Reviews and other early reactions
Essays and other forms of criticism.
Reviews And Other Early Reactions
[Emerson Writes Whitman] / R.W. Emerson
[The Inital Review of Leaves of Grass] / [Charles A. Dana]
["a curious and lawless collection"] / [Charles Eliot Norton]
["well worth going ... to buy it"] / [Edward Everett Hale]
[Whitman Reviews Himself] / [Walt Whitman]
[A New York Journalist Finds Whitman a Scurvy Fellow] / [Rufus Griswold]
[The Boston Intelligencer Seconds Griswold] / Anonymous
[Whitman Victim of "the depravity of public taste"] / Anonymous
[The New York Daily Times is both Attracted and Repelled] / [William Swinton]
[A Selection from His Autobiography] / Moncure D. Conway
[A Selection from His Journals] / Bronson Alcott
[A Letter about Whitman] / Henry David Thoreau
["as unacquainted with art, as a hog is with mathematics"] / Anonymous
["a pregnant text-book ... minted gold"] / [William J. Fox]
["unmixed and hopeless drivel"] / Anonymous
["the genuine stuff in this man"] / Anonymous
["these foul and rank leaves"] / Anonymous
["a herculean fellow ... with an entire gold mine"] / Anonymous
The Good Gray Poet: A Vindication / William Douglas O'Connor
[A Young Novelist Fails to Appreciate Drum-Taps] / William Dean Howells
[Another Fledgling Novelist Disparages Drum-Taps] / Henry James
[An Enthusiastic Reaction from Germany] / Ferdinand Freiligrath
[A Mixed Review from France] / Therese Bentzon
[The Good Gray Poet Lionized] / Anonymous
[An Ovation in Boston] / Anonymous
["we are presented with the slop-bucket of Walt Whitman"] / Anonymous.
Essays And Other Forms Of Criticism
"Walt Whitman" / Robert Buchanan
[Whitman's English Editor Writes a Friend] / William Michael Rossetti
"An Englishwoman's Estimate of Walt Whitman" / Anne Gilchrist
Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person / John Burroughs
"The Poet of Democracy: Walt Whitman" / Edward Dowden
"The Gospel According to Walt Whitman" / Robert Louis Stevenson
[An Important American Critic Views Whitman] / Edmund Clarence Stedman
["I differ from him utterly"] / Sidney Lanier
[A Letter to Robert Bridges] / Gerard Manly Hopkins
Walt Whitman, Chapter III: Analysis of Poems, Continued / Richard Maurice Bucke
[A Student Visits Walt Whitman in 1886] / C. Sadakichi Hartmann
"To Walt Whitman in America" / Algernon Charles Swinburne
"Whitmania" / Algernon Charles Swinburne
[The Years Work a Change] / William Dean Howells
[Spoken at Whitman's Funeral] / Robert G. Ingersoll
[A British Critic Probes Whitman's Treatment of Love] / John Addington Symonds
["sometimes sublime, sometimes ridiculous"] / Willa Cather
"The Poetry of Barbarism" / George Santayana
"The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness" / William James
"What I Feel about Walt Whitman" / Ezra Pound
"The Form: Constructive Principles" / Basil de Selincourt
"Whitman" / D.H. Lawrence
"Explication de Texte Applied to Walt Whitman's 'Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking'" / Leo Spitzer
"Poetry: The Art" / Stanley Burnshaw
"Walt Whitman: He Had His Nerve" / Randall Jarrell
"Walt Whitman and the American Tradition" / Floyd Stovall
[An Analysis of "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd"] / Richard Chase
[An Analysis of "Song of Myself"] / Malcolm Cowley
"There was a child" / Edwin Haviland Miller
"The Realm of Whitman's Ideas: Nature" / Gay Wilson Allen
"The Care and Feeding of Long Poems: The American Epic from Barlow to Berryman" / James E. Miller, Jr.
"Emerson, Whitman, and the Paradox of Self-Reliance" / Jerome Loving
"Nationalism vs. Internationalism in Leaves of Grass" / Roger Asselineau.