I was sadly very disappointted by this book. The postive light is that Robert Frost's works are there and as always wonderful. Yet the contents and way that the book is actually set up is very confusing. It has no index and the contents is blantently wrong. Their is no order to where the works are and poems, plays and stories are mixed in amongest one another. I would recommend to all that they read Robert Frost yet certainly not in this frustraiting fashion.

An excellent book that contains all of this works to perfect form. This book as letters that he sent to other people. I have read this whole book a few times, it is perfect. Get the book.

I do not really I believe that all the stuff here merits five stars (books like these throw in the kitchen sink when covering their subjects). Yet, when I ask myself--"how can I possibly not give some of the stuff here more than five stars?" I cannot sufficiently answer the question.

A poet like Frost comes around maybe once in a generation (if we're lucky). Some of his works are undeniably for the ages. This volume is filled with the treasures Frost left to us.

Works like "The Tuft of Flowers," "The Death of the Hired Man," "Blueberries," "The Road Not Taken," "Fire and Ice," and "Mending Wall" (a poem that literally changed my life) are genuine contributions to world literature.

A ton of Frost's poetry is to be found in this edition. I am struck by how consistent and sure he is in his poetry. This man was a great poet. I am not a big fan of reading plays. I'd rather see them interpreted by actors on a stage. I'm not going to lie and say Frost was a great playwright--he was not. But all the same, I am glad to have read the works contained in this volume.

I must say that The Library of America's volume are all handsomely done and attractively presented. The texts are extremely readable for only being in ten-point font. For the most point, I ignored the notes (I prefer to make heads or tales of things on my own.) The few that I read surprised me because they actually were enlightening.

I recommend this volume most highly.

This book made me want to scream, or cry. The characters are beautifully rendered, and some of them are dispicable people. That's what made it so unenjoyable to read for me.

The heroine, Isabel Archer, begins her adventures with much vitality and promise, yearning to see life and the world and not to settle prematurely into marriage and domesticity. Although James shows she's not perfect -- she's naive and somewhat conceited -- it's still pretty easy to fall in love with her. You look forward to seeing what great things her life will bring.

And then it all falls apart. After 200 pages of building her up, James marries her to a scoundrel and spends the next 300 pages suffocating her, one liberty at a time. Others have described this book as "uplifting" and spoken of Isabel's strength and courage; I honestly can't see what they could mean. I found it genuinely painful to see such a beautiful character destroyed. With all credit to James's writing skills, this book made me miserable. I couldn't wish it on anyone.

Henry James is one of my favorite authors and The Portrait of a Lady is one of his greatest works. In it, he creates a unique and unforgettable heroine, Isabel Archer, and then proceeds to let her make all the mistakes the young are capable of making. In fact, Isabel is so sure of herself that, at times, I found it difficult to have much sympathy for her poor choices. But one thing I never felt for Isabel Archer was indifference, all to James' credit.

The Portrait of a Lady is truly 19th Century literature at its finest, but that means it also contains elements that might be distracting for the modern reader. There are lengthy descriptions, the pace is rather slow and James never lets us forget we are reading a book. He makes liberal use of phrases such as "our heroine," and "Dear Reader." While all of this was expected in the 19th Century, some readers today might find it annoying.

Those who don't however, will find themselves entranced by a beautiful story of love and loss, unforgettable characters (there are many more besides Isabel, most notably the enigmatic Madame Merle) and gorgeous description, all rendered in James' flawless prose.

Anyone who loves classics or who wants a truly well-rounded background in literature cannot afford to pass this up.

The best thing about 19th century novels is that they take so long to unwind, you know that you are guaranteed a long and satisfying trip into a story. I initially bought this book after seeing the Jane Campion film, (which I actually wasn't too crazy about)but I always think it's a good idea to read the source material. After a few false starts (warning: one needs to devote all their attention to James in order to enjoy him)I finally got into this book, and couldn't put it down. From the great settings of the novel, to the variety of fascinating characters (the liberated Henrietta Stackpole, the sinister Madame Merle, the beloved Ralph Touchett, Ralph's eccentric mother, the flighty Countess Gemini, the deadly Gilbert Osmond, and of course, Isabel Archer herself... James gives characters great names as well) "Portrait" is a great novel not only of self discovery, but self deception. How many of us in this world have liked to have thought ourselevs as free to make our own chocies, and were excited by a future full of "possibility" only to allow something (or usually someone) to get in our way and make us realize just how quickly we can lose our freedom and be in a cage that we need to get out of. (Pardon my bad grammar.) Those of you looking fora Jane Austen type ending, this may not be the book for you, but I think this book is more of a spiritual cousin to Austen than we may think. It all comes down to making choices, and teh effects of those decisions. Throw off any reservations that you may have because this book was written over a century ago, it's as fresh, funny, tragic and riveting today as it was then. (And hey, buy the film soundtrack which perfectly captures the mood of the story for accompaniment..that was a plug!)

In this classic work of American literary criticism, Poirier analyzes American writers' attempts, through style and language, to free their main characters from the constraints of American social and economic forces. Writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, and Theodore Dreiser and the heroes of their works are attempting to conjure "at least the illusion of a world elsewhere," away from the inhibiting effects of American society.

Emerson is the central figure of Poirier's study, as his works "constitute a compendium of iconographies that have gotten into American writers who may never have liked or even read him"; he is "nearly always a hovering presence in American writing." Poirier skillfully traces Emerson's influence through twentieth-century works, finding strong Emersonian undercurrents in certain passages from F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby. In Emerson's essay "Nature" and The Great Gatsby, the "relation to landscape is established by gazing at it, by an 'aesthetic contemplation' rather than by more palpable and profitable claims to ownership." The speaker in Emerson's essay and Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby, look at landscape and imaginatively alter it, removing houses or farms and restoring it to its pristine condition before the arrival of European explorers, thus taking "visionary possession" of the landscape and creating a new environment-a world elsewhere-devoid of the influence of American society.

In his biography of Hawthorne, James asserts that "no serious fiction could have been written" in pre-Civil War America because of "the bareness of American life"; this is reflected in what James perceives as a major weakness in Hawthorne's works: an inability to portray social relationships with complexity. Poirier believes that James undervalues Hawthorne by not recognizing that "far from feeling deprived by what James thinks is lacking in his society, Hawthorne was usually anxious to escape from what it did offer." This quest for escape is reflected in The Blithedale Romance, in which Hawthorne's main character, Miles Coverdale, retreats to a transcendentalist Utopian community. According to Poirier, "tasteless literariness" is Hawthorne's greatest weakness; the author cannot overcome a tendency toward conventional literary constructs and language.

In the book's most intriguing chapter, Poirier examines the similarities and differences in the literary philosophies of nineteenth-century American and English writers. American writers of the period were critical of their English counterparts, who, to them, seemed to view the novel simply as entertainment or a vehicle for addressing social ills. Emerson sees Jane Austen as "imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society"; Twain and James are also highly critical of her works. Poirier convincingly argues that Emerson, Twain, and James "are unable to see, so alien to them is her positive vision of the social experience, that she is fully aware of the dangers in society which for them are dangers of it." Like the heroes of American fiction, the title character of Austen's Emma manipulates her social environment through imagination; her failed attempts to arrange a match between her low-born friend Harriet Smith and men above her social station demonstrate a will to transcend the societal constraints of early nineteenth-century England. However, unlike American fiction, the movement in Austen's novels is not toward isolation or escape but instead toward marriage; the couple, not the individual or the group, is the "best society."

Dreiser and Wharton, like Fitzgerald and other later American writers, create heroes who "are often anxious to surrender themselves to the powers that destroy them." For these novelists, like their nineteenth-century precursors, "society. . .becomes an expression of impersonal power, even when that power is being manipulated by some of its victims." Emerson is still a prominent figure in the American literature of the early part of the twentieth century, as Poirier traces his concept of individuality-"non-conformism, social protest, and a sense of human destiny not satisfied by the opportunities available within the structure of society"- through Dreiser, Wharton, and Thoreau.

Ultimately, for Poirier, the undercurrent in American literature in regards to issues of self and environment is not a progression but a stasis. Twentieth-century American writers create characters who attempt to construct environments uncontaminated by "modern democratic America" in the same manner as that of their nineteenth-century predecessors.

One must keep in mind that Poirier was writing in the mid-1960s, and his arguments may or may not apply to the American post-modern novel; however, A World Elsewhere is a readable, wide-ranging, and thought-provoking look at one of the central themes in American literature: the desire to escape societal constraints

Dense. Deep. That Poirier knows his stuff. He knows it cold, and he's been doing a lot of thinking about American authors, too. He's got some fine ideas about them. And a mighty big vocabulary he uses in expressing those ideas. What he hasn't got is any way into his thinking for people who don't know as much as he does. He doesn't talk down to this uninitiated reader; he simply ignores him/her. I confess I could only get about halfway through his latest, and I'm the kind of reader who doesn't quit lightly. So while I found some good stuff in here -- his writings on Whitman especially -- I got tired of having to reread everything twice. Maybe you'll have more patience.