"Indeed, perhaps, the best way to approach this book is as a prose poem of the first order, i.e., to suspend, for the time being, one's own conclusions about America and Americans, and to read on slowly, relishing it sentence by sentence, for it is no more a guidebook than the "Ode to a Nightingale" is an ornithological essay."
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Original Language: English
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W. H. Auden, "The American Scene," The Dyer's Hand (1962) [Vintage, 1989, ], p. 314
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_American_Scene
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