SOURCE: “White: Charles Simic's Thumbnail Epic,” in Contemporary Literature, Fall, 1982, pp. 528-49.

In the following essay, Schmidt analyzes White, finding elements that strongly liken the series to the tradition of Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

O how joys, dreads, convolutions, human shapes, and all shapes, spring as from graves around me! O phantoms! you cover all the land and all the sea! O I cannot see in the dimness whether you smile or frown upon me. … 

—Whitman, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” (1867 version)

A chaque être, plusieurs autres vies me semblaient dues.

—Rimbaud, Une Saison en Enfer

These are examples of Reason's momentary grasp of the scepter; the exertions of a power which exists not in time or space, but an instantaneous instreaming causing power. The difference between the actual and the ideal force of man is happily figured by the schoolmen, in saying, that the...