The twelve pairings:
- Walt Whitman and Herman Melville
- Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emily Dickinson
- Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James
- Mark Twain and Robert Frost
- Wallace Stevens and TS Eliot
- William Faulkner and Hart Crane
From the book:
Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emily Dickinson met when he lectured in Amherst and stayed for dinner and overnight at her brother's home next door. Her references to him in her letters are wistful and humorous, while her poems offer a sly critique of him.
The relationship of Nathaniel Hawthorne to Henry James is one of direct influence and I bring them close together, in a way James would have disliked.... The ghostly Henry James, as in "The Jolly Corner," also emanates from Hawthorne.
Mark Twain and Robert Frost have little in common despite their mutually concealed savagery, but they are our only great masters with popular audiences. Both dissemble and move on two levels, implying deeper meanings to only an elite.
Long, long paragraph on Stevens and TS Eliot, p. 5.
William Faulkner and my lifetime favorite, Hart Crane, are placed here side by side since each forces the American language to its limits. I contrast these titans implicitly, and I hope subtly, in their authentic shared tradition of American precursors. The only begetters they have in common are Melville and Eliot. Additional Faulkner begetters include Hawthorne and Mark Twain. Crane's formidable lineage inludes Whitman and Moby-Dick, Emerson and Dickinson, Stevens and Eliot, and a panoply of other American poets from William Culley Bryant and Edgar Allan Poe through William Carlos Williams.
A long, long paragraph on Whitman and Melville, starting at bottom of page 5.
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