Abstract:

Poetry and Public Discourse explores nineteenth-century poetry as it addresses and engages in major concerns of American cultural life. It focuses on gender, biblical politics, Revolutionary discourses and racial, sectional, and religious identities, as these contend and negotiate with each other in the shaping of a pluralist democratic polity. Nineteenth-century American poetry, far from being the self-reflective art object of twentieth-century aesthetic theory, offers a rhetorical arena in which civic, economic, and religious trends intersect with each other in mutual definition and investigation. Poetry emerges as a core impulse in the formation of American identity and cultural definition