ABSTRACT
Extracts from ‘The Poetry of Democracy: Walt Whitman’, Westminster Review (July 1871). Reprinted, with some changes, in Dowden’s Studies in Literature (1882). The following extracts are from the latter version, pp. 468–83, 519–23.
Concerning this article Professor Harold Blodgett has written:
Among early utterances on Whitman’s claims it is conspicuous for its sobriety…. Although Dowden’s article was by no means the first important European comment upon Leaves of Grass, it was signally effective in strengthening Whitman’s position…. In Dublin Dowden played much the same role that William Michael Rossetti played in London [American Literature, May 1929].
Edward Dowden (1843–1913), Irish critic and poet, became professor of English literature at Trinity College in Dublin in 1867. His first book, Shakespeare, his Mind and Art (1875) was translated into German and Russian. His own volume of Poems (1876) went into a second edition. He wrote extensively on Shakespeare and is the author of the introductory studies to each of Shakespeare’s plays in the Oxford University Press edition. He was best known to the public at large for his Life of Shelley (1886). He became the first Taylorian lecturer at Oxford in 1889 and served from 1892 to 1896 as Clark lecturer at Trinity College, Cambridge.
