Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Jay Grossman

Critical Essay by Jay Grossman

SOURCE: “The Canon in the Closet: Matthiessen's Whitman, Whitman's Matthiessen,” in American Literature, Vol. 70, No. 4, December, 1998, pp. 799-832.

In the following essay, Grossman analyzes how Matthiessen's sexuality influenced his perception and discussion of the literary relationship between Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau.

An artist's use of language is the most sensitive index to cultural history, since a man can articulate only what he is, and what he has been made by the society of which he is a willing or an unwilling part.

—F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance

Family-life is not to be treated as a red flag to be flaunted in the streets, or a horn to be blown hoarsely on the housetops.

—Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

This essay takes as its point of departure a single, perhaps startling, fact about F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and...
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