Chapters in this book

1. Front Matter i
2. Contents vii
3. Acknowledgments ix
4. Introduction 1
5. Philip Freneau’s Summa of American Exceptionalism: “The Rising Glory of America” 16
6. The Progress Poem in America, a Long View: Whitman’s “A Passage to India,” Hart Crane’s The Bridge, and Beyond 34
7. Repercussions of “The Bells”: Poe, Emerson, and the Bifurcation of American Poetics (with a Postscript on Tuckerman) 58
8. “Speaking as an American to Americans”: James Russell Lowell’s “Harvard Commemoration Ode” and the Idea of Nationhood 100
9. Confederate Poetics: Simms, Timrod, Lanier 123
10. Nineteenth-Century Poems by Women: Hannah Flagg Gould’s “Ode on Art,” Mary Ashe Lee’s “Afmerica,” and Harriet Monroe and the Great Columbian Exposition 166
11. Questioning America: Moody’s “Ode in Time of Hesitation” 196
12. Between Two Wars (1): The Lost Causes of Allen Tate – “Ode to the Confederate Dead” 225
13. Between Two Wars (2) “America Was Promises” – Archibald MacLeish and “The Irresponsibles” 253
14. Between Two Wars (3) Odes for and against Silence – Millay, Taggard, Rukeyser 292
15. The Rising Glory of Africa: Melvin Tolson’s Libretto for the Republic of Liberia 314
16. “America, You Made Me Want to Be a Saint” Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” 337
17. Notes 351
18. Bibliography 405
19. Index 443