The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Poetry

by Edited by Kerry Larson

• ISBN13: 9780521763691
• ISBN10: 052176369X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-01-16
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This Companion is the first critical collection of its kind devoted solely to American poetry of the nineteenth century. It covers a wide variety of authors, many of whom are currently being rediscovered. A number of anthologies in the recent past have been devoted to the verse of groups such as Native Americans, African-Americans and women. This volume offers essays covering these groups as well as more familiar figures such as Dickinson, Whitman, Longfellow and Melville. The contents are divided between broad topics of concern such as the poetry of the Civil War or the development of the 'poetess' role and articles featuring specific authors such as Edgar Allan Poe or Sarah Piatt. In the past two decades a growing body of scholarship has been engaged in reconceptualizing and re-evaluating this largely neglected area of study in US literary history - this Companion reflects and advances this spirit of revisionism.

Table of Contents

List of contributors	p. vii
Chronology of major works and events	p. x
Acknowledgments	p. xix
Introduction	p. 1
Mandates, Movements, and Manifestoes
The reception of nineteenth-century American poetry	p. 15
American Indian poetry in the nineteenth century	p. 36
The poet as Poetess	p. 54
Transcendentalist poetics	p. 76
Slavery and its metrics	p. 94
Weathering the news in US Civil War poetry	p. 113
The "Twilight of the Poets" in the era of American realism, 1875-1900	p. 135
Individual Authors
Longfellow's ambivalence	p. 157
Sarah Piatt's grammar of convention and the conditions of authorship	p. 172
Poo and Southern poetry	p. 193
The color line: James Monroe Whitfield and Albery Alison Whitman	p. 208
Colonial violence and poetic transcendence in Whitman's ôSong of Myself"	p. 225
Emily Dickinson's "turbaned seas"	p. 248
Selected guide to further reading	p. 265
Index	p. 270
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