Introduction. "The Expression and Stimulant of National Feeling": Poems, Critics, Contexts -- Chapter 1. "National Ideas Shall Take Birth": Beginnings -- Chapter 2. "Flattering the Prejudices of the Multitude": Poe, Longfellow, and the Problem of Popularity -- Chapter 3. The Weapons of Poetry: Negotiating the Civil War Era -- Chapter 4. "Perfect Simplicity and Self-Control": Larcom, Piatt, and the Critics -- Chapter 5. Scarlet Experiments: Dickinson's New English among the Critics -- Coda: Stopping by Woods.
Summary:
"Conceptually and methodologically unique among studies of 19th-century American poetry, Who Killed American Poetry? not only charts changing attitudes toward American poetry, but also applies these ideas to the work of representative individual poets. Closely analyzing hundreds of reviews and critical essays, Karen L. Kilcup tracks the century's developing aesthetic standards and highlights the different criteria reviewers used to assess poetry based on poets' class, gender, ethnicity, and location. She shows that, as early as the 1820s, critics began to marginalize some kinds of emotional American poetry, a shift many scholars have attributed primarily to the late-century emergence of affectively restrained modernist ideals. Mapping this literary critical history enables us to more readily apprehend poetry's status in American culture-both in the past and present-and encourages us to scrutinize the standards of academic criticism that underwrite contemporary aesthetics and continue to constrain poetry's appeal"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.