19th Century American Poetry

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Throughout the 19th century, American readers preferred and read no literary genre, beside popular novels and biographies, more than poetry. Poetry was ubiquitous; in particular it could be found in newspapers and magazines, where it attracted an audience otherwise not particularly interested in literature. Many of these once popular texts have since been relegated to the remotest stacks in the libraries; however, contemporary critics and large audiences celebrated them as expressions of cultural life in the American republic. As a contrast to - and in some sense also a rejection against - this middle-brow mainstream poetic production, two names stand out in US-American literary history: Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. Both Dickinson and Whitman initiated new, long-lasting trends in American poetry, although their initial historical reception was halting at best. In this seminar, we will look both at the mainstream and the more "elitist" or avant-garde" productions of American poetry, alongside issues of canonization and institutional questions with respect to the "literary field" (Pierre Bourdieu).