In Three American Poets, William C. Spengemann describes the very
different sorts of poetry Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville wrote,
their comparable reasons for writing as they did, and the
posthumous critical effects of their having done so. By linking
these utterly singular poets and their work-verse connected by
shared qualities of oddity, complexity, and difficulty-Spengemann
illuminates the poets' efforts to create verse equal to the demands
of a changing nineteenth century. All three responded to a
widespread sense of loss-loss, above all, of Christian
understandings of the origins, nature, and purpose of human
existence, both individual and collective. All three, too, regarded
poetry as the sole means of dealing with that loss and of
comprehending not only a changing world but the old world from
which the new one had departed, and hence the connections between
the vanished, discredited past, the baffling present, and the as
yet inscrutable future. Spengemann suggests that the poetic
eccentricities of Whitman, Melville, and Dickinson arose directly
from their use of poetry as a vehicle of thought; each devised a
poetic language either to attempt to recover a lost sense of
assurance threatened by the collapse of traditional faith or to
discover an altogether new ground of knowledge and being.
Spengemann guides us in parsing their respective poetics with
masterful readings closely attuned to diction, syntax, meter, and
figure. His authoritative and empirical descriptions of the poets'
verse and their respective characteristic aesthetics afford us
heightened access to the poems and the pleasures peculiar to them,
in the process making us better readers of poetry in general.
General
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