How to Read Early American Poetry

2021 ◽  
pp. 49-67
Author(s):  
Amy M. E. Morris
Author(s):  
John Timberman Newcomb

This chapter examines the odyssey of the Seven Arts, led by its editor-in-chief, James Oppenheim, from naïve nationalism to radical dissent that ultimately led to its demise. It emphasizes the important role played in this project by verse texts and by “poetry” as a metaphor for national identity, as well as the far-reaching cultural impact of the New Verse movement. The Seven Arts's life can be divided into two halves: an initial phase of utopian cultural nationalism between November 1916 and March 1917, followed by a steadily intensifying oppositional phase between April and October. Defying conventional views of the modernist little magazine as a fugitive publication, the Seven Arts became an ideal destination for formally experimental American poetry owing to its amateur status. This chapter considers the impact of World War I on the Seven Arts and cites its demise as evidence of the limits and weaknesses of American free-speech traditions and the end of the utopian moment of early American modernism.


1959 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-170
Author(s):  
Frederick S. Stimson

Driven by a spirit of nationalism and romanticism and stimulated by certain literary sources, many of North America's first poets, those of the revolutionary, national, and early romantic periods of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (until ca. 1830) sought inspiration in the Hispanic world. There they found some seven themes for verses, which today, with the possible exception of Freneau's and Bryant's, may seem of questionable aesthetic value. But because of these poets' interpretation of and surprisingly great concern for things Spanish, their works are of considerable historical interest.


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