Wade Van Dore

Famous for short rhymed quips and puns with infamous footnotes some of which are pertinent and all of which are educated. In the book's dedication, the author expresses his faith that the dedicatee will continue in his reading to "soar above a Reader's Digest level even as far as into the unknown uninterpreted starred darknesses of Robert Frost who, dextrously over-powering the glare and stare of television, the lecture platform and a slight dash of politics, in American literature actually complements with some secret "contrary" Frostian warmth the related but colder Concord-touched, quiet-laced, moon-mined, leaf-veined soul-saturated thoughts fitted tightly to words by Henry David Thoreau, who, by Frosts' own statement, in one book, "Walden", "has surpassed everything we have had in America". Ouch.

The author introduces his work with the capital headline: "HYPOCRITES ALL!" Then "I wish I could recall the name of the writer who asserted that hypocrisy is the only highly developed art of America". Then wondering if the writer was condemning America or praising her, or if calling hypocrisy an art, he thought it one of the great arts among others (!).

The author suggests that Americans were "set up" to be hypocrites by the pretenses Christianity and Democracy. Trying to get any actual religion into one of the contemporary Churches is "like trying to pump blood into a dead horse".

De Vore summarizes his three periods of near-Christianity: TOLSTOY renounced materialism and called the Church the greatest enemy of Christ. GANDHI renounced materialism and expounded a Thoreau/Sermon on the Mount mash-up for freeing an enslaved and languishing India from imperialism. Finally, SCHWEITZER renounced all but the Unitarian forms of Christianity -- rejecting all dogma about Jesus, including his divinity, but not his teaching. Schweitzer taught that the most important message that ever came to mankind was that spiritual love could be attained by administering to the lowly -- "The Quest for the Historical Jesus". Someday, Schweitzer's book will cause the upheaval it merits, basically, equivalent to Darwin's "The Origin of Species".

But what a "swoony, oozy, gelatinous embarrassing world it would be if only love prevailed...". [8] Better to mind our own business than get in each other's way giving our possessions to others who aren't even asking.

De Vore exults over Robert Frost's admission, having been called "the complete man" by Elizabeth Sergeant ["the Trial by Existence"] that he had been false. Frost is quoted as saying "What hypocrites we are!"

In spite of our naked frauds, "our one and only abiding concern and curiosity is still the Secret of the Universe--why the sky, the stars, and the planets and we are here at all."

The author asserts that the value of these "expressive verses" is that other publications "say absolutely nothing that is vital owing to editors who are frightened to death of offending their advertisers and sponsors". Since the Perkins-Wolfe arrangement (1930s), editors as a class have won the battles with poets and writers. The author asserts, after the bomb went off over Hiroshima, there is very little left in the "blatant world" which is "in good taste".

The verses are fun and the footnotes filled with direct facts. For example, his wife knew H.G.Wells intimately and swears he preferred cheap California wine to expensive European vintages. Hear-hear! [20]

The prurient Henry Miller associated his writing with the puritan Thoreau by agreeing that no man can make a greater mistake in life than spending the greater part of it making a living. [21]

The author publicly read Frost's poems -- including "The Silken Tent" -- at Frost's funeral and has personal knowledge about the greatness of Frost, as a hired man gardener and companion in Vermont. Self-published by a piano-tuner. Brilliant!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Samples:

Segregation
How very sad and odd
That one man made by God
Should heartessly turn and berate
Another man God did create.

Original Sin
Speaking of Original Sin
And its alleged curse,
What but unoriginal sin
Could possibly be worse?

Footnoting Bertrand Russell's "The Sense of Sin", and Herbert Muller's "The Uses of the Past".… (mehr)