Green On Brown

Martin Green understood what Norman O. Brown was up to and where he fit in American letters as early as 1966. In a review of Love's Body, published in the liberal Catholic journal Commonweal, Green wrote the following:

"Love's Body is a modern Thus Spake Zarathustra. Professor Brown is affiliating himself to a major line of 19th- and 20th-century prophets, Nietzsche, Carlyle, D. H. Lawrence, oddest of all, Emerson. All of these were practitioners of the aphorism, the gnomic saying, in richly odd diction, swinging ambiguously between the comic and the tragic, the prophet's personality strenuously swelling and strainfully collapsing in a self-mocking grimace. We have not had one of these wild men for some time, but we should be able to recognize him. Norman Brown has the same apocalyptic imagery, fire; resurrection, the judgment, the body, and a very similar apocalyptic message. There is even a native American tradition he belongs to. Emerson would have understood Professor Brown, and so would Whitman."

23 December 1966, 353.