A companion to American poetry

"In his 1919 essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," T.S. Eliot observed that the creation of a new work of art necessarily changes everything that went before 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 consider "American" poetry. New work can broaden contexts and point to new areas of influence. Like works of art, critical paradigms can also 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 contested, first by the New Historicism, which restored the elements of identity and context, and privileged narrative over lyric in the late 20th century, and more recently by the "new lyric studies." The twenty-first century has also 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 new 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 reemergence 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. Not only is the past unstable, but it changes according to the questions we ask of it. 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 respected long-standing concerns of American poetry and its critics but also 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 U.S. settler colonialism? How have queer and trans voices used poetry to articulate identities that have been otherwise repressed in the U.S.? 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-and those are 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"--

Section 1: Poetry before "American Poetry" -- Section 2: Transcendence and its Legacies -- Section 3: Experimentalisms, Early and Late -- Section 4: Poetics and Identity -- Section 5: Transnational Poetics -- Section 6: Poetry and the Arts -- Section 7: Nature and After -- Section 8: Poetry of Engagement.