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Spengemann, William C. Three American Poets: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Herman Melville. Notre Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame P, 2010. $28.
William C. Spengemann's book comprises three introductory essays on Walt Whitman, Dickinson, and Herman Melville. Focusing on verbal craft and thematic concerns, the essays engage closely with the poems of each poet in turn and survey widely his or her overall work. The main aim of the book is to understand the distinctive poetic signature and excellence of each poet.
In terms of method, the book relies heavily on piecemeal quotation and paraphrase to allow the poems to speak for themselves. For the most part, the book attempts to be descriptive, which means that the essays are more taxonomic than argumentative. Context is invoked, but very broadly since, in the author's view, it can but inadequately account for a dead poet's still living appeal to present readers. The book mentions in passing some of the major upheavals of the nineteenth century, but only in order to reveal the modernity of each poet and make the point that all three were, more or less, writing in response to threatened belief. Earlier scholarship and criticism of the poets, dismissed as "prosing" in the preface, is not a feature of this study.
The central essay on Dickinson is, at ninety pages, the longest in the book. It attempts to come to terms with the poet's difficulty by comprehensively mapping out the various features of her verse, both formal and thematic, addressing one after another. These include: the speaker, meter, dashes,...