2. American English as a poetic resource

“American English as a poetic resource” argues that American English is one of the country’s great poetic resources. It is remarkably adaptable, contested, and diverse. When poets explore American English’s poetic usefulness, the diversity of their approaches and interests demonstrates the language’s flexibility. They use American English to critique and celebrate America and its literary traditions and to create a distinctive literature that also draws from traditions outside it. They mark differences as well as affinities. In some cases, the poetry shows an exuberant appreciation of American English’s peculiarities, its quirks and openness to experimentation and cultural cross-fertilization. Discussed poets include Walt Whitman, Harryette Mullen, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ezra Pound, and Robert Frost.

Sicklepod (Senna obtusifolia (L.) H. S. Irwin & Barneby) “Getting sleepy?”

There is a Reaper, whose name is Death, And, with his sickle keen, He reaps the bearded grain at a breath, And the flowers that grow between. – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Reaper and the Flowers

Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874

This book examines the central role that the picturesque, a popular mode of scenery appreciation that advocated for an improved and manipulated natural landscape, played in the social, spatial, and literary history of mid-nineteenth-century America. It argues that the picturesque was not simply a landscape aesthetic, but also a discipline of seeing and imaginatively shaping the natural world that was widely embraced by bourgeois Americans to transform the national landscape in their own image. Through the picturesque, midcentury bourgeois Americans remade rural spaces into tourist scenery, celebrated the city streets as spaces of cultural diversity, created new urban public parks, and made suburban domesticity a national ideal. This picturesque transformation was promulgated in a variety of popular literary genres, all of which focused on landscape description and inculcated readers into the protocols of picturesque visual discipline as social reform. Many of these genres have since been dubbed “minor” or have even been forgotten in our literary history, but the ranks of the writers of this picturesque literature include those from the most canonical (Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Emerson, and Poe) to major authors of the period who are now less familiar to us (such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Lydia Maria Child, Nathaniel Parker Willis, and Margaret Fuller) to those who are now completely forgotten. Individual chapters of the book link picturesque literary genres to the spaces that the genres helped to transform and, in the process, create what is recognizably our modern American landscape.

Do rascunho à edição: análise preliminar das versões de “The Sicilian Tale: King Robert of Sicily” por D. Pedro II

Neste trabalho, apresento uma análise genética preliminar de três conjuntos de documentos autógrafos de uma tradução do monarca D. Pedro II do poema intitulado The Sicilian Tale: King Robert of Sicily, de autoria do poeta estadunidense Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. As três versões do imperador encontram-se em uma fase pré-editorial, ou seja, foram passadas a limpo. Um desses trabalhos, porém, difere dos outros manuscritos e do texto publicado em 1889, o que nos faz refletir sobre as campanhas de escritura do monarca e sobre a escolha do texto a ser editado. Além disso, objetiva-se, a partir dessas traduções, discutir acerca do panorama histórico-cultural pertinente à interação entre o último imperador do Brasil e os intelectuais e literatos norte-americanos com quem se relacionou e que traduziu, em especial, Longfellow.

Black Samson of Brandywine

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was not the only writer to popularize a Black Samson figure. Moving away from treating Samson as an abolitionist hero, other writers continued to develop this uniquely American Samson figure within folklore, fiction, and poetry in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Black Samson became immortalized in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “Black Samson of Brandywine,” which transformed Samson into a symbol of African American achievement. In this chapter, we highlight the writers who offer new understandings of Samson as a loyal American patriot. Folklore about the Battle of Brandywine developed a less revolutionary and more conciliatory image of Black Samson than those modeled after the biblical story.

Housing History

The rise of a culture of consumption in the decades that bracketed the turn of the century created unprecedented opportunity for the dissemination of images, objects, and texts that engendered historical consciousness in the United States. Antiquarian impulses, once the province of social outliers, the wealthy, or the creative, and encoded in the poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) and the narrative paintings of Edward Lamson Henry (1841–1919), became normative behavior in the new middle-class America. Entrepreneurial individuals, such as the minister-turned-entrepreneur Wallace Nutting (1861–1941), employed the new platforms of advertising, publishing, department stores, and mail-order merchandising to create and fulfill middle-class desires for objects and myths that fulfilled social needs in an era of rapid economic and geographic change. Nutting, in commodifying the colonial revival, paved the way for postwar historicism in the built environment. This hybrid aesthetic prized idealized “ancestral” imagery as typified by the work of architect Royal Barry Wills (1895–1962), and it can be found coast to coast in the modern American suburb.