On Shelf at CCBC Libraries
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African American Poetry
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Taking the measure of the tradition in a single indispensable volume, African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song sets a new standard for a genuinely deep engagement with Black poetry and its essential expression of American genius.
Publication Date: 2020 -
An American Sunrise
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National Bestseller A stunning new volume from the first Native American Poet Laureate of the United States, informed by her tribal history and connection to the land. In the early 1800s, the Mvskoke people were forcibly removed from their original lands east of the Mississippi to Indian Territory, which is now part of Oklahoma. Two hundred years later, Joy Harjo returns to her family's lands and opens a dialogue with history. In An American Sunrise, Harjo finds blessings in the abundance of her homeland and confronts the site where her people, and other indigenous families, essentially disappeared. From her memory of her mother's death, to her beginnings in the native rights movement, to the fresh road with her beloved, Harjo's personal life intertwines with tribal histories to create a space for renewed beginnings. Her poems sing of beauty and survival, illuminating a spirituality that connects her to her ancestors and thrums with the quiet anger of living in the ruins of injustice. A descendent of storytellers and "one of our finest--and most complicated--poets" (Los Angeles Review of Books), Joy Harjo continues her legacy with this latest powerful collection.
Call Number: PS3558.A62423 A64 2019 -
The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Poetry
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The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Poetry comprises original essays by eighteen distinguished scholars. It offers a critical overview of major and emerging American poets of the twentieth century, in addition to critical accounts of the representative schools, movements, regional settings, archival resources, and critical reception that define modern American poetry. The Companion stretches the narrow term of 'literary modernism' - which encompasses works published from approximately 1890 to 1945 - to include a more capacious and usable account of American poetry's evolution from the twentieth century to the present. The essays collected here seek to account for modern American verse against the contexts of broad political, social, and cultural fields and forces. This volume gathers together major voices that represent the best in contemporary critical approaches and methods.
Call Number: PS323.5 .C28 2015 -
The Road Not Taken
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A cultural "biography" of Robert Frost's beloved poem, arguably the most popular piece of literature written by an American "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood . . ." One hundred years after its first publication in August 1915, Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken" is so ubiquitous that it's easy to forget that it is, in fact, a poem. Yet poetry it is, and Frost's immortal lines remain unbelievably popular. And yet in spite of this devotion, almost everyone gets the poem hopelessly wrong. David Orr's The Road Not Taken dives directly into the controversy, illuminating the poem's enduring greatness while revealing its mystifying contradictions. Widely admired as the poetry columnist for The New York Times Book Review, Orr is the perfect guide for lay readers and experts alike. Orr offers a lively look at the poem's cultural influence, its artistic complexity, and its historical journey from the margins of the First World War all the way to its canonical place today as a true masterpiece of American literature. "The Road Not Taken" seems straightforward: a nameless traveler is faced with a choice: two paths forward, with only one to walk. And everyone remembers the traveler taking "the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference." But for a century readers and critics have fought bitterly over what the poem really says. Is it a paean to triumphant self-assertion, where an individual boldly chooses to live outside conformity? Or a biting commentary on human self-deception, where a person chooses between identical roads and yet later romanticizes the decision as life altering? What Orr artfully reveals is that the poem speaks to both of these impulses, and all the possibilities that lie between them. The poem gives us a portrait of choice without making a decision itself. And in this, "The Road Not Taken" is distinctively American, for the United States is the country of choice in all its ambiguous splendor. Published for the poem's centennial--along with a new Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Frost's poems, edited and introduced by Orr himself--The Road Not Taken is a treasure for all readers, a triumph of artistic exploration and cultural investigation that sings with its own unforgettably poetic voice.
Call Number: PS3511.R94 Z8565 2015Publication Date: 2015 -
The Columbia History of American Poetry
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-- "New York Times Book Review"
ISBN: 0585041547Publication Date: 1993
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Online From CCBC Libraries
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Sylvia Plath
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Talented from the very beginning of her life, Sylvia Plath published her first poem at the age of eight in the ""children's section"" of the Boston Herald. She said of her childhood: ""I want to work at putting together the complex mosaic of my childhood; to practice capturing feelings and experiences from the nebulous seething of memory and yank them out into black-and-white on the typewriter."" Plath won several major prizes in writing and scholarship and her poems are considered today to be the most famous by an American female poet of the 20th Century, especially those in her 1965 collection Ariel. In 1981, Plath's Collected Poems was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, the first American poet to win this prize after death. This volume in the Critical Insights series presents a variety of new essays on the unconventional American poet. This work will introduce Sylvia Plath to high school and college classrooms. Such introductions are usually conventional: biography, summary of works, and the author's ""place"" in the history of American literature. This title provides such information. Yet, there is nothing ""conventional"" about Sylvia Plath. She is a unique, rare, rebellious and unexpected voice in American literature. Rounding out the volume are a chronology of Plath's life and a list of her principle publications as well as a bibliography for readers seeking to study this fascinating poet in greater depth. Each essay is 2,500 to 5,000 words in length, and all essays conclude with a list of ""Works Cited,"" along with endnotes. Finally, the volume's appendixes offer a section of useful reference resources: About This Volume Critical Context: Original Introductory Essays Critical Readings: Original In-Depth Essays Further Readings Detailed Bibliography Detailed Bio of the Editor General Subject Index
Publication Date: 2013 -
American Modernist Poets
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The rise of modernism marked one of the major transitional periods in contemporary literature. The American modernist poets created a rich legacy in their verse explorations of a world touched by war, rapid industrialization, and the growing perceived alienation of the individual. The innovators featured in this volume include Ezra Pound, e.e. cummings, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Carl Sandburg and their abiding influences. Critical essays examine these poets and their works, with a chronology, bibliography, index, and an introductory essay by master scholar Harold Bloom completing the title.
Publication Date: 2011 -
Beat Poets
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Beat Poets is a single-volume reference that contains selected essays from Critical Survey of Poetry, Fourth Edition. Every article in this set was carefully selected by our editors to provide the best information available about the topic covered. The essays in Beat Poets discuss such influential poets as Paul Blackburn, Robert Duncan, Anselm Hollo, Marie Ponsot, and Allen Ginsberg.
Publication Date: 2011 -
Phillis Wheatley and the Romantics
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Phillis Wheatley was the first African American to publish a book. Born in Gambia in 1753, she came to America aboard a slave ship, the Phillis. From an early age, Wheatley exhibited a profound gift for verse, publishing her first poem in 1767. Her tribute to a famed pastor, "On the Death of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield," followed in 1770, catapulting her into the international spotlight, and publication of her 1773 Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral in London created her an international star. Despite the attention she received at the time, history has not been kind to Wheatley. Her work has long been neglected or denigrated by literary critics and historians. John C. Shields, a scholar of early American literature, has tried to help change this perception, and Wheatley has begun to take her place among the elite of American writers. In Phillis Wheatley and the Romantic Age, Shields contends that Wheatley was not only a brilliant writer but one whose work made a significant impression on renowned Europeans of the Romantic age, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who borrowed liberally from her works, particularly in his famous distinction between fancy and imagination. Shields shows how certain Wheatley texts, particularly her "Long Poem," consisting of "On Recollection," "Thoughts on the Works of Providence," and "On Imagination," helped shape the face of Romanticism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Phillis Wheatley and the Romantic Age helps demolish the long-held notion that literary culture flowed in only one direction: from Europe to the Americas. Thanks to Wheatley's influence, Shields argues, the New World was influencing European literary masters far sooner than has been generally understood.
Publication Date: 2010 -
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The American Puritan Elegy
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Jeffrey Hammond's study takes an anthropological approach to the most popular form of poetry in early New England - the funeral elegy. Hammond reconstructs the historical, theological and cultural contexts of these poems to demonstrate how they responded to a specific process of mourning defined by Puritan views on death and grief. The elegies emerge, he argues, not as 'poems' to be read and appreciated in a post-Romantic sense, but as performative scripts that consoled readers by shaping their experience of loss in accordance with theological expectation. Read in the framework of their own time and place, the elegies shed new light on the emotional dimension of Puritanism and the important role of ritual in Puritan culture. Hammond's book reassesses a body of poems whose importance in their own time has been obscured by almost total neglect in ours. It represents the first full-length study of its kind in English.
Publication Date: 2000
