9.24.2004

Hotelman notes a Roger Williams take-off by Brendan Galvin, which I also happened upon somewhere or other. It's a nice poem, nicely done, but involves a kind of versickal smoothing & tempering, bringing RW lingo up to the contemporary pleasant magazine verse standard (not unlike the efforts of Restoration poets to improve upon Shakspr). Recommend dipping into the 2-vol collected correspondence. RW a torrential writer and a very seasoned practical (experienced in worldly affairs) person at the same time - rare combination. With a genuine taste - gusto - for the original coinage & the baroque term. His polemical rants are overlong, crabbed, tiresome - but all in all his writing's a headier brew (in large part because of Williams' political genius, visionary principles, & plain orneriness, which centered him in the midst of tremendous conflict & drama - with Massachusetts, with London, with the Quakers, with the Narragansetts & Pequots, with his neighbors. . .).

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