Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Forget the melting pot, its a brew

Waldo Frank on American language:
"Our brew of Nigger-strut, of wailing Jew, of cantankerous Celt, of nostalgic Anglo-Saxon, is a brew of Dada"

Edmund Wilson on contemporary literature in 1926:
"polyglot, parvenu, hysterical and often only semi-literate"

The black William Carlos Williams, as quoted from Van Wyck Brooks:
"Dr Williams's father and mother had grown up with the colored people in their West Indian islands, and he himself had, ingrained in his very bones, a love of the negroes, 'furnaces of emotional power'.