A Companion to American Poetry

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Mary McAleer Balkun, Jeffrey Gray, and Paul Jaussen

In his 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot observed that the creation of a new work of art necessarily changes those that preceded it: “The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them” (1920, para. 4). In the case of poetry, new work changes the way we look at Emily Dickinson’s fascicles or modernist images, for example, or indeed what we decide to call “American” poetry. Like works of art, critical paradigms can refine methods, broaden contexts, and reorganize the field of poetics, transforming what scholars value or understand about poems. The New Criticism, for instance, raised the profile of the lyric poem in the early twentieth century, an elevation that was later challenged, first, in the late twentieth century by the New Historicism, which restored the elements of identity and context and privileged narrative over lyric, and more recently by the “new lyric studies,” which questions the critical stance toward this genre over the past century, one that has often ignored the diversity of poetry and its historical dimension. The twenty-first century has seen a growing interest in documentary and archival poetry, a further remove from New Critical impersonality. As a result of changes in both poetic practice and critical paradigms, often in a reciprocal relation with one another, the study of poetry has evolved at a rapid rate.

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 “experimental isms ,” 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.