American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century Vol. 2 (LOA #67): Melville to Stickney / American Indian Poetry / Folk Songs & Spirituals: 002 (Library of America) - Hardcover

Various

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 094045078X ISBN 13: 9780940450783

Publisher: The Library of America, 1993

Synopsis

In nineteenth-century America, poetry was, part of everyday life, as familiar as a hymn, a love song, a patriotic exhortation. American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century reveals the vigor and diversity of a tradition embracing solitary visionaries and congenial storytellers, humorists and dissidents, songwriters and philosophers. These two volumes reassess America's poetic legacy with a comprehensive sweep that no previous anthology has attempted. This second volume follows the evolution of American poetry from the monumental mid-century achievements of Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson to the modernist stirrings of Stephen Crane and Edwin Arlington Robinson. The cataclysm of the Civil War - reflected in fervent antislavery protests, in marching songs and poetic calls to arms, and in muted postbellum expressions of grief and reconciliation - ushered in a period of accelerating change and widening regional perspectives. Among the unfamiliar pleasures to be savored in this volume are the penetrating meditations of the reclusive Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, the eloquent lyricism of Emma Lazarus, the mournful, superbly crafted fin de siecle verse of Trumbull Stickney. Here too are the pioneering African-American poets (Frances Harper, Albery Allson Whitman, Paul Laurence Dunbar); popular humorists (James Whitcomb Riley, Eugene Field); writers embodying America's newfound cosmopolitanism (Edith Wharton, George Santayana); and extravagant self-mythologizing figures who could have existed nowhere else, like the actress Adah Isaacs Menken and the frontier poet Joaquin Miller. Parodies, dialect poems, song lyrics, and children's verse evoke the liveliness of an era when poetry was accessible toall. Here are poems that played a crucial role in American public life, whether to arouse the national conscience (Edwin Markham's "The Man with the Hoe") or to memorialize the golden age of the national pastime (Ernest Lawrence Thayer's "Casey at the Bat"). An entire section of t

About this title

Review:

"There is simply nothing else like it in print." --Helen Vendler

About the Author:

John Hollander (1929-2013), editor, was a distinguished poet, critic, and teacher whose many collections included The Night Mirror (1971), Reflections on Espionage(1976), Spectral Emanations (1978), and Powers of Thirteen (1983). He was a MacArthur Fellow and was awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1983. He also edited two volumes in the Library of America's American Poets Project series: American Wits: An Anthology of Light Verse (2003) and Emma Lazarus: Selected Poems (2005).

About this edition

• Publisher: The Library of America
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 094045078X
• ISBN 13: 9780940450783
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 1050
• Editor: Hollander John