ABSTRACT
The American poet and critic Edmund Clarence Stedman (1833- 1908). Extract from Scribner’sMonthly (1880), XXI. Stedman edited a volume of Cameos from Landor (1873). A Library of American Literature in eleven volumes (1887–90), The works of Edgar Allan Poe(1894–95).A Victorian Anthology (1895) and An American Anthology (1900). He wrote a number of volumes of poetry and an elaborate commemorative ode on Hawthorne, which he read before the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Society in 1877: No one more conspicuously shines by difference. Others are more widely read, but who else has been so widely talked about, or who has held even a few readers with so absolute a sway? … In two things he [Whitman] fairly did take the initiative, and might, like a wise advocate, rest his case upon them. He essays, without reserves or sophistry, the full presentment of the natural man. He devoted his song to the future of his own country, accepting and outvying the loudest peak-and-prairie brag, and pledging These States to work out a perfect democracy and the salvation of the world.
