Volume 40, Number 21 · December 16, 1993
'Sweep on, O River…'
By Brad Leithauser
American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, Volume One: Philip Freneau to Walt Whitman
edited by John Hollander
Library of America, 1,099 pp., $70.00 boxed set
American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, Volume Two: Herman Melville to Trumbull Stickney, American Indian Poetry, Folk Songs and Spirituals
edited by John Hollander
Library of America, 1,050 pp., $70.00 boxed set
In the summer of 1832 a cholera epidemic ravaged New York City and something like a third of the population fled. One of those who remained behind, alone in his family house, was thirteen-year-old Walt Whitman, whose job as a printer's apprentice kept him city-bound. His parents must have been terrified that he would be one of the epidemic's victims. Let's assume he was. And assume, likewise, that Emily Dickinson, whose childhood illnesses caused her to miss whole terms of school, failed to reach adulthood. Neither of them, that is, lived long enough to become poets. What would the map of nineteenth-century American poetry now look like?
Review, 4748 words
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