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Richard Gray has been Professor or Distinguished Visiting Professor at several universities in the UK and USA, including Essex, Georgia and South Carolina. He is the first specialist in American literature to be elected a Fellow of the British Academy and has published over a dozen books on the topic, including the award-winning Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region (1986) and The Life of William Faulkner: A Critical Biography (1994).A History of American Poetry presents a comprehensive exploration of the development of American poetic traditions from their pre-Columbian origins to the present day.
- Offers a detailed and accessible account of the entire range of American poetry
- Situates the story of American poetry within crucial social and historical contexts, and places individual poets and poems in the relevant intertextual contexts
- Explores and interprets American poetry in terms of the international positioning and multicultural character of the United States
- Provides readers with a means to understand the individual works and personalities that helped to shape one of the most significant bodies of literature of the past few centuries
Preface and Acknowledgments x
1 The American Poem 1
The United States … the Greatest Poem 1
The Poem is You 8
The Breaking of the New Wood 21
Forging the Uncreated Conscience of the Nation 27
2 Beginnings 39
In My Beginning is My End 39
The word and the Word: Colonial Poetry 44
Towards the Secular: Colonial Poetry 53
Writing Revolution: The Poetry of the Emergent Republic 57
Across the Great Divide: Poetry of the South and the North 63
To Sing the Nation: American Poetic Voices 69
To Sing of Freedom: African American Voices 89
Looking Before and After: Poetic Voices of Region and Nation 91
3 The Turn to the Modern: Imagism, Objectivism, and Some Major Innovators 106
The Revolution is Accomplished 106
The Significance of Imagism 111
From Imagism to Objectivism or Dream 115
From Imagism to the Redemption of History 128
From Imagism to Contact and Community 136
From Imagism to Discovery of the Imagination 141
4 In Search of a Past: The Fugitive Movement and the Major Traditionalists 153
The Precious, the Incommunicable Past 153
The Significance of the Fugitives 157
Traditionalism and the South 160
Traditionalism Outside the South 174
Traditionalism, Skepticism, and Tragedy 179
Traditionalism, Quiet Desperation, and Belief 185
Traditionalism, Inhumanism, and Prophecy 191
5 The Traditions of Whitman: Other Poets from Between the Wars 201
Make this America for Us! 201
Whitman and American Populism 205
Whitman and American Radicalism 211
Whitman, American Identity, and African American Poetry 217
Whitman and American Individualism 224
Whitman and American Experimentalism 232
Whitman and American Mysticism 237
6 Formalists and Confessionals: American Poetry since World War II 250
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket 250
From the Mythological Eye to the Lonely "I": A Progress of American Poetry since the War 253
Varieties of the Personal: The Self as Dream, Landscape, or Confession 258
From Formalism to Freedom: A Progress of American Poetic
Techniques since the War 264
The Imagination of Commitment: A Progress of American
Poetic Themes since the War 270
The Uses of Formalism 274
The Confessional "I" as Primitive 278
The Confessional "I" as Historian 281
The Confessional "I" as Martyr 285
The Confessional "I" as Prophet 289
New Formalists, New Confessionals 292
7 Beats, Prophets, and Aesthetes: American Poetry since World War II 302
Who Am I? 302
Rediscovering the American Voice: The Black Mountain Poets 306
Restoring the American Vision: The San Francisco Poets 316
Recreating American Rhythms: The Beat Poets 323
Resurrecting the American Rebel: African American Poetry 330
Reinventing the American Self: The New York Poets 340
And the Beat Goes On: American Poetry and Virtual Reality 351
8 The Languages of American Poetry and the Language of Crisis: American Poetry into the Twenty-First Century 367
What is the Language of American Literature? 367
The Actuality of Words: The Language Poets 376
The Necessity of Audience: The New Formalists 384
Remapping the Nation: Chicano/a and Latino/a Poetry 395
Improvising America: Asian American Poetry 418
New and Ancient Songs: The Return of the Native American 448
Legends of the Fall: American Poetry and Crisis 476
Epilogue: What Is an American? The Problem of Literary Nationality 509
Index 519
“In his preface to this work, Richard Gray says that he has “tried to be faithful to the sheer range and plurality of the American poetic tradition,” and much the most impressive feature of this work is the “sheer range” of authors it covers. Extending from Philip Freneau at the end of the eighteenth century to emerging Asian-American poets at the beginning of the twenty-first, this book offers the reader a compendious, almost encyclopaedic range, which treats every facet of American poetry … Gray writes fluently and with stylistic brio about a very large range of American poets, and he manages to convey a strong sense not only of his commitment to this field but also his enjoyment of it.”—Paul Giles, University of Sydney
“Richard Gray's History of American Poetry has great appeal for both specialized scholars and general readers. Gray's lucid prose style and sensitive analyses allow us to gain valuable insights into American poetry seen within its historical context.”—Susan Castillo, King’s College London