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

Helm Information, Robertsbridge, first edition, 1995. 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.