Contains a collection of poetry that spans two centuries and provides a diverse point of view of American life. American Poetry offers a collection of 26 verses by our finest poets, all with their unique perspective on the land they loved and accompanied by remarkable paintings that enhance the meaning of the words. Here, beautifully illustrated, are such unforgettable works.

Freneau to Whitman.

Afro-Americans of the nineteenth century are the invisible poets of our national literature. This anthology brings together 171 poems by 35 poets, from the best known to the unknown, in one volume.

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.

This second volume of The Library of America’s two-volume collection of nineteenth-century American poetry 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 post-bellum expressions of grief and reconciliation—ushered in a period of accelerating change and widening regional perspectives. 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 to all. 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 this volume is devoted to American Indian poetry in nineteenth-century versions, making available—some for the first time since their initial publication—an astonishing range of translations and adaptations: Ojibwa healing rituals, the songs of the Ghost Dance religion, Zuni mythological narratives, chants from the Kwakiutl Winter Ceremonial. Also included is a generous selection from America’s rich heritage of anonymous folk songs, ballads, and hymns. Unprecedented in its textual authority, the anthology includes newly researched biographical sketches of each poet, a year-by-year chronology of poets and poetry from 1800 to 1900, and extensive notes. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Presents a collection of early American poetry in a tribute to the diversity and range of poetic traditions from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and includes regional music ballads and Native American translations.

Throughout the 19th century, American poetry was a profoundly populist literary form. It circulated in New England magazines and Southern newspapers; it was read aloud in taverns, homes, and schools across the country. Antebellum reviewers envisioned poetry as the touchstone democratic genre, and their Civil War–era counterparts celebrated its motivating power, singing poems on battlefields. Following the war, however, as criticism grew more professionalized and American literature emerged as an academic subject, reviewers increasingly elevated difficult, dispassionate writing and elite readers over their supposedly common counterparts, thereby separating “authentic” poetry for intellectuals from “popular” poetry for everyone else.\ Conceptually and methodologically unique among studies of 19th-century American poetry, Who Killed American Poetry? not only charts changing attitudes toward American poetry, but also applies these ideas to the work of representative individual poets. Closely analyzing hundreds of reviews and critical essays, Karen L. Kilcup tracks the century’s developing aesthetic standards and highlights the different criteria reviewers used to assess poetry based on poets’ class, gender, ethnicity, and location. She shows that, as early as the 1820s, critics began to marginalize some kinds of emotional American poetry, a shift many scholars have attributed primarily to the late-century emergence of affectively restrained modernist ideals. Mapping this literary critical history enables us to more readily apprehend poetry’s status in American culture—both in the past and present—and encourages us to scrutinize the standards of academic criticism that underwrite contemporary aesthetics and continue to constrain poetry’s appeal. Who American Killed Poetry? enlarges our understanding of American culture over the past two hundred years and will interest scholars in literary studies, historical poetics, American studies, gender studies, canon criticism, genre studies, the history of criticism, and affect studies. It will also appeal to poetry readers and those who enjoy reading about American cultural history.