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This book addresses the special relationship from the perspective of post-Second World War British governments. It argues that Britain's foreign policy challenges the dominant idea that its power has been waning and that it sees itself as the junior partner to the hegemonic US. The book also shows how at moments of international crisis successive British governments have attempted to re-play the same foreign policy role within the special relationship. It discusses the power of a profoundly antagonistic relationship between Mark Twain and Walter Scott. The book demonstrates Stowe's mis-reading and mis-representation of the Highland Clearances. It explains how Our Nig, the work of a Northern free black, also provides a working-class portrait of New England farm life, removed from the frontier that dominates accounts of American agrarian life. Telegraphy - which transformed transatlantic relations in the middle of the century- was used by spiritualists as a metaphor for the ways in which communications from the other world could be understood. The story of the Bolton Whitman Fellowship is discussed. Beside Sarah Orne Jewett's desk was a small copy of the well-known Raeburn portrait of Sir Walter Scott. Henry James and George Eliot shared a transatlantic literary network which embodied an easy flow of mutual interest and appreciation between their two milieux. In her autobiography, Gertrude Stein assigns to her lifelong companion the repeated comment that she has met three geniuses in her life: Stein, Picasso, and Alfred North Whitehead.
6 Poet of comrades: Walt Whitman and the Bolton Whitman Fellowship Carolyn Masel These I singing in spring collect for lovers, (For who but I should understand lovers and all their sorrow and joy? And who but I should be the poet of comrades?) (from ‘These I Singing in Spring’) I see not America only, not only Liberty’s nation but other nations preparing (from ‘Years of the Modern’) Old age poses special risks for poets. The fear must always be that the diminution of physical capacity will correspond with a diminution of poetic capacity, a fear augmented for
attitudes of mutual suspicion in letters to many of their friends but never to each other. In contrast, the remarkable intellectual affinity between Gertrude Stein and Alfred North Whitehead, at a crucial moment in the development of their literary and philosophical careers, provides a model of a productive Anglo-American ‘special relationship’, a description that can also be applied to the extraordinary sympathy which developed Introduction 3 between the members of the Bolton Whitman Fellowship and those who were in close association with the poet in the United States