Tolson, and others.Īn illuminating and pioneering work, The Patriot Poets provides a rich understanding of the ambivalent relationship American poets and poems have had with nation, genre, and the public. His answer draws connections between familiar touchstones of American poetry and significant yet neglected writing by Philip Freneau, Sidney Lanier, Archibald MacLeish, William Vaughn Moody, Muriel Rukeyser, Genevieve Taggard, Allen Tate, Henry Timrod, Melvin B. Blazing a new path of critical discourse, Adams questions why America, of all nations, has appeared to rule out politics as a subject fit for poetry. He traces competing loyalties through major works of writers at both extremes of the political spectrum, from the radical Republican versus Confederate voices of the Civil War, through New Deal liberalism versus the lost-cause propaganda of the defeated South and the conservative isolationism of the 1930s, and after the Second World War, the renewed hope of Black leaders and the existential alienation of Allen Ginsberg's counter-culture. Author: Philip Morin Freneau Publisher: Gale, Sabin Americana Description: Based on Joseph Sabins famed bibliography, Bibliotheca Americana, Sabin Americana, 1500-1926 contains a collection of books, pamphlets, serials and other works about the Americas. In The Patriot Poets Stephen Adams considers major odes and 'progress poems' that address America's destiny in the face of slavery, the Civil War, imperialist expansion, immigration, repeated financial boom and bust, gross social inequality, racial and gendered oppression, and the rise of the present-day corporate oligarchy.Īdams elucidates how poets in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries addressed political crises from a position of patriotic idealism and how military interventions overseas in Cuba and in the Philippines increasingly caused poets to question the actions of those in power. Title: A poem on the rising glory of America: being an exercise delivered at the public commencement at Nassau-Hall, September 25, 1771. Since before the Declaration of Independence, poets have shaped a collective imagination of nationhood at critical points in American history.

The rising glory of america