Whitman's Phrenology
"Good Taste consists in the appropriate manifestation of each and all of the faculties in their proper season and degree; and this can only take place from persons in whom they are so balanced that there is no tendency for any one of them unduly to assume the mastery. When such a mind is prompted by some high theme to its fullest action, each organ contributes to the emotion of the moment and words are uttered in such condensed meaning, that a single sentence will touch every fibre of the heart, or, what is the same thing, arouse every faculty of the hearer. The power is known as Inspiration, and the medium in which it is conveyed is called Poetry."
---- The Phrenological Journal and Magazine of Moral Science, 1846
"In fact, a new theory of literary composition for imaginative works of the very first class, and especially for highest poems, is the sole course open to these States. Books are to be call'd for, and supplied, on the assumption that the process of reading is not a half-sleep, but, in highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast's struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself, must be on the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay--the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start or frame-work. Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does. That were to make a nation of supple and athletic minds, well train'd, intuitive, used to depend on themselves, and not on a few coteries of writers."
---- Democratic Vistas
"Poets require the highest order of both temperament and development. Poetry depends more on the physiology than the phrenology. It consists in a spiritual ecstasy which can be better felt than described. Not one in many thousands of those who write verses has the first inspiration of true poetry."
---- from a Fowler/Wells pub.
---- The Phrenological Journal and Magazine of Moral Science, 1846
"In fact, a new theory of literary composition for imaginative works of the very first class, and especially for highest poems, is the sole course open to these States. Books are to be call'd for, and supplied, on the assumption that the process of reading is not a half-sleep, but, in highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast's struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself, must be on the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay--the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start or frame-work. Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does. That were to make a nation of supple and athletic minds, well train'd, intuitive, used to depend on themselves, and not on a few coteries of writers."
---- Democratic Vistas
"Poets require the highest order of both temperament and development. Poetry depends more on the physiology than the phrenology. It consists in a spiritual ecstasy which can be better felt than described. Not one in many thousands of those who write verses has the first inspiration of true poetry."
---- from a Fowler/Wells pub.
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