This volume was conceived and written during a period of accelerating global instability, with the re-emergence of authoritarian political regimes, the increasingly obvious effects of climate change, and, in the final years of writing and editing, the COVID-19 pandemic. These challenges highlight the dynamism between present concerns and the ways in which the past helps us understand those concerns. In the development of the Companion to American Poetry, we have tried to broaden our critical map so as to address the fact that our American pasts often entertained very different ideas of the poet and of poetry’s place and purpose. We solicited essays that both took those historical concepts on their own terms but also, crucially, reconceptualized the past in dialogue with the present. Not only is the past unstable, but it changes according to the questions we ask of it. In this volume, we sought to pose new questions that respect long-standing concerns of American poetry and criticism as well as recast those questions according to our present lights. How, for instance, has the inescapable experience of death and dying been transformed through the decades by the poetic imagination? How has American poetry staged the struggles over language and nation in the wake of US settler colonialism? How have queer and trans voices used poetry to articulate identities that have been otherwise repressed in the United States? Where do we see poetry engaging “nature” as a transcendent concept and the anthropocene as a material activity of planetary destruction? How does the very term “American poetry” become redefined when read through the forces of globalization? Questions such as these express critical and poetic continuities—traditionally at the heart of a volume such as this one—but also demonstrate important discontinuities. These include poetry’s relationship to other genres and other fields, the way conceptions of the poem itself have changed, and the way poetry responds to contemporary events and trends.
The challenge for such a project is not only its scale but also the demands of portraying American poetry as a whole. Instead of offering a singular narrative, as we developed this Companion to American Poetry we committed to two principles: first, to highlight new approaches, unexplored research areas, and emerging practices within American poetry and poetics writ large; and, second, to prompt a wide-ranging discussion about the expanding edges of poetry scholarship. The Companion brings together a group of scholars and scholar–poets, from those in the early stages of their careers to more established voices, and with expertise in a cross-section of historical periods and forms: from the time before there was an “American” poetry to the present day, and from the traditional to the experimental. These essays reflect a poetry that is broadly conceived and that acknowledges the porousness of boundaries, whether cultural, temporal, or generic.
While each chapter presents an individual argument, we have organized the volume according to clusters of concerns. Each section title gestures toward earlier paradigms in American poetry criticism while also attempting to widen our definitions of those conceptual frameworks. We begin with “Poetry before ‘American Poetry,’” calling attention to the problematic definition of “America” through chapters on pre-colonial writings, indigenous politics, and the role that poetry played in forming the early national imaginary. We follow this with “Poetry and the Transcendent,” considering the flourishing of nineteenth-century poetry in dialogue with transcendentalist philosophy while also exploring the ongoing role of experiences of the sacred and epiphanic in contemporary writing. Acknowledging that the “experimental/traditional” divide is both operative and problematic in many accounts of American poetry, our third section stresses “experimentalisms,” whether in modernist and contemporary poetry or in experimental critical practices, such as philosophical readings or digital fabrications. Sections four and five examine the related topics of identity and nation, with essays that take up queer, transgender, and transnational concerns. Section six expands the field of poetry’s relationship to other arts and media, with reconsiderations of ekphrastic and cinematic poetries, along with chapters on bio art and rap music. Section seven exemplifies our commitment to moving between past, present, and future through readings of the various ways that ecology, nature, and the anthropocene have shaped our vision of planetary existence. In our final section, we gather a diverse collection of essays on poetry that engages with public struggles: over borders, war, capitalism, or racial inequality.
Some scholars claim that shifts in literary critical practice, notably the rise of New Historicism and various reactions to it, have led to the sidelining of poetry in favor of narrative. However, as we can see from the intellectual diversity and depth of this volume, the death of poetry has been greatly exaggerated. The 37 essays in A Companion to American Poetry demonstrate the continued relevance of poetry and poetics for broader fields that animate literary scholarship today, including indigenous studies, queer and transgender studies, diasporic and Black studies, maker methodologies, science and technology studies, and visual cultural studies, among others. We hope these essays not only offer new understandings and perspectives but also speak to the ongoing vitality of American poetry, as well as its important, always timely, contributions to American and world culture.
References
1 Eliot, T.S. (1920). Tradition and the Individual Talent. The Sacred Wood. Available at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/57795/57795-h/57795-h.htm. (Accessed: 13 July 2021).
2 Worldmaking and Ambition in History Poems by Early American Women: The Examples of Anne Bradstreet and Sarah Wentworth Morton
Tamara HarveyGeorge Mason University
Arme, arme, Soldado’s arme, Horse, Horse, speed to your Horses,
Gentle-women, make head, they vent their plot in Verses;
They write of Monarchies, a most seditious word,
It signifies Oppression, Tyranny, and Sword:
March amain to London, they’l rise, for there they flock,
But stay a while, they seldome rise till ten a clock.
R.Q. (Bradstreet, 1650, n.p.)
The humor in R.Q.’s prefatory poem to Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse (1650) is neither original nor subtle, which may explain why it was the only prefatory poem to be dropped from Several Poems (1678).1 And yet its representation of both monarchy and literary gentle-women epitomizes the broad trends in scholarship on the poem R.Q. would seem to have in mind, Bradstreet’s “The Four Monarchies.” Bradstreet renders Sir Walter Ralegh’s2 five volume The Historie of the World in over 3500 lines of iambic pentameter couplets. According to Gillian Wright, Bradstreet’s poem is a “politic history,” a subgenre of early modern verse history that uses condensation and an epigrammatic style to render its subject (p. 85). At times this yields pithy epitomes of long, scholarly discourse, though just as frequently the effort to turn Ralegh’s prose into poetry leads to confusing inversions and other infelicities. Modern readers, it is fair to say, don’t love this poem. To make sense of it, scholars have read it as a reflection of extratextual concerns that resonate more readily with modern interests, situating Bradstreet politically within transatlantic Puritan concerns during the English Civil War and literarily as a woman writer who must work against broad characterizations of women’s abilities