Walt Whitman: The Contemporary Reviews

by Kenneth M. Price

Overview

This volume, a significant contribution to the reception history of Leaves of Grass, Specimen Days, and other works, reproduces the full range of the contemporary reviews of Whitman's various books. Brash and iconoclastic, revered and reviled at various times, Whitman came in for an astonishing array of commentary ranging from sympathy to hostility. Reviews by William Dean Howells, Henry James, Oscar Wilde and (writing anonymously) Whitman himself, and a host of other writers clarify much about both the poet and nineteenth-century American culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521453875
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	05/31/1996
Series:	American Critical Archives , #9
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	6.34(w) x 9.49(h) x 1.14(d)

Table of Contents

Leaves of Grass (1855); Leaves of Grass (1856); A Child's Reminiscence (1859); Leaves of Grass (1860); Drum-Taps; Leaves of Grass (1867); Poems by Walt Whitman (1868), ed. William Michael Rossetti; Two Rivulets (1876); Leaves of Grass (1881–82); Specimen Days and Collect (1882–83); November Boughs (1888); Complete Poems and Prose (1888); Democratic Vistas, and Other Papers (1888); Good-Bye My Fancy (1891).

Editorial Reviews

"All libraries serving serious students of literature should have these volumes." Q. Grigg, Choice

"Kenneth M. Price's edition of the early reviews of Whitman's work is a carefully edited, beautifully produced, and fundamentally important collection. For the first time, we have available a full...gathering of the contemporary responses to Whitman's raging sequence of book publications...One of the values of a book such as Price's is that it inspires and initiates work that eventually updates and supplements what the editor has done. It is a testament to the quality of Price's work that so little supplementing needs to be done to a collection that covers such a vast range of responses to Whitman's multitudinous career. Price's volume allows us to begin to hear Whitman as last century's readers heard him." Ed Folsom, Resiurces for American Literary Study

From the Publisher