The Columbia Anthology of American Poetry

Front Cover
Jay Parini
Columbia University Press, 1995 - 757 pages
In the nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville suggested that the poetry of the new American democratic state, free from the staggering weight of centuries of European aristocracy and tradition, would focus on "man alone... his passions, his doubts, his rare properties and inconceivable wretchedness."

For hundreds of years, American poets have presented their various images of the land and its people. But what is "American poetry?" Is there truly such a thing as an American poetic tradition, spanning over nearly four centuries from colonial times to the turn of the millennium? In The Columbia Anthology of American Poetry, Jay Parini, a respected American poet and critic in his own right, offers an authoritative survey of the elusive category that is the poetry of the American people.

The Columbia Anthology of American Poetry covers all of the canonical American poets, from the colonial to the contemporary-Anne Bradstreet, Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Adrienne Rich are all included.

But Parini has also selected a broad sampling of poetry from voices that have been heard as widely over the years. Here, for the first time, is a thorough collection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry by women, Native American, and African Americans. Within these pages readers will find the many different traditions that make up the expansive collage of American poetry. Here are the Transcendentalists-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau; and the Imagists-William Carlos Williams, Amy Lowell, H.D., and Carl Sandburg.

Readers will discover also the early twentieth-century movement of African-American poetic expression, known as the Harlem Renaissance-James Weldon Johnson, Countee Cullen, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Langston Hughes are all solidly represented in The Columbia Anthology of American Poetry.

Jay Parini's introduction deftly guides us into the rich tradition of poetry in our country. Whether in search of a well-known classic or a poem that is not yet considered part of the American poetic tradition, readers will find much to enjoy in The Columbia Anthology of American Poetry.

From inside the book

Contents

Introduction
1
Anne Bradstreet 16121672
21
Before the Birth of One of Her Children
27
First Series I kenning through astronomy divine
48
The Wild Honey Suckle
54
Phillis Wheatley 17531784
61
Joel Barlow 17541812
68
The Prairies
81
John Crowe Ransom 18881974
397
T S Eliot 18881965
400
Conrad Aiken 18891973
418
So she came back into
431
Melvin Beaunearus Tolson 18981966
444
From The Bridge To Brooklyn Bridge
457
All Things
470
Arna Bontemps 19021973
482

A November Landscape
94
John Greenleaf Whittier 18071892
108
Barbara Frietchie 114
114
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 18071882
136
Oliver Wendell Holmes 18091894
150
Frances Sargent Osgood 18111850
163
LightWinged Smoke Icarian Bird
176
48
199
Saw in Louisiana a LiveOak Growing
202
The WoundDresser
215
Herman Melville 18191891
228
Frances E W Harper 18251911
241
A narrow fellow in the grass
254
A Caged Bird
267
Edgar Lee Masters 18681950
274
Ere Sleep Comes Down to Soothe the Weary Eyes
287
The Departure
301
Nothing Gold Can Stay
312
Wallace Stevens 18791955
326
To an Old Philosopher in Rome
339
Sara Teasdale 18841933
352
Ezra Pound 18851972
354
And then went down to the ship
360
The Shrine
366
Shine Perishing Republic
373
Malediction upon Myself
379
The SteepleJack
391
The Snakes of September
495
My Papas Waltz
508
Josephine Miles 19111985
516
Robert Hayden 19131980
530
John Berryman 19141972
544
Robert Lowell 19171977
554
Notes from the Childhood and the Girlhood
567
Richard Wilbur 1921
580
Denise Levertov 1923
596
Chez Jane
610
Allen Ginsberg 1926
623
William S Merwin 1927
636
Galway Kinnell 1927
637
Angel Butcher
650
Robert Pack 1929
663
Axe Handles
673
Mark Strand 1934
686
California Spring
699
Against Whatever It Is Thats Encroaching
702
Robert Hass 1941
715
Acknowledgments
729
53
741
Index of Titles and First Lines
745
54
748
113
755
Copyright

Common terms and phrases

References to this book

The Poetry Handbook
John Lennard
Limited preview - 2006

About the author (1995)

Jay Parini was born in Pittston, Pennsylvania in 1948. In 1970 he graduated from Lafayette College and he received a doctorate from the University of St. Andrews in 1975. Before becoming a professor of Engliah and Creative Writing at Vermont's Middlebury College in 1982, Parini taught at Dartmouth College. Parini writes poetry, novels, biographies, and criticism, and he has published numerous reviews and essays in major journals and newspapers. He co-founded the New England Review in 1976. In 1995, he was appointed literary executor for author Gore Vidal. A film version of The Last Station, his 1990 novel, was released in 2009. Parini's novel, One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner, made the New York Times bestseller list in 2015.

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