The Columbia History of American Poetry [PDF] {01001001}

Description



These 31 essays by various experts in the field interrogate, dismantle, and ultimately reassemble the history of poetry in the United States, from the work of the slave George Moses Horton, who earned money for his freedom by ghostwriting love poems for romantic if uninspired college students, to the writings of Beat, Black Arts, and Marxist-oriented Language Poets of today. The great figures of the past--Whitman, Poe, Eliot, and so on--still loom, yet each time we are made to see them in some new way. Emily Dickinson, for example, comes across here as a cunning, ambitious poet rather than a sick or fragile one. The most eye-opening of these essays is the one by Dana Gioia on the Longfellow whom everyone thinks they have forgotten, even though they quote him whenever they say "ships that pass in the night" or "the patter of little feet." An essential volume that shows how poetry intersects with our lives and vice versa.
- David Kirby, Florida State Univ., Tallahassee

About the Author



Jay Parini is Axinn Professor of English at Middlebury College. A former Guggenheim Fellow and visiting fellow at Christ Church College, Oxford, Parini has published four volumes of poetry, five novels (including The Last Station and Benjamin's Crossing), a critical study of Theodore Roethke, and biographies of John Steinbeck and Robert Frost. The latter won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Award for the best work of nonfiction in 1999. He has also edited numerous volumes, including The Norton Anthology of American Autobiography and The Columbia Anthology of American Poetry.