) 17 1 Browse Search
Margaret Fuller, Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (ed. W. H. Channing) 14 0 Browse Search
Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 1, Colonial and Revolutionary Literature: Early National Literature: Part I (ed. Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950.) 14 0 Browse Search
Frank Preston Stearns, Cambridge Sketches 12 0 Browse Search
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life 12 0 Browse Search
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Harvard Memorial Biographies 10 0 Browse Search
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Carlyle's laugh and other surprises 8 0 Browse Search
Edward L. Pierce, Memoir and letters of Charles Sumner: volume 3 8 0 Browse Search
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Olde Cambridge 7 1 Browse Search
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Browsing named entities in Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays. You can also browse the collection for Tennyson or search for Tennyson in all documents.

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Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays, Americanism in literature. (search)
result in a new form of national genius. But we must guard against both croakers and boasters; and above all, we must look beyond our little Boston or New York or Chicago or San Francisco, and be willing citizens of the great Republic. The highest aim of most of our literary journals has thus far been to appear English, except where some diverging experimentalist has said, Let us be German, or Let us be French. This was inevitable; as inevitable as a boy's first imitations of Byron or Tennyson. But it necessarily implied that our literature must, during this epoch, be second-rate. We need to become national, not by any conscious effort, such as implies attitudinizing and constraint, but by simply accepting our own life. It is not desirable to go out of one's way to be original, but it is to be hoped that it may lie in one's way. Originality is simply a fresh pair of eyes. If you want to astonish the whole world, said Rahel, tell the simple truth. It is easier to excuse a tho
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays, A letter to a young contributor. (search)
d sings; we can spare neither. The combination gives us an affluence of synonymes and a delicacy of discrimination such as no unmixed idiom can show. While you utterly shun slang, whether native or foreign born,--at present, by the way, our popular writers use far less slang than the English,--yet do not shrink from Americanisms, so they be good ones. American literature is now thoroughly out of leading-strings; and the nation which supplied the first appreciative audience for Carlyle, Tennyson, and the Brownings, can certainly trust its own literary instincts to create the new words it needs. To be sure, the inelegancies with which we are chiefly reproached are not distinctively American: Burke uses pretty considerable ; Miss Burney says, I trembled a few ; the English Bible says reckon, Locke has guess, and Southey realize, in the exact sense in which one sometimes hears them used colloquially here. Nevertheless, such improprieties are of course to be avoided; but whatever go