The Wandering One, The Inquisitive Dreamer Of

I'm Afraid I Wasn't Much Of A Student, But My Casual Reading Was Enormous.

I Began By Doing Book Reviews On The Typewriter And Then Went Over To Short Stories On The Machine, Meanwhile Sticking To Pencil For Poetry.

O Sweet Clean Earth, From Whom The Green Blade Cometh! When We Are Dead, My Best Beloved And I, Close Well Above Us, That We May Rest Forever, Sending Up Grass And Blossoms To The Sky.

Whitman Had A Profound Influence On Me. That Was During My Sophomore Year When I Came Down With A Bad Attack Of Whitmanitis. But He Did Me A Lot Of Good, And I Think The Influence Is Discoverable.

It Is Precisely The Sort Of Thing I Am Always Trying To Do In My Writing -- To Present My Unhappy Reader With A Wide-ranged Chaos -- Of Actions And Reactions, Thoughts, Memories And Feelings -- In The Vain Hope That At The End He Will See That The Whole Thing Represents Only One Moment, One Feeling, One Person. A Raging, Trumpeting Jungle Of Associations, And Then I Announce At The End Of It, With A Gesture Of Despair, "this Is I!