And what can we do but praise such a splendidly American scam? Unabashed in self-praise, stupendous in style, Whitman's
auto-reviews also possess two exculpatory virtues: They're arguably necessary (America needed some help accepting its own poetic genius) and they're not claiming anything that the poems can't back up. If Whitman's poetry belongs to the first age of American literary modernism, his unsigned self-advertisements belong to the heroic age of American humbug: Like the fabulous publicity stunts of his contemporary, P.T. Barnum, Whitman offered hype with real heft behind it. However a Barnum poster might exagerrate, there was no arguing with Tom Thumb's tinyness or Jenny Lind's trill. And who can say that Whitman sang untruly of himself?* * *
All of which is just to say that I am trying not to be embarassed by the urge to self-advertise--- and calling, as ever, on Epimetheus for wisdom, or at least for a plausible precedent.
The object being to inform preemptivehindsight.com readers of the publication of Where The Mountain Stands Alone, a simply beautiful new release from the University Press of New England. The title refers to the First Nations name for Mount Monadnock, “the mountain that stands alone” in New Hampshire's southwest corner. The book's brilliant editor, Howard Mansfield, writes that “the elusive feel of one place exists in that intersection of political and family history, landscape, destiny, expectations, weather and time.”
Where The Mountain Stands Alone is a handsomely designed and illustrated anthology of essays, historical texts and excerpts from oral histories ranging "from the formation of the region's distinctive landscape to the lives and customs of its first inhabitants, from the industrialization of the antebellum period to the collapse of both farms and mills, from the region's influence on writers and artists to the rewilding and repopulating of the twentieth century." Its contributors include Sy Montgomery, Ernest Hebert, Janisse Ray, Tom Wessels, Richard Ober, Jim Collins, Jane Brox --- and your humble HistoryBuff, who is honored to be in such company.
I'll play Walt no more boldly than to assure you that Where The Mountain Stands Alone is a terrific read for any New Englander, Yankee-in-exile or faraway white-clapboard fan; for any lover of nature, and epecially those concerned by our interaction with the environment; and for history buffs in general and especially those with interests in First Nations' fates, New England civic traditions and the region's literary legacy. And as a good look at any one place often teaches us something about all places, so I can recommend Where The Mountain Stands Alone to all who take a Whitmanesque interest in the world, who appreciate the universal applications of any well-drawn map of the particular.
--- HistoryBuff
