The Patriot Poets

Since before the Declaration of Independence, poets have shaped a collective imagination of nationhood at critical points in American history. In The Patriot Poets Stephen Adams considers major odes and "progress poems" that address America's destiny in the face of slavery, the Civil War, imperialist expansion, immigration, repeated financial boom and bust, gross social inequality, racial and gendered oppression, and the rise of the present-day corporate oligarchy. Adams elucidates how poets in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries addressed political crises from a position of patriotic idealism and how military interventions overseas in Cuba and in the Philippines increasingly caused poets to question the actions of those in power. He traces competing loyalties through major works of writers at both extremes of the political spectrum, from the radical Republican versus Confederate voices of the Civil War, through New Deal liberalism versus the lost-cause propaganda of the defeated South and the conservative isolationism of the 1930s, and after the Second World War, the renewed hope of Black leaders and the existential alienation of Allen Ginsberg's counter-culture. Blazing a new path of critical discourse, Adams questions why America, of all nations, has appeared to rule out politics as a subject fit for poetry. His answer draws connections between familiar touchstones of American poetry and significant yet neglected writing by Philip Freneau, Sidney Lanier, Archibald MacLeish, William Vaughn Moody, Muriel Rukeyser, Genevieve Taggard, Allen Tate, Henry Timrod, Melvin B. Tolson, and others. An illuminating and pioneering work, The Patriot Poets provides a rich understanding of the ambivalent relationship American poets and poems have had with nation, genre, and the public.

Tracing the political wisdom in American poetry, from colonial times to present day.

The poetry of the mid- and late-eighteenth century has long been regarded as primarily private and apolitical; in this wide-ranging study Dustin Griffin argues that in fact the poets of the period were addressing the great issues of national life--rebellion at home, imperial wars abroad, an expanding commercial empire, an emerging new British national identity. Taking up the topic of patriotic verse, Griffin shows that poets such as Thomas Gray, Christopher Smart, Oliver Goldsmith, and William Cowper were engaged in the century-long debate about the nature of true patriotism.

The Pen & the Patriot Poet is a compilation of beautiful poems that ranges across the issues of history, religion, politics, family, patriotism, love, nature, and a blend of other concepts important to every age and culture. With the most famous and beloved letters of the century, his metaphoric strength has never been more delightful to read; each poem refreshes the heart and the soul. Richard Allen Hulbert has given his most personal and intimate work, which will help you find the same source

John Milton (1608-1674) is best known as the author of the masterful epic retelling of fall of man, Paradise Lost. But he was more than just the 17th century voice of Satan. Wise and witty scholar Anna Beer traces his literary roots to a youthful passion for ancient verse, especially Ovid. She also rounds out parts of his life that have been, until now, little studied. Milton was deeply involved in the political and religious controversies of his time, writing a series of pamphlets on free speech, divorce, and religious, political and social rights that forced a complete rethinking of the nature and practice not only of government, but of human freedom itself. He struggled to survive through Cromwell's rise to power, chaotic reign and death, and then the restoration of the monarchy. Milton's personal life was just as rich and complex as his professional, and here it receives a fresh assessment. For centuries, he has emerged from biographies either as a woman-hating domestic tyrant or as a saintly figure removed from the messy business of personal affections. While Milton was probably a touch tyrant and saint, Beer suggests he also suffered lifelong heartache at the untimely death of his intimate friend Charles Diodati, with whom he was likely in love. Milton's context, from religious persecution to institutional turmoil to sexual politics, is as central to the book as Milton himself. With extensive new research, Milton emerges from Anna Beer's ground-breaking biography for the first time as a fully rounded human being.

José Agustín Quintero (1829-1885) was a Cuban American from New Orleans, Louisiana who skillfully and energetically represented the Confederacy in northeastern Mexico during the Civil War. This dynamic multilingual leader helped coordinate the defensive plans necessary to protect the Texas border and insure the procurement of war material and provisions vital to the Southern Army. He is a relatively unknown but fascinating figure in many ways: a native of Cuba who participated in his country’s struggle for independence against Spain, an outstanding writer of Cuban patriotic poetry, and an American who was highly respected and recognized for his legal and journalistic accomplishments, as well as his significant diplomatic contributions to the Southern Cause. This is the story of a man of extraordinary culture, an extremely intelligent, capable, and determined immigrant who believed passionately in a cause and dedicated much of his short life to it.

The Patriot is the chronicle of a deeply personal attempt to rebuild a sense of self and safety in an unstable environment. Christopher Davis's poems address destructive forces, including the murder of a younger brother and the impact of AIDS on modern gay culture. These elements blend with the dangers of a world in which love and death are cruelly inseparable, and in which the insinuations of consumer culture into the psyche destroy security, but in which dark humor and the beauty of imagery combat despair. In language electric with imagination, these poems utter a mangled, stuttering, contemporary echo of Walt Whitman's poetry, cheated out of its joyous confidence but constructing, in the words of the author, a "weak bridge away from suicide."