The first (Bartleby) includes the full texts
of early American anthologies, which are fascinating
for their content and also because they represent
the literary diet of the poets who come after.
You will also find there a very early example
of the themed anthologies which have become
popular with the recent rise of ‘cultural
studies’.
There are the poets that everyone knows, or
knows of: Eliot, Pound, Frost, Williams, Dickinson,
Whitman. In browsing the sites collected here,
I encourage you to venture afield to those poets
who are perhaps less read, especially outside
the United States: Amy Lowell, Edna St Vincent
Millay, Carl Sandburg, Wallace Stevens, Marianne
Moore, Elizabeth Bishop.
Eliot was a ‘modernist’; Williams
an ‘imagist’. Perhaps the poet who
is most consistently thought of as ‘American’
is Robert Frost, and you will find among the
following sites one dedicated wholly to him.
Frost’s American image may be attributed
to the woodsy subject matter of his best-loved
poetry, as well as his liminal position between
19th Century frontierism and the modernity of
the 20th Century. With this in mind it is interesting
to read backwards from Frost to those great
19th Century American poets: Henry David Thoreau,
Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Particular attention should be paid to the poet’s
imagined relationship to the land, to Nature,
and to ancestry/progeny.
Bartleby.com has an impressive
verse-section,
which contains the full, searchable texts of
several early American Antologies, including
An
American anthology, (1900), Hariet Monroe’s
The
New Poetry: An Anthology (1917), the Yale
Book of American Verse (1919), Louis Untermeyer’s
Modern
American Poetry (1919), and The
Book of American Negro Poetry (1922). There
are also author-specific pages with poetry,
prose, and notable quotations from some early
greats of American poetry, including Dickinson,
Eliot, Frost,
Sandburg, and Whitman.
http://www.bartleby.com/verse/.
| If
you would like to study American Poetry
further at university undergraduate or postgraduate
level, click
here. |
Americanpoems.com offers detailed biography, critical
summary, bibliography, and poetry culled from
various published sources, from Philip Freneau
(1752-1832) to Joseph Mayo Wristen (1951-. Thirty
American poets are presented, including Edna St
Vincent Millay, Amy Lowell, and H. D. (Hilda Doolittle).
http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/
The Academy of American Poets has pages on
a hundreds of American poets from the earliest
to the latest, which include photos, biographies,
bibliographies, poems and in some cases sound
samples of the poets reading from their work.
Hear Wallace
Stevens read ‘The Idea of Order at
Key West’.
http://www.poets.org/poets/
The Modern American Poetry site offers extensive
snippets of commentary and analysis on individual
poems as well as broader themes as they pertain
to each poet. Over one hundred and fifty poets
are presented.
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets.htm
The American Verse project is an ambitious attempt
to digitise all American Poetry published before
1920, and includes work by 400 poets.
http://www.hti.umich.edu/a/amverse/
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