God and the American Writer
Arthur  Miller, who has wrestled an angel or two of his own, had this to say about Kazin's  literary/theological project,God and the American Writer: "The American  writer's struggles to reject, accept, sublimate, or ignore God is the stem around which  Kazin has wound his fascinating insights into the works of our masters. It is a profound  pleasure to read such inspired good sense." This praise is especially merited by his  writing about the poetsEmily Dickinson(Kazin writes about the "power and depth of her solitude"), andWalt Whitman(whose  rowdy, sexual, corporeal, and pantheistic poetry, Kazin says, sought to "rescue  religion by replacing it"). Whitman and Dickinson are, in many ways, the yin and  yang of American approaches to spirituality. To create literature is to engage reality, to  try to wrest some truth from the particulars of a life. This is an almost inevitably   religious undertaking, and Kazin shows how that struggle informs the work of America's  greatest writers, among themRalph Waldo  Emerson,Robert  Frost, andT. S.  Eliot.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.