Impatient Odyssey

There is a certain strain involved in reading Robert Elliot Fitch’s impatient Odyssey. The author goes racing at tremendous speed, constantly accelerated by explosive summary sentences, and in a short book executes a long file of spokesmen for their times, from the Renaissance to the morning paper.

The critical concentration makes the book a satisfying rout and a circus in the classic pattern that leaves blood on the sand. The first fatted victim is Walt Whitman, genius for expressing “The Self in Love with Itself.” Most aptly, at about the time this book appears, an advertisement announces the publication of a new work, Walt Whitman’s Civil War, and the critic can demonstrate that now the War Between the States is reduced to a means for Walt Whitman’s self-expression. But Mr. Fitch finds a multitude of targets to attack. The final creature analyzed is called “the Blob,” the self-worshipping Me that has managed the complex feat of annihilating its own person. . . .

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About the Author

Philip Burnham

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There is a certain strain involved in reading Robert Elliot Fitch’s impatient Odyssey. The author goes racing at tremendous speed, constantly accelerated by explosive summary sentences, and in a short book executes a long file of spokesmen for their times, from the Renaissance to the morning paper.

The critical concentration makes the book a satisfying rout and a circus in the classic pattern that leaves blood on the sand. The first fatted victim is Walt Whitman, genius for expressing “The Self in Love with Itself.” Most aptly, at about the time this book appears, an advertisement announces the publication of a new work, Walt Whitman’s Civil War, and the critic can demonstrate that now the War Between the States is reduced to a means for Walt Whitman’s self-expression. But Mr. Fitch finds a multitude of targets to attack. The final creature analyzed is called “the Blob,” the self-worshipping Me that has managed the complex feat of annihilating its own person. . . .