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1 results

  • Chapter 14 - American Poetry Fights the Civil War

  • from Part II - A New Nation: Poetry from 1800 to 1900
  • Edited by Alfred Bendixen, Princeton University, New Jersey, Stephen Burt, Harvard University, Massachusetts
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of American Poetry
    Published online:
    05 December 2014
    Print publication:
    27 October 2014, pp 306-328

  • Summary

    Lydia Sigourney is often misunderstood as an excessively sentimental and possibly not very smart poet and a writer of ponderous advice handbooks for mothers and daughters. In the poem, To a Shred of Linen Mrs. Sigourney displayed having an unexpectedly witty, even iconoclastic, streak. Ralph Waldo Emerson found himself hankering after such worthier bards. He disliked poetry in which the meter influenced what the poet wants to say. Emerson's closest ally was Margaret Fuller who had written an unrhymed poetic sketch titled Meditations. Margaret Fuller's spirit of love quietly rebels against one of the most iconic images of Transcendentalism before Emerson had even had time to formulate it: the image of the solitary eyeball melting into the horizon. The works of other poets including Osgood, Waldo, Saadi Shirazi and Henry David Thoreau are also discussed.