Contains essays on 21 alphabetically arranged themes that recur throughout American poetry . Includes interpretations of 250 poems, representing the work of 86 poets from a wide spectrum of historical, contemporary, ethnic, and canonical writers THEMES and POEMS: ART AND BEAUTY To Helen (Edgar Allan Poe), Each and All (Ralph Waldo Emerson), The Rhodora (Ralph Waldo Emerson), Art (Herman Melville), Euclid Alone Has Looked on Beauty Bare (Edna St. Vincent Millay), Beauty (Elinor Wylie), Blue Girls (John Crowe Ransom), To the Stone Cutters (Robinson Jeffers), No Swan So Fine (Marianne Moore), Juggler (Richard Wilbur), Piazza di Spagna, Early Morning (Richard Wilbur), Aunt Jennifers Tigers (Adrienne Rich), Beauty and Sadness (Cathy Song). CIVILIZATION To the States (Walt Whitman), Chicago (Carl Sandburg), New England (Edwin Arlington Robinson), the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls (E.E. Cummings), next to of course god america i (E.E. Cummings), Disillusionment of Ten O Clock (Wallace Stevens), Shine, Perishing Republic (Robinson Jeffers), Harlem (Langston Hughes), A Supermarket in California (Allen Ginsberg), A Primer of the Daily Round (Howard Nemerov), For the Union Dead (Robert Lowell), Among Philistines (R.S. Gwynn). FAMILY RELATIONS My Papas Waltz (Theodore Roethke), Daddy (Sylvia Plath) Those Winter Sundays (Robert Hayden), The Broken Home (James Merrill), The Writer (Richard Wilbur), The Gift (Li-Young Lee), Womans Work (Julia Alvarez), Eden (Emily Grosholz). FREEDOM AND SLAVERY On the Emigration to America and Peopling the Western Country (Philip Freneau), To Sir Toby (Philip Freneau), Ichabod (John Greenleaf Whittier), Laus Deo (John Greenleaf Whittier), The New Colossus (Emma Lazarus), Sympathy (Paul Laurence Dunbar), Middle Passage (Robert Hayden), Caged Bird (Maya Angelou) THE INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETY Im Nobody! Who are you? (Emily Dickinson), Much Madness is Divinest Sense- (Emily Dickinson), Miniver Cheevy (Edwin Arlington Robinson), Bewick Finzer (Edwin Arlington Robinson), The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (T.S. Eliot), The Harlem Dancer (Claude McKay), Helen (Hilda Doolittle), Chaplinesque (Hart Crane), Southern Cop (Sterling Brown), The Drunk in the Furnace (W.S. Merwin). INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE As Adam Early in the Morning (Walt Whitman), The March into Virginia (Herman Melville), Birches (Robert Frost), To Earthward (Robert Frost), in Just- (E.E. Cummings), The Lost Son (Theodore Roethke), To the Snake (Denise Levertov), A Barred Owl (Richard Wilbur). LIFE AND DEATH The Wild Honey Suckle (Philip Freneau), Thanatopsis (William Cullen Bryant), A Psalm of Life (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow), Mezzo Cammin (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow), Hamatreya (Ralph Waldo Emerson), I heard a Fly buzz-when I died- (Emily Dickinson), Because I could not stop for Death- (Emily Dickinson), Lucinda Matlock (Edgar Lee Masters), Richard Cory (Edwin Arlington Robinson), The Mill (Edwin Arlington Robinson), Out, Out- (Robert Frost), The Emperor of Ice-Cream (Wallace Stevens), Piazza Piece (John Crowe Ransom), Hurt Hawks (Robinson Jeffers), Vulture (Robinson Jeffers), the Phoenix (J.V. Cunningham), The Sparrow (William Carlos Williams), We Real Cool (Gwendolyn Brooks), Falling (James Dickey), The Black Snake (Mary Oliver)
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