Title Three American poets : Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Herman Melville / William C. Spengemann

Published Notre Dame, Ind. : University of Notre Dame Press, ©2010

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Description 1 online resource (xv, 226 pages) Series Book collections on Project MUSE Contents Whitman's Modern song -- Sorting with Emily Dickinson -- Melville the poet Summary In this work, the author describes the very different sorts of poetry Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville wrote, their comparable reasons for writing as they did, and the posthumous critical effects of their having done so. By linking these utterly singular poets and their work, verse connected by shared qualities of oddity, complexity, and difficulty, he illuminates the poets' efforts to create verse equal to the demands of a changing nineteenth century. All three responded to a widespread sense of loss, loss, above all, of Christian understandings of the origins, nature, and purpose of human existence, both individual and collective. All three, too, regarded poetry as the sole means of dealing with that loss and of comprehending not only a changing world but the old world from which the new one had departed, and hence the connections between the vanished, discredited past, the baffling present, and the as yet inscrutable future. The author suggests that the poetic eccentricities of Whitman, Melville, and Dickinson arose directly from their use of poetry as a vehicle of thought; each devised a poetic language either to attempt to recover a lost sense of assurance threatened by the collapse of traditional faith or to discover an altogether new ground of knowledge and being. He guides us in parsing their respective poetics with readings closely attuned to diction, syntax, meter, and figure. His descriptions of the poets' verse and their respective characteristic aesthetics afford us heightened access to the poems and the pleasures peculiar to them, in the process making us better readers of poetry in general Bibliography Includes bibliographical references Notes Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL English Print version record digitized 2011 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve pda MiAaHDL Subject Whitman, Walt, 1819-1892 -- Criticism and interpretation Dickinson, Emily, 1830-1886 -- Criticism and interpretation Melville, Herman, 1819-1891 -- Criticism and interpretation Dickinson, Emily, 1830-1886 Melville, Herman, 1819-1891 Whitman, Walt, 1819-1892 American poetry -- 19th century -- History and criticism Modernism (Literature) -- America American poetry Modernism (Literature) LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General America Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc. Form Electronic book LC no. 2010004291 ISBN 0268092729 9780268092726

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