Walt Whitman : Critical Assessments. [ Complete set, 4 volumes ]

Clarke, G.

ISBN 10: 187340316X / ISBN 13: 9781873403167

Published by Helm Information, Robertsbridge, first edition, 1995, 1995

About this Item

4 vols, rexine, 8vo, in publisher's card slipcase, 24 cm, xviii, 386 + viii, 451 + xi, 299 + ix, 899 pp. An attractively produced set bringing together much of the most important critical material on Walt Whitman, with an introduction, a chronology of Whitman's life, a bibliography of his writings, a critical bibliography, and a chronological list of criticism. Vol. 1: The Man and The Myth: Biographical Studies; Vol. 2 : The Response to the Writing; Vol 3 : Writers on Whitman's Writing; Vol. 4 : Walt Whitman in the Twentieth Century : A Chronological Overview. From the publisher's description: "Volume I: The Man and the Myth; is given over to early biographical studies (some reprinted in full) and associated material, juxtaposing those over which he had considerable influence and others over which he had none. Volume II: The Response to the Writing charts the contemporary response to Whitman. Through a series of reviews, essays and letters it maps the responses, often extreme but never neutral, that his work provoked. This is followed by a section of twentieth-century response to 'Song of Myself', and finally by a section on responses to other poems, in particular to 'When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom and 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry'. Volume III: Writers on Whitman's Writing is in two parts containing a lengthy series of views and reviews by significant writers (European and American) who have sought to view Whitman both in relation to their own work as much as in his significance to American culture. The first part has nineteenth-century contributions including Thoreau, Matthew Arnold, Henry James, Swinburne, Robert Louis Stevenson and Gerard Manley Hopkins; and the second, twentieth-century contributions which include Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, Federico Garcia Lorca, Henry Miller, Allen Ginsburg, and Anthony Burgess. Volume IV: Walt Whitman in the Twentieth Century. A Chronological Overview offers a selection of the most important critical writings on Whitman's work, reflecting as widely as possible the range and variety of opinion from a series of different critical viewpoints." From a review of the series : "The Helm Information Critical Assessments of Writers in English, under the general editorship of Graham Clarke, is an invaluable aid to scholarship.this series generously makes available truly representative samples of contemporaneous reviews of a writer's major works, as well as a wide range of general assessments and critical views up to the present moment. Today's scholars can discover in these finely edited, exquisitely handsome volumes, not only the histories of critical debates for their chosen writers, but they can also recognize the recurrent features of the writers' oeuvres that have characteristically defined the object of study." As New.

Seller Inventory # ABE-69150

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Walt Whitman : Critical Assessments. [ Complete set, 4 volumes ]
• Publisher: Helm Information, Robertsbridge, first edition, 1995
• Publication Date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 187340316X
• ISBN 13: 9781873403167
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Seller catalogs:
  • English & American literature

About this title

Synopsis

When Ralph Waldo Emerson declared, in his seminal letter of 1855 to Walt Whitman, :E greet you at the beginning of a great career, be was both prophetic and unknowingly ironic. Walt Whitman remains one of the greatest American poets, an exemplary figure whose work is key to understanding the culture of the 19th century. And yet Whitman's career was hardly great in the way Emerson suggested. Although he did become a celebrity in his own lifetime, he hardly approached the position of the poet he imagined in the Preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass or the prophetic stature he suggested in his central autobiographical poem Song of Myself. Recent studies show that the private Whitman was a very different man from the mythic public figure he constructed of himself. The response to Whitman has been extreme and diverse. For instance, in the 19th century, he was admired by Emerson and Rossetti but rejected by Henry James and Swinburne. Even now the consensus on Whitman both as a poet and as a person is for from settled. His poetry underscores the writing of Ezra Pound and the imagists; it is seminal to the work of William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and Allen Ginsberg. Indeed, Whitman remains at the heart of any understanding of American literature and culture--a touchstone for its myths, ideals, a key to its continuities and contradictions. This critical assessment is divided into four sections: The Man and the Myth, The Response to the Writing, Writers on Whitman's Writing, and Walt Whitman in the 20th Century: A Chronological Overview.

Review

." . .this work is essential for serious students of literature. Libraries that purchase only this book will be well-armed for Eliot scholars and the college/high school term-paper crowd alike."
From reviews of T. S. Eliot: Critical Assessments
-Library Journal