The Cambridge History of American Literature: Volume 4, Nineteenth-Century Poetry 1800–1910

This is the first complete narrative history of nineteenth-century American poetry. Barbara Packer explores the neoclassical and satiric forms mastered by the early Federalist poets; the creative reaches of once-celebrated, and still compelling, poets like Longfellow and Whittier; the distinctive lyric forms developed by Emerson and the Transcendentalists. Shira Wolosky provides a new perspective on the achievement of female poets of the period, as well as a close appreciation of African-American poets, including the collective folk authors of the Negro spirituals. She also illuminates the major works of the period, from Poe through Melville and Crane, to Whitman and Dickinson. The authors of this volume discuss this extraordinary literary achievement both in formal terms and in its sustained engagement with changing social and cultural conditions. In doing so they recover and elucidate American poetry of the nineteenth century for our twenty-first century pleasure, profit, and renewed study.

• The most complete narrative history to date of nineteenth-century American poetry • The only full analysis of American poetry between 1790 and 1855 • An invaluable work for students and scholars of American literature

Introduction Sacvan Bercovitch and Neal Dolan; Part I. American Verse Traditions, 1800–1855 Barbara Packer: 1. Neoclassicism: comic and satiric verse; 2. Early narrative and lyric; 3. Transcendentalism; Part II. Poetry and Public Discourse, 1820–1910 Shira Wolosky: Preface: The claims of rhetoric; 1. Modest claims; 2. Claiming the Bible; 3. Poetic language; 4. Plural identities; 5. Walt Whitman: the office of the poet; 6. Emily Dickinson: the violence of the imagination; Chronology Neal Dolan.

\'… this is, without doubt and without any serious rival, the scholarly history for our generation.\' Journal of American Studies

‘… vast and eminently readable survey of twentieth century American literature …’. Use of English