Underwood, F. H. Lowell; a Biographical Sketch. 1882.
Underwood, F. H. The Poet and the Man. 1893.
Wendell, Barrett. Stelligeri. 1893.
Wilkinson, W. C. A Free Lance in the Field of Life and Letters. 1874.
TOPICS AND PROBLEMS
Read “The Present Crisis” as determining the temper in which Lowell wrote his essay on Thoreau in view of their different reactions to the same national situation.
Read what Poe, Longfellow, and Lowell had to say concerning overemphasis on the American quality of American literature as noted on pages 177, 272, and 284. Is there any clear reason for this common dissent?
Compare the people discussed in Lowell’s “Fable for Critics” and in Poe’s “Literati,” published within two years of each other.
Read the connecting prose passages between the “Biglow Papers” for interesting evidence of Lowell’s attention to and knowledge of linguistic detail.
Read “Mason and Slidell: a Yankee Idyll” in “Biglow Papers,” Second Series, as a commentary on the Great European War.