"Edward Whitley's book maps James M. Whitfield, Eliza R. Snow, and John Rollin Ridge prominently onto nineteenth-century American poetic history as a group of poets seeking to become national bards not by embracing the traditional trappings of nationalism

In Fettered Genius, Keith D. Leonard identifies how African American poets' use and revision of traditional poetics constituted an antiracist political agency. Comparing this practice to the use of poetic mastery by the ancient Celtic bards to resist British imperialism, Leonard shows how traditional poetics enable African American poets to insert racial experience, racial protest, and African American culture into public discourse by making them features of validated artistic expression. As with the Celtic bards, these poets' artistry testified to their marginalized people's capacity for imagination and reason within and against the terms of the dominant culture. In an ambitious survey that moves from slavery to the cultural nationalism of the 1960s, Leonard examines numerous poets, placing each in the context of his or her time to demonstrate the antiracist meaning of their accomplishments. The book offers new insight on the conservatism of Phillis Wheatley, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and the genteel members of the Harlem Renaissance, how their rage for assimilation functioned to refute racist notions of difference and, paradoxically, to affirm a distinctive racial experience as valid material for poetry. Leonard also demonstrates how the more progressive and ethnically distinctive poetics of Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, and Melvin B. Tolson share some of the same ambivalence about cultural achievement as those of the earlier poets. They also have in common the self-conscious pursuit of an affirmation of the African American self through the substitution of African American vernacular language and cultural forms for traditional poetic themes and forms. The evolution of these poetics parallels the emergence of notions of ethnic identity over racial identity and, indeed, in some ways even motivated this shift. Leonard recognizes poetic mastery as the African American bardic poet's most powerful claim of ethnic tradition and of social belonging and clarifies the full hybrid complexity of African American identity that makes possible this political self-assertion. The development that is traced in Fettered Genius illustrates nothing less than the defining artistic coherence and political significance of the African American poetic tradition.

Presents a complete reference to the life and works of Walt Whitman.

Poetry occupied a complex position in the social life of nineteenth-century America. While some readers found in poems a resource for aesthetic pleasure and the enjoyment of linguistic complexity, many others turned to poems for spiritual and psychic wellbeing, adapted popular musical settings of poems to spread scandal and satire, or used poems as a medium for asserting personal and family memories as well as local and national affiliations. Poetry was not only read but memorized and quoted, rewritten and parodied, collected, anthologized, edited, and exchanged. Michael C. Cohen here explores the multiplicity of imaginative relationships forged between poems and those who made use of them from the post-Revolutionary era to the turn of the twentieth century. Organized along a careful genealogy of ballads in the Atlantic world, The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America demonstrates how the circulation of texts in songs, broadsides, letters, and newsprint as well as in books, anthologies, and critical essays enabled poetry to perform its many different tasks. Considering the media and modes of reading through which people encountered and made sense of poems, Cohen traces the lines of critical interpretations and tracks the emergence and disappearance of poetic genres in American literary culture. Examining well-known works by John Greenleaf Whittier and Walt Whitman as well as popular ballads, minstrel songs, and spirituals, Cohen shows how discourses on poetry served as sites for debates over history, literary culture, citizenship, and racial identity.

This printers, publishers and booksellers index is modeled after Bristol's Index of Printers, Publishers and Booksellers Indicated by Charles Evans in his American Bibliography. Each entry contains a name and place, with item numbers listed underneath by date. Personal names are listed in the most complete form that could be determined. Corporate names are listed in the form used by the Library of Congress. Newspapers and magazines are entered by their full titles as recorded in Brigham's American Newspapers, 1821-1936 and Union List of Serials. Also included is a geographical index by city and a list of omissions with explanations.