The Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. 4

Nineteenth-Century Poetry, 1800-1910

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Edited by Sacvan Bercovitch

Cambridge University Press

Due/Published January 2005, 572 pages, cloth

ISBN 0521301084

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.

Contributors: Sacvan Bercovitch, Neal Dolan, Barbara Packer, Shira Wolosky

Contents

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.