The Cambridge History of American Poetry

"This forbidding-looking tome weighs about five pounds; it makes quite a doorstop. As a person who teaches survey courses, I know students love surveys. We love sampling. When you asked me to make this list, I was thinking about a reader with an appetite for learning more about poetry. Such a reader might enjoy a smorgasbord of fascinating stuff about American poetry—like this book. There is no better scholarly compendium than The Cambridge History of American Poetry . In its pages, one finds many of the best critics of the last thirty years, absolute authorities, in fine form, distilling their classic takes. For instance, Ed Folsom, who is the editor of The Walt Whitman Archive , covers Whitman. This book also includes emerging scholars and scholar-poets. The sheer variety of topics is stunning. Maybe you’re interested in “Poets of the South”, or in the weird world in which Edgar Allan Poe published, or in poetry’s role in the emergence of first-wave feminism. It’s nice to have a book full of so many nuggets. While the writers are mostly from the academy, they put away the apparatus of scholarly argument and write really brilliantly. It’s a pleasure to read. You might want to start at the beginning and read all the way through, but I just like to dip in to it whenever I’m wrestling with a poem from a period I might not know that much about. It’s an interesting fact that some of the best critical work these days comes out in books like the The Cambridge History of American Poetry . Many of the best critics understand that books purchased as reference works are probably going to have more readers than scholarly monographs; the critics give books like this the best that they’ve got. I think what Merwin means is that American poetic traditions have evolved from identifiable progenitors. A capacious, democratic, culturally-enmeshed, and politically-alert tradition grows from the root of Whitman. A spiritually-attuned, perceptually-focused, inward-looking family of poetry flows from Emily Dickinson’s work. An environmental tradition that comes to us from Frost, Emerson, and Mary Oliver. Many poets from groups who struggle for equity trace the roots of their work to 1920s Harlem."