Description
Book SynopsisExplorers, colonists, native peoplesall played a role in early American settlement, and the legacy they left was a turbulent one. During the first three decades of the twentieth century, as the United States asserted itself as a world power, poets began to revisit this legacy and to create their own interpretations of national history. In The Colonial Moment, Jeffrey Westover shows how five major poetsMarianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, Hart Crane, and Langston Hughesdrew from national conflicts to assess America''s new role as world leader.
Sensitive to the nation''s memory of colonial brutality, these poets mingled their pride in America with moral protest against racism. Some identified a dark side to the nation''s history, particularly in the conflicts between white pioneers and Native Americans, that haunted their otherwise confident celebrations of patriotism. Others used poetry as a vehicle of discovery to challenge existing historical accounts
Trade Review
A very useful and thought-provoking book.
* South Atlantic Review *
Westover's study is as theoretically well informed and sensible as it is poetically sensitive.
* Choice *
The Colonial Moment provides a persuasive portrait of several early modernist poets as sharing a tendency to mythologize and de-mythologize questions of nationality and origins in their poetic representations of their own age and values.
* Modernism/Modernity *
Table of ContentsTable of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Discoveries and Settlements in Modern American Poetry
1. Marianne Moore's Geography of Origins
2. Nation and Enunciation in the Work of William Carlos Williams
3. National Forgetting and Remembering in the Poetry of Robert Frost
4. Empire and America in the Poetry of Hart Crane
5. Fragmentation and Diaspora in the Work of Langston Hughes
Epilogue: "We the People" in an Imperial Republic
Notes
Works Cited
Index
