Lowell, James R.:

$250 · Offered by William Reese Company

CONVERSATIONS ON SOME OF THE OLD POETS. First edition of Lowell's first volume of prose and his first published book of criticism. The work takes the form of a series of hypothetical conversations between two imagined interlocutors, John and Philip, and serves as a wide-ranging exploration of the Old English and Elizabethan poets, from Chaucer and Shakespeare to John Ford and George Chapman. As an exercise in literary criticism, the Conversations anticipates Lowell's emergence as one of America's foremost men of letters which would culminate in his editorship of both the Atlantic Monthly and the North American Review.

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