Animals in Classic American Poetry

by John Cullen Gruesser

ISBN: 9781648433030

Published: 2025

"The ten essays in Animals in Classic American Poetry: How Natural History Inspired Great Verse showcase how the natural history of and imagery relating to animals have inspired some of America's best-known and most beloved poets. The book highlights exceptional literary verse from the first American to publish a book of poems, Puritan Anne Bradstreet in the seventeenth century, to the African American writer Yusef Komunyakaa and the Native American Joy Harjo, a recent US poet laureate, in the twenty-first century. Essays on the well-known figures Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop round out this pathbreaking collection. Animals in Classic American Poetry provides a glimpse into the brilliant, burrowing, and passionate minds of some of America's most revered poets. Whether it is Poe's haunting, hybrid description of a raven, Emily Dickinson's nostalgic yet chilling observations about a garter snake, or...