William Michaelian

Poems, Notes, and Drawings

Tag Archive for ‘Hawthorne’

Pedlar’s Progress

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention, and heartily recommend, the book I just finished reading: Pedlar’s Progress: The Life of Bronson Alcott, by Odell Shepard. Published in 1937 in Boston by Little, Brown and Company, this masterpiece of biography was the publisher’s Centenary Prize Book, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1938. It’s easily one of the best biographies I’ve read, and I’ve read many. Shepard’s work, […]

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Front Walk

In his journal, Emerson writes of walking with Hawthorne, talking with Thoreau, Carlyle’s latest book, and Tennyson’s new poems. In mine, I write of you, in terms of my own plain self. And this is our wealth: that we are each a funny blend of science and superstition, of pain, nerve, and luck. And this is our grief — the loss of dear Waldo, Emerson’s five-year-old son. August 4, 2019 […]

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