Walt Whitman
The Contemporary Reviews

A collection of the contemporaneous reviews of Walt Whitman's work.

Kenneth M. Price (Edited by)

9780521453875, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 31 May 1996

384 pages
24.1 x 16.1 x 2.9 cm, 0.71 kg

"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

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 - because of his bold literary experiments and frank treatment of sexuality - came in for an astonishing array of commentary ranging from sympathy with his 'hearty wholesomeness' to hostility toward poems that were a 'mass of stupid filth'. Reviews by Rufus Griswold, Fanny Fern, John Burroughs, William Dean Howells, Henry James, Hamlin Garland, Oscar Wilde and (writing anonymously) Whitman himself, together with a host of lesser-known writers clarify much about both the poet and nineteenth-century American culture and its tastes and preoccupations, its myopia and acuity. These reviewers first framed the issues for critical debate and shaped Whitman's long-term reputation.

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).

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]