However modern the stimulus for and the superficial appearance of his writing may have been, much of it arises from a nineteenthcentury romantic reverence for natural order over man-made order, for intuition and imagination over routine-grounded perception. His exalted vision of life and love is served well by his linguistic agility. He was an unabashed lyricist, a modern cavalier love poet. But alongside his lyrical celebrations of nature, love, and the imagination are his satirical denouncements of tawdry, defiling, flat-footed, urban, and political life—open terrain for invective and verbal inventiveness. He trained his ear on the rhythms of American speech: he attacked the inauthentic and the manipulative; he twisted over-used words into punning submission; he mimicked familiar public slogans in despairing but vigorous poems, such as the justly celebrated "next to of course god america i/ love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth . . . ," and, from "POEM, OR BEAUTY HURTS MR. VINAL":take it from me kiddo believe me my country, 'tis of you,land of the Cluett Shirt Boston Garter and Spearmint Girl With The Wrigley Eyes(of you land of the Arrow Ide and Earl & Wilson Collars)of you i sing: land of Abraham Lincoln and Lydia E.
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