Rich treasury of verse from the 19th and 20th centuries includes works by Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, other notables.

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.

Outstanding anthology features more than 150 English and American masterpieces spanning over 400 years. "Death Be Not Proud," "The Tyger," "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," plus works by Tennyson, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats, Frost, others. Includes 3 selections from the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

This collection of essays places issues central to literary study, particularly the question of the canon, in the context of institutional practices in American colleges and universities. Lauter addresses such crucial concerns as what students should read and study, how standards of "quality" are defined and changed, the limits of theoretical discourse, and the ways race, gender, and class shape not only teaching, curricula, and research priorities, but collegiate personnel actions as well. The book examines critically the variety of recent proposals for "reforming" higher education, and it calls into question many practices, like employing large numbers of part-timers, now popular with college managers. Offering concrete examples of a "comparative" method for teaching literary texts, and specific instances about "integrating" curricula, Canons and Contexts proposes realistic ideas for creating varied, spirited, and democratic classrooms and colleges.

JOHN DONNE: AIR AND ANGELS: SELECTED POEMS A selection of the finest poems by British poet John Donne. John Donne was, Robert Graves said, a 'Muse poet', a poetwho wrote passionately of the Muse. It is easy to see Donne asa love poet, in the tradition of love poets such as Bernard deVentadour, Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarch and Torquato Tasso. Donne has written his fair share of lovepoems. There are the bawdy allusions to the phallus in 'TheFlea', while 'The Comparison' parodies the adoration poem, with references to the 'sweat drops of my mistress' breast'. Like William Shakespeare in his parody sonnet 'my mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun', Donne sends up the Petrarchan and courtly love genre with gross comparisons ('Like spermatic issue of ripe menstruous boils'). In 'The Bait', there is the archetypal Renaissance opening line 'Come live with me, and be my love', as used by Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare, among others. And there is the complex, ambivalent eroticism of 'The Extasie', a much celebrated love poem, and the 19th 'Elegy', where features Donne's famous couplet: Licence my roving hands, and let them go Before, behind, between, above, below. The Songs and Sonnets of John Donne celebrate the many emotions of love, feelings that are so familiar in love poetry from Sappho to Adrienne Rich. Donne does not quite cover every emotion of love, but a good deal of them. In 'The Canonization', we find the age-old Neo-platonic belief that two can become as one ('we two being one', or 'we shall/ Be one', he writes in 'Lovers' Infiniteness'), a common belief in love poetry. John Donne's love poetry, like (nearly) all love poetry, self-reflexive. Although he would 'ne'er parted be', as he writes in 'Song: Sweetest love, I do not go', he knows that love poetry comes out of loss. The beloved woman is not there, so art takes her place. The Songs and Sonnets arise from loss, loss of love; they take the place of love. For, if he were clasping his beloved in those feverish embraces as described in 'The Extasie' and 'Elegy', he would not, obviously, bother with poetry. Love poetry has this ambivalent, difficult relationship with love. The poem is not love, and is no real substitute for it. And writing of love exacerbates the pain and the insecurity of the experience of love. With an introduction and bibliography. Illustrated, with new pictures. The text has been revised for this edition. Also available in an E-book edition. www.crmoon.com. "

In 850 analytical articles, this two-volume set explores the developments that influenced the profound changes in thought and sensibility during the second half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century. The Encyclopedia provides readers with a clear, detailed, and accurate reference source on the literature, thought, music, and art of the period, demonstrating the rich interplay of international influences and cross-currents at work; and to explore the many issues raised by the very concepts of Romantic and Romanticism.

Our Conrad is about the American reception of Joseph Conrad and its crucial role in the formation of American modernism. Although Conrad did not visit the country until a year before his death, his fiction served as both foil and mirror to America's conception of itself and its place in the world. Peter Mallios reveals the historical and political factors that made Conrad's work valuable to a range of prominent figures—including Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Richard Wright, Woodrow Wilson, and Theodore and Edith Roosevelt—and explores regional differences in Conrad's reception. He proves that foreign-authored writing can be as integral a part of United States culture as that of any native. Arguing that an individual writer's apparent (national, gendered, racial, political) identity is not always a good predictor of the diversity of voices and dialogues to which he gives rise, this exercise in transnational comparativism participates in post-Americanist efforts to render American Studies less insular and parochial.

The essays collected in this volume survey the major works of modern American poetry, from magnificent epics like Hart Crane's "The Bridge" and Wallace Stevens's "Auroras of Aurmn," to such central lyrics as Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and Maranne Moore's "Poetry." the complexity of modern American poetry has demanded appreciation and analysis of an especially high order, and the list of critics included here makes up a veritable all-star team of close readers, from Kenneth Burke to Helen Vendler, from Richard Poirier to David Bromwich.

Gathering reviews and essays which examine Rich's poetry and prose, this text also looks at how critical opinion about her works has changed.