21 | 19

Contemporary Poets in the Nineteenth-Century Archive

Alexandra Manglis, Kristen Case, Alexandra Manglis, Kristen Case

• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781571319869
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Essays on the modern relevance of Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson, and more "suggest the ways poetry might be both agitator and balm in times of social crisis" ( Poets & Writers ). The nineteenth century is often viewed as a golden age of American literature, a historical moment when national identity was emergent and ideals such as freedom, democracy, and individual agency were promising, even if belied in reality by violence and hypocrisy. The writers of this "American Renaissance"—Thoreau, Fuller, Whitman, Emerson, and Dickinson, among many others—produced a body of work that has been both celebrated and contested by following generations. As the twenty-first century unfolds in a United States characterized by deep divisions, diminished democracy, and dramatic transformation of identities, the editors of this singular book approached a dozen North American poets, asking them to engage with texts by their predecessors in a manner that avoids both aloofness from the past and too-easy elegy. The resulting essays, delving into topics including race and gun violence, dwell provocatively on the border between the lyrical and the scholarly, casting fresh critical light on the golden age of American literature and exploring a handful of texts not commonly included in its canon. A polyvocal collection that reflects the complexity of the cross-temporal encounter it enacts, 21|19 offers a re-reading of the "American Renaissance" and new possibilities for imaginative critical practice today. "Displaying a sophisticated sense of poetics as well as a good grasp of history and its implications for the present moment... [the editors] have done a remarkable job of bringing together such a challenging collection." — Harvard Review

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword: Approximity (In the Life, Her Attempt to Bring the Life of Her Mother Close
• Introduction: Unsettling Proximities
• Thinking As Burial Practice: Exhuming a Poetic Epistemology in Thoreau, Dickinson, and Emerson
• Feeling The Riot: Fugitivity, Lyric, and Enduring Failure
• Essay In Fragments, A Pile Of Limbs: Walt Whitman’S Body In The Book
• Citation In The Wake Of Melville
• Touching Horror: Poe, Race, And Gun Violence
• Homage To Bayard Taylor
• Revising The Waste Land: Black Antipastoral & The End Of The World
• Henry Ossawa Tanner: Night Over Night
• Nights And Lights In Nineteenth-Century American Poetics
• The Earth Is Full Of Men
• Making Black Cake In Combustible Spaces
• “The Tinge Awakes”: Reading Whitman And Others In Trouble
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Image Credits
• Editors
• Contributors