Edward everett hale autobiography

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About Whitman's age and, according to William James, like him in his inborn spiritual and personal optimism, Edward Everett Hale wrote one of the first unqualified appreciations of Leaves of Grass. Already prominent in New England as an essayist and Unitarian minister, Hale would become nationally known as a clergyman, magazine editor, and prolific author. His works include fiction, sermons, travel writings, biography, and autobiography, chief among them a hugely popular patriotic short story, "The Man Without a Country" (1863).

Reviewing Leaves of Grass anonymously for the North American Review, Hale admires most its fresh and direct poetic voice. Its author, he writes admiringly, "has a horror of conventional language of any kind" (34). Most early commentators on Leaves find it too original, but for Hale the book's power inheres in its "simplicity," its absolute freedom from traditional, "strained," literary speech (35). Its second accomplishment lies in its vivid description: "sketches of life . . . so real that we wonder how they came on paper" (36). He concludes by observing that the poems' occasional "indelicacies" (36) are no more worrisome than those of Homer. His portrayal of Whitman as founder-poet and "American Homer" would become, as Timothy Morris points out, the dominant critical strategy leading to the poet's eventual canonization.

Bibliography

Adams, John R. Edward Everett Hale. Boston: Twayne, 1977.

Hale, Edward Everett. Rev. of Leaves of Grass, 1855 Edition. Walt Whitman: The Contemporary Reviews. Ed. Kenneth M. Price. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. 34–36.

Holloway, Jean. Edward Everett Hale: A Biography. Austin: U of Texas P, 1956.

James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. 1902. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1985.

Morris, Timothy. Becoming Canonical in American Poetry. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1995.

American historian and minister (1822–1909)

Edward Everett Hale (April 3, 1822 – June 10, 1909) was an American author, historian, and Unitarianminister, best known for his writings such as "The Man Without a Country", published in Atlantic Monthly, in support of the Union during the Civil War. He was the grand-nephew of Nathan Hale, the American spy during the Revolutionary War.

Life and career

Hale was born on April 3, 1822, in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Nathan Hale (1784–1863), proprietor and editor of the Boston Daily Advertiser, and Sarah Preston Everett; and the brother of Lucretia Peabody Hale, Susan Hale, and Charles Hale. Edward Hale was a nephew of Edward Everett, the orator and statesman, and grand-nephew of Nathan Hale (1755–1776), the Revolutionary War hero executed by the British for espionage. Edward Everett Hale was also a descendant of Richard Everett and related to Helen Keller.

Hale was a child prodigy who exhibited extraordinary literary skills. He graduated from Boston Latin School at age 13 and enrolled at Harvard College immediately after. There, he settled in with the literary set, won two Bowdoin Prizes and was elected the Class Poet. He graduated second in his class in 1839 and then studied at Harvard Divinity School. Decades later, he reflected on the new liberal theology there:

The group of leaders who surrounded Dr. [William Ellery] Channing had, with him, broken forever from the fetters of Calvinistic theology. These young people were trained to know that human nature is not totally depraved. They were taught that there is nothing of which it is not capable... For such reasons, and many more, the young New Englanders of liberal training rushed into life, certain that the next half century was to see a complete moral revolution in the world.

Hale was licensed to preach as a Unitarian mini