John Dugdale, like Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, offers what at first sight might seem to be, at least by today's standards of corporate morality, self-interest, and greed, a rather unrealistic portrait of the world, a vision of flowers, lovers, and places--or the desire for them, coupled with metaphysical yearnings and questionings. Whether it is unrealistic or not, one does quickly see that it is a vision at odds with much of our world, at odds with life in our time. It's about beauty, which is radical in contemporary art; it's about love, which is radical and rare at any time; and it's about believing in the future even when it looks blindingly dark. To some it might even seem anachronistic, a remnant of New England transcendentalism and the ideas of Emerson, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott and those who saw the boundary between natural and supernatural illusory, saw God and Nature fused, and saw the true self as a spiritual essence. 
(An American Poetic: Whitman, Dickinson, and Dugdale by John Wood)

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