Book
The heart of American poetry
Publication Information
[New York, New York] : Library of America, [2022]
Physical Description
xxvii, 452 pages ; 24 cm
Summary
"We live in unsettled times. What is America and who are we as a people? How do we understand the dreams and betrayals that have shaped the American experience? For poet and critic Edward Hirsch, poetry opens up new ways of answering these questions, of reconnecting with one another and with what's best in us. In this landmark new book from Library of America, Hirsch offers deeply personal readings of forty essential American poems we thought we knew--from Anne Bradstreet's "The Author to Her Book" and Phillis Wheatley's "To S.M. a Young African Painter, on seeing his Works" to Garrett Hongo's "Ancestral Graves, Kahuku" and Joy Harjo's "Rabbit Is Up to Tricks"--exploring how these poems have sustained his own life and how they might uplift our diverse but divided nation. "This is a personal book about American poetry," writes Hirsch, "but I hope it is more than a personal selection. I have chosen forty poems from our extensive archive and songbook that have been meaningful to me, part of my affective life, my critical consideration, but I have also tried to be cognizant of the changing playbook in American poetry, which is not fixed but fluctuating, ever in flow, to pay attention to the wider consideration, the appreciable reach of our literature. This is a book of encounters and realizations.""--Provided by publisher.
Notes
"A Library of America special publication"
Contents
- Introduction: The education of a poet
- "The author to her book" / "To S. M. a young African painter, on seeing his works" / "The Jewish cemetery at Newport" / "Out of the cradle endlessly rocking" / "Shiloh" / #479 ["Because I could not stop for death"] / "The new colossus" / "Eros turannos" / "Madonna of the evening flowers" / "The most of it" / "Sunday morning" / from Spring and All, I ["By the road to the contagious hospital"] / "The river-merchant's wife: a letter" / "The steeple-jack" / "The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock" / "To Brooklyn Bridge" / "Harlem" / "Southern Road" / "Cuttings" and "Cuttings (later)" / "In the waiting room" / "Cross road blues" [Take 2] / "Middle passage" / "St. Roach" / "Farewell in Welfare Island" / "A Bronzeville mother loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi mother burns bacon" / "More light! More light!" / "O taste and see" / "The day lady died" / "America" / "Soonest mended" / "Autumn begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio" / "To Cipriano, in the wind" / "XIII (Dedications" [from "An atlas of the difficult world"] / "Daddy" / ["won't you celebrate with me"] / "My mother's lips" / "Dear John, Dear Coltrane" / "Retreating wind" / "Ancestral graves, Kahuku" / "Rabbit is up to tricks"