Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in AmericaListen to a short interview with Joan Shelley RubinHost: Chris Gondek | Producer: Heron & Crane |
From inside the book
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... Whittier's “Snow-Bound” furnished diversion and pleasure, but I acknowledged to myself that the poems had taken on a function unrelated to their subject and structure: they had given me a way to cope with my distress at not knowing, in ...
... Whittier's birth. The purpose of the event was to sustain the prestige of the magazine by underscoring its association with four distinguished New England writers, all of whom were present among the fifty-eight guests. Three—Henry ...
... Whittier Day commemoration (Bryant died the next year), all had passed from poetry's rank-and-file to become—as the commemoration testified— icons of New England literary culture.2 That circumstance colored both the content of and the ...
... Whittier Day speech thus foreshadowed the problematic position that poetry would shortly occupy in the United States as the realistic novel gained ground. It also anticipated the customary judgment of the fireside poets—as against ...
... Whittier Day guests' shocked reactions—but with a reverence that Howells likens to religious worship: “beautiful devotion” that, as the darkness deepens, shades into “mystical experience.” The deference the schoolroom poets commanded ...
Contents
19 | |
25 | |
34 | |
53 | |
Celebrity and Cipher | 75 |
Alien and Intimate | 92 |
Listen My Children Modes of Poetry Reading in American Schools | 107 |
I Am an American Poetry and Civic Ideals | 165 |
Grow Old Along with Me Poetry and Emotions among Family and Friends | 242 |
Gods in His Heaven Religious Uses of Verse | 287 |
Lovely as a Tree Reading and Seeing OutofDoors | 336 |
Favorite Poems and Contemporary Readers | 381 |
Notes | 407 |
Index | 451 |