From School Library Journal
Grade 6 Up-By Walt Whitman. Narrated by Flo Gibson.Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

FROM OUR EDITORS

This handsome edition includes the 12 original poems of Whitman's groundbreaking work, including "Song of Myself," "I Sing the Body Electric," and "There Was a Child Went Forth." Considered almost organic, Leaves of Grass was a continuing project which Whitman augmented and revised every few years until his death in 1892--by which time it included 383 poems. However, it was this original edition that Ralph Waldo Emerson called "The most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed." Taking its title from themes of fertility, universality, and cyclical life, with language reminiscent of Shakespeare and the Hebraic poetry in the Bible, the book was quite radical in form and content and was not well received at the time. Today it is considered one of the great classics of American literature and a towering work of poetry. This B&N edition includes an introduction by the renowned poet and critic Malcolm Cowley.

ANNOTATION

Comprises all of Whitman's poems written following the arrangement of the edition of 1891-1892.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

This revised Norton Critical Edition contains the most complete and authoritative collection of Whitman's work available in a paperback student edition. The text of Leaves of Grass is again that of the indispensable "Reader's Comprehensive Edition," edited by Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett, which is accompanied by revised and expanded explanatory annotations. New to this edition is the full text of the celebrated 1855 first edition of Leaves of Grass, as well as generous excerpts from Whitman's two prose master-pieces, Democratic Vistas and Specimen Days. Following the texts is an album of portraits of Whitman, as well as "Whitman on His Art," a collection of Whitman's statements about his role as a poet taken from his notebooks, letters, conversations, and newspaper articles. While continuing to provide leading commentary on Whitman by major twentieth-century poets and critics, among them D. H. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, and Randall Jarrell, this revised edition adds important commentary by Whitman contemporaries Henry David Thoreau, Fanny Fern, Henry James, and Oscar Wilde, among others. An entirely new section of recent criticism includes six essays -- by David S. Reynolds, Karen Sanchez-Eppler, John Irwin, Allen Grossman, Betsy Erkkila, and Michael Moon -- that reflect both the continuing historicist mainstream of Whitman literary interpretation and influential recent work in gender and sexuality studies. The volume also includes a Chronology, a Selected Bibliography, and an Index of Titles.

FROM THE CRITICS

Booknews