It cannot be said of nineteenth-century American poetry that it needs no introduction. Shifting interests and new paradigms have substantially altered the ways in which we view and value a field that for some time has indeed seemed less like a field of study in its own right than the collected works of two writers of genius surrounded by a host of lesser lights. With many of the standards and methodological assumptions associated with a modernist aesthetic now called into question, older continuities have been challenged while new ones have emerged. In short, over the past two decades a growing body of scholarship has been engaged in reconceptualizing and reevaluating a largely neglected area of study in US literary history. Each of the essays commissioned for this collection reflects and helps advance this spirit of new directions and revisionism.

Of course, the recent surge of interest in verse written in the United States during the nineteenth century has not developed in isolation from trends that have marked literary criticism elsewhere. Among these, three seem worth singling out in particular: the waning importance assigned to distinctions between high or elite culture and popular or mass entertainment; the increased appreciation for women's contribution to poetry and the various traditions from which it proceeds; and the rewriting of literary history in ways that travel outside or beyond national demarcations. When applied to nineteenth-century verse written in the United States, each of these rubrics overlaps to a considerable extent, but not so much so that, for the purposes of this overview, they cannot be considered consecutively.