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Article: Editor's Introduction
- Article from:
- Southern Quarterly
- Article date:
- July 1, 2009
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright Southern Quarterly Summer 2009. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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That avatar of nineteenth-century American optimism, Walt Whitman (1819-1892), opened his Leaves of Grass with the lines:
I CELEBRATE myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease . . . observing a spear of summer grass.1
Having lived for a season (January to May) in New Orleans in 1848, before decamping back to Brooklyn, and then later "staying" - as Southerners used to say, and in fact still do say here in the Deep South - in Washington D.C. long enough to "loafe" in those sweltering months of an Upper South summer, Whitman unwittingly evokes for us the old antebellum ideal of ...