The Mississippi Writings of Mark Twain


Book Description

Contains three books by author Mark Twain: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer -- Life on the Mississippi -- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.




101 Great American Poems


Book Description

Rich treasury of verse from the 19th and 20th centuries includes works by Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, other notables.




Three American Poets


Book Description

Describes the different sorts of poetry Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville wrote, their comparable reasons for writing, and the posthumous critical effects of their having done so.




A Treasury of Poetry for Young People


Book Description

Combine the poetry of six of America's finest poets with specifically commissioned illustrations from its finest artists and you get a deluxe treasury of more than 150 classic works from the pen of Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Allan Poe, Carl Sandburg and Walt Whitman. As you and your child read each poem together, you'll both feel as if a magical world - sometimes light and charming, sometimes dark and spooky - has come to life through the remarkable harmony between word and image. And with a biography of each poet, commentary and definitions for the harder vocabulary, you'll be able to help youngsters appreciate the beauty of the verse's sound and rhythm and understand what is being said between the lines. Nothing is better for inspiring a lifetime love of poetry, of language and of reading.




Great Short Poems


Book Description

Outstanding anthology features more than 150 English and American masterpieces spanning over 400 years. "Death Be Not Proud," "The Tyger," "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," plus works by Tennyson, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats, Frost, others.




Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman


Book Description

*Includes pictures *Includes contemporary accounts *Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading Walt Whitman, the great American poet, is also in many ways a great American enigma, for more and less are known about him than other famous men in 19th century American history. On the one hand, he was the product of something of an all-American family, the sort of salt of the earth people he would later describe so vividly in his work. On the other, he was a complete bohemian and profligate, given to vanity in the way he dressed and lived. He started out his career as a school teacher and was later a newspaper man, but he left both those types of work for a job as a government bureaucrat. As a young man, when most of his peers were sowing their wild oats, he was considered by many to be a stick in the mud who neither drank nor chased women. Then, as a middle-aged man, when his peers had settled down into quieter lives, he remained single and seems to have pursued romantic relationships with both men and women. Then, of course, there was his poetry, words that summarized both the best and worst about his nation. His seminal work, Leaves of Grass, began as little more than a pamphlet but grew for decades, as each new edition added more poems. By the time of his death, it had become a large volume still studied today. While he wrote other pieces for publication, Leaves of Grass remained his magnum opus and his baby, nurturing and developing it throughout his life. And yet, through it all, the title remained the same self-deprecating play on words that he had given it when he first self-published the work in 1855. Like many writers of her day, Emily Dickinson was a virtual unknown during her lifetime. After her death, however, when people discovered the incredible amount of poetry that she had written, Dickinson became celebrated as one of America's greatest poets. Dickinson was notoriously introverted and mostly lived as a recluse, carrying out her friendships almost entirely by written letters. Her work was just as unique; her poetry is written with short lines, occasionally lacked titles, and often used slant rhyme and unconventional capitalization and punctuation. Only a few of her poems were published in her lifetime, but American schoolchildren across the country read her work today. As a result, Dickinson is, even to those who have studied her the most, an enigma and, even more to the point, a contradiction. Born in an era when women rarely received more than a rudimentary education, she attended college but left before graduating. Considered by many evangelical Christians to be a pioneer of religious poetry, she struggled during her entire life to fully embrace the Calvinist doctrines taught in her New England home. She embraced the friendship of women, sometimes to a level that bordered on the obsessive, but then easily removed herself from physical contact with all but a few of her closest family members. She seemed to be, in every way, the quintessential Victorian spinster, but her poetry and letters reveal shocking passions, often shared with married men. Not surprisingly, her poetry was just as diverse as her personal life, as she praised romantic love but criticized marriage. She wrote stanza after stanza of verse based on religious themes but never quite presented a clear cut view of the Christian faith. She produced in the same year passionate, even sexually charged verses, and also stilted observations of natural science. But in the midst of all this, she created a new genre of poetry, one that allowed her to speak her mind but in such a way that she could still move about, to the extent she wanted to, in polite society. Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman: The Lives and Careers of 19th Century America's Most Famous Poets looks at the remarkable lives of the two, and the impact their famous works have had.




Leaves of Grass


Book Description




Whitman & Dickinson


Book Description

Whitman & Dickinson is the first collection to bring together original essays by European and North American scholars directly linking the poetry and ideas of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. The essays present intersections between these great figures across several fields of study, rehearsing well-established topics from new perspectives, opening entirely new areas of investigation, and providing new information about Whitman’s and Dickinson’s lives, work, and reception. Essays included in this book cover the topics of mentoring influence on each poet, religion, the Civil War, phenomenology, the environment, humor, poetic structures of language, and Whitman’s and Dickinson’s twentieth- and twenty-first–century reception—including prolonged engagement with Adrienne Rich’s response to this “strange uncoupled couple” of poets who stand at the beginning of an American national poetic. Contributors Include: Marina Camboni Andrew Dorkin Vincent Dussol Betsy Erkkilä Ed Folsom Christine Gerhardt Jay Grossman Jennifer Leader Marianne Noble Cécile Roudeau Shira Wolosky