25 Years of Library of America (2007)

such is the cross I wear upon my breast yet I have the murmurs of its friends no less than the curses of its foes from my reward destined finally to go out into that dirty great turmoil to follow love and pride and see the honor entered the happiness and the hopes of this beloved country that like all Legends belongs to my own past I sit with Shakespeare and he wins his nut across the color line I move arm-in-arm with Balzac and du ma were smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls from out the caves of evening that swing between the strong limbed earth and the tracery of the stars I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will and they come all graciously with no scorn or condescension so when with truth I'd well above the veil W EBD boys souls of black folk 1903 this is America sitting for its literary portrait the uniformity and the authority of the volumes in the library America almost looked like stones that have made up sort of portal entrance with American literature written over the entrance they seem so steady and so much of a common effort when in fact each one of those books was more or less written by a loner I think American writers are a very determined narrow-eyed lot filled with great souls and not many social gifts so it's made an image of America as a culture of extremes and a possibilities I don't think Americans as a whole really yet appreciate what accomplishments merit and Wragge it is the ways in which it is unique among the loosest world [Music] I'm not sure if there's another nation that is quite as strongly grounded on words as America but I think that's partly because America's founding was so deliberate I mean the American Founding the least the the creation of the national government was literally a moment in which people sat down in a room and said okay we want to really create a fair representative government how do we do that it was so deliberate and so much built on compromise and so different from the way in which most countries are formed and of course that process of compromise and debate was all about words whatever they were saying to each other and then whatever they actually managed to put down on the paper so I think the founding itself makes Americans feel differently about language and things on paper one of the most important aspects of the Canon is defined by the library of America is that it embraces the rich variety of the American tradition in all of its dimensions gay and straight black and white male and female without sacrificing standards and that's important never does the library of America say we're including these texts because of diversity for self-esteem reasons to be ethnic cheerleaders we are including them because they are exemplary parts of the great tradition of American literature [Music] one of the real hallmarks of the series to me is that it's open-minded about what American literature is it includes the obvious suspects clearly but it also includes a kind of creative living sense of the country's literature as a sort of living testament to its culture I think it's easy to look at American writings and look at the founders and their writings on this side and put great literature on this side and I actually think that's a mistake because I think all of those things together are the American voice and you can't understand the literary side of the American voice without also getting some sense of the national and political aspirations and ideas that are sort of flowing underneath the nation as a whole and I think when you put all of that together then you really get the American character the American voice in all of its complexity with all of its different modes and uses I smell a book before I even look at it there's I've done that since I was a child it's as if you're coming into a room that you is both familiar and strange somebody else's kitchen as it were where things are being made the production values of these books I mean the quality of the paper the the the beauty of the print layouts of pages the ribbon the library of America has done everything it can to make it as sensual austerely sensual as possible out of the bosom of the air out of the cloud folds of her garments shaken over the woodlands brown and bare over the harvest fields forsaken silent and soft and slow descends the snow even as our cloudy fancies take suddenly shake if ever there was a time when all of us the American people and others needed to be reminded of what our country was about how it began and what it is and what kind of literary content we have what kind of poetry we've had written we would all understand that this is a country worth caring about in an absolute sense not just for ourselves but for our children my grandchildren in my case for great-grandchildren you

Channel: Library of America

Views: 1,257

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Library of America, David L. Ulin, Richard Poirier, Henry Louis Gates Jr., J. D. McClatchy, Joanne Freeman, A. Scott Berg, American literature, books, literature, publishing, classic literature, Martin E. Segal, Catherine Tatge, Dominique Lasseur

Id: argonrpX1D4

Length: 6min 27sec (387 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 03 2019