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A review by tipi
One Man's Meat by E.B. White
3.0
E.B. White is American creative nonfiction's best kept secret. Casual readers only know him for his children's books, but it turns out he's a very good essayist as well. He wrote the essays in this collection between 1938 and 1943 while living on a farm in Maine, and farming makes for an excellent backdrop, methinks. It gives White the rare opportunity to write sophisticatedly about a vocation which we popularly assume to be unrefined and working class. Even in 2017, farming has a good amount of untapped potential in the realm of creative nonfiction.
"Poetry" may be my favorite essay in this collection. I have personally never cultivated much of a taste for poetry, but the fact that such an oftentimes opaque medium can move other humans to wonderment... that in itself is enough to put a smile on my face. As opposed to reading it firsthand, I've always preferred reading about poetry. But more than anything I prefer a prose writer whose innermost temperament is poetic. E.B. White is one such writer. Only a poet can look at his dreaming dog and say that "he quivers like an aspen," or visit the Museum of Natural History for the sole purpose of witnessing a "a whale suspended in air."
"Poetry" may be my favorite essay in this collection. I have personally never cultivated much of a taste for poetry, but the fact that such an oftentimes opaque medium can move other humans to wonderment... that in itself is enough to put a smile on my face. As opposed to reading it firsthand, I've always preferred reading about poetry. But more than anything I prefer a prose writer whose innermost temperament is poetic. E.B. White is one such writer. Only a poet can look at his dreaming dog and say that "he quivers like an aspen," or visit the Museum of Natural History for the sole purpose of witnessing a "a whale suspended in air."