Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"All libraries serving serious students of literature should have these volumes." Q. Grigg, Choice
Review
"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
Synopsis
A collection of the contemporaneous reviews of Walt Whitman's work.
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).