John burroughs who is

John Burroughs was born on April 3, on his family's farm in Roxbury. He spent his youth working on the farm and exploring Old Clump Mountain. His favorite place he called Boyhood Rock, where he would sit and study the ways of Nature around him. He was a teacher, a journalist, a treasury clerk in Washington, DC where he met and befriended Walt Whitman , and a bank examiner before returning to his beloved Catskills.

In , his first book Wake Robin was published. On their wedding night, however, the devoutly religious Ursula portentously fell to her knees at the side of the bed they would share for the first time and urged John to join her in prayer. After five troubled years of marriage, Ursula consulted ministers in Olive, her hometown in Catskills, and concluded that her husband's sexual demands were immoral and intolerable.

She prescribed a separation of two months, July and August of , so that John could learn to value chastity. The separation, however, lasted until February of , by which time John had learned not the value of chastity, but rather the ease of finding accommodating female company. Even after their reunion, John remained unfaithful.

Whitman sided with Ursula. He told John that his "wantonness" was the one flaw in an otherwise beautiful and admirable character. As for Ursula's sexual unresponsiveness, Whitman blamed John's failure to sufficiently inspire Ursula to love him.

Whitman frequently visited the lonely Ursula when John's job at the bank examiner required him to travel, as it often did. In Whitman's visits suddenly ceased because of the stroke he suffered; Ursula, in turn, then became a frequent visitor to the ailing poet, bringing him food and taking him out for carriage rides.

She even offered him in a room in the Burroughs's Washington home at V Street, which offer Whitman appreciated but decline. Burroughs's first work on Whitman was Notes on Walt Whitman The work was so extensively revised and rewritten by Whitman himself that it should properly be considered a collaborative effort.

In it we see Whitman shaping his public personality, even at the expense of accurate biography; for example, Whitman is alleged to have traveled to the Western United States, although in fact his first such trip took place decades later.

In Whitman, A Study , his second major work on the poet Burroughs is, as always, the Whitman disciple, but he turns his naturalist's eye on Whitman as an original specimen: a poet whose work transcends the usual categories of art, who is as much the prophet as the poet. Whitman was commonly attacked for his lack of artistic polish and literary refinement; Burroughs and others defended him against these charges by in turn attacking the limitations of "the literary. In , nine years after Whitman's death, John Burroughs met the great love of his life, Clara Barrus, who was a physician affiliated with the state psychiatric hospital at Middletown, New York.

She wrote Burroughs an admiring letter, and he invited her to visit him at Slabsides, his "hermit's retreat" about a mile from Riverby, the home he had built on the banks of the Hudson. Barrus was 33, Burroughs 64; he referred to her as "Whtimanesque," a "new woman" who was his intellectual equal as well as his lover. For more than thirty years he served as adviser and mentor to the members of the Vassar Wake Robin Club, an undergraduate organization devoted to the study of nature and named after a book Burroughs wrote in Once a year Vassar students would cross the Hudson River and travel the twelve miles to "Slabsides," the rustic retreat in West Park to which the author had retired for his study of flora and fauna and where he did much of his writing.

In a letter dated May 29, , Helen I. Haight Vassar Class of and sister of Elizabeth Haight, Class of wrote to John Burroughs, telling him of his influence on her own work:. I came back to this old city, with much inspiration for my work and more tolerance for its blind ways because of the memory of that little clearing up there in the woods with all it stands for. In the Vassar College Library acquired, through a grant from the Pew Memorial Trust, the manuscript journals of John Burroughs, which he had compiled over the last 45 years of his life.

The first entry in the first notebook is for May 13, ; the last one is for February 4, , seven weeks before Burroughs's death at the age of