Abraham Cowley

#2

Spanning the crucial months from January 1863 to March 1864, this third volume of The Library of America's highly acclaimed four volume series presents an incomparable portrait of a nation at war with itself while illuminating the military and political events that brought the Union closer to victory and slavery closer to destruction. It brings together more than 140 contemporary letters, diary entries, speeches, articles, messages, and poems by more than eighty participants and observers, among them Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman, Robert E. Lee, Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Mary Chesnut, Clement Vallandigham, Henry Adams, Charlotte Forten, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, and George Templeton Strong, as well as Union officers Robert Gould Shaw, Charles B. Haydon, and Henry Livermore Abbott; Confederate diarists Catherine Edmondston, Kate Stone, and Judith McGuire; and Alabama soldier Samuel Pickens, Iowa housewife Catharine Peirce, Kentucky preacher George Richard Browder, and Kansas clergyman Richard Cordley. The selections include vivid and haunting eyewitness narratives of some of the war's most famous battles--Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Fort Wagner, Chickamauga, Chattanooga--as well as firsthand accounts of the merciless guerrilla war in Missouri and Kansas; the Richmond bread riot and the New York draft riots; the controversies surrounding the use of black soldiers and the Lincoln administration's curtailment of civil liberties; and the struggles of civilians both black and white to survive increasingly harsh wartime conditions.

#3

This is an edition of all the known poems of Mark Akenside, the eighteenth-century English poet and physician, whose poetry has not been newly edited for more than a century. This edition will thus provide scholars and students with a much-needed opportunity to reassess the extent of Akenside's contribution to literary culture, and it will also clarify his role in the development of the aesthetic theories of his own generation and the one that followed. The career of Mark Akenside (1721-70) spans a period of extraordinarily fast change in English literature: his first major poem, The Pleasures of Imagination, appeared in the year of Pope's death; and Akenside died in the year Wordsworth was born. His works not only reflected the very considerable changes that took place during these years; they also contributed in many ways to the shifts in focus, interest, and emphasis that characterize the literature of the later eighteenth century. Akenside's fascination with the imagination, its characteristics and functions, resulted in an intriguing and influential blend of the poetic and the philosophical in his longer poems, The Pleasures of Imagination (1744) and The Pleasures of the Imagination (1772). The earlier work explores the then new subject of aesthetics in greater detail than it had ever been explored before, presenting various original insights and arguments. Yet it would be wrong to see the poem as merely a versified philosophical treatise; its complex structure offers satisfactions beyond those of sequential logic, and the examples cited to illustrate the central ideas are imbued with considerable vigor and clarity. As products of, and contributors to, the eighteenth-century enthusiasm for aesthetics, Akenside's longer poems are captivating examples of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century experiment in developing the philosophical poem into a major literary form. It is for this reason above all others that they are valued by Coleridge and the writers of the next generation. Because of the comparative obscurity into which Akenside's works fell after the demise of the long philosophical poem in the latter part of the nineteenth century, they have not by and large attracted the attention of modern bibliographers. In this edition numerous bibliographical and textual puzzles presented by his poems are solved for the first time. The apparatus, meanwhile, demonstrates the full extent of the poet's urge to revise - an urge that extended from the wholesale rewriting of some poems to subtle alterations of textual minutiae, showing a mind and an ear alive to nuances of meaning and intonation.