do not stand at my grave and weep michael connolly

He tried his hand at law under his cousin Oliver Wendell Holmes, but found it uninteresting and failed miserably. Born into a wealthy, pedigreed Boston family in 1855, he experienced a childhood of privilege and graduated from Harvard College in 1877, a slightly nervous, socially-maladjusted, introspective young man. Against the “steam-roller of industrial democracy,” the contrarian Wendell pulled no punches.īarrett Wendell remains in the shadow of his better known Harvard colleagues from the early 20th century, Irving Babbitt and Santayana, as well as some of his students, like Robert Frost, John Dos Passos, and T.S. What we deprecated was only that this spontaneous life of the people should be frustrated by the machinery of the popular government and of incorporated private interests.” In this fight, the prolific and opinionated Wendell excoriated what he regarded as frivolous philosophies, literary trends, and writers too easily beguiled by the latest intellectual fashions, and left a coherent, conservative interpretation on American character and letters from colonial settlement to the Progressive Era. We were not asking much for these were precisely the follies and the virtu that democracy, if liberated from the steam-roller, would cultivate of its own accord. “We both desired to screen those follies and to propagate that virtu against the steam-roller of industrial democracy. “We were on the same side of the barricade.” Both he and Wendell loved the College with all its quirky traditions and sought to protect it from the academic innovations of President Charles Eliot. Long after Barrett Wendell’s death, an elderly George Santayana remembered his former Harvard colleague fondly.

Do not stand at my grave and weep michael connolly