ABSTRACT
WELLS’s early study attempts an account of what is “truly indigenous and unique in the American tradition itself”, the “tradition” here being that of American poetry which Wells considers, perhaps somewhat controversially, the “chief… of the arts in America”. Wells’s approach is by topical and thematic routes rather than chapters on individual poets: thus “Matter and Spirit”, a chapter that deals, primarily, with Whitman, is about Transcendental self-knowledge, “Cambridge Culture and Folk Poetry” organizes the discussion of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and John Greenleaf Whittier, while Herman Melville’s Clarel is read as “A Religious Quest”. Wells’s book takes the history of American poetry through to figures such as T.S.Eliot, Robert Frost, and Hart Crane, but the first half of the book is substantively concerned with the nineteenth century, and the lucid, direct style of writing makes the book very accessible, if not always authoritative.
