By the beginning of the twentieth century, short-story writing in the US was well established as a form of efficient literary production along the lines that Edgar Allan Poe had established sixty years earlier. One way of understanding the American modernist short story is as an attempt to reinvent the form by restoring the balance that Poe had once advocated: not to forget technique but to make it work again in the service of art understood as both an expressive and an elite activity. This chapter considers some of the ways in which American short-story writers can usefully be said to have developed, modified, or put into question the modern principle of efficiency.

Beginning with the widely discussed poem read by the young poet Amanda Gorman at the inauguration of President Joe Biden, this brief conclusion addresses the vital role that poetry continues to play in our cultural life, while also suggesting how much the borders of the poetic canon have irrevocably shifted since the beginning of the period this book covers. The chapter concludes this study by reflecting on how American poetry has responded in myriad ways to the cultural changes and historical events that have punctuated American life since 1945, while undergoing dramatic evolution and change in terms of its form, style, and content.

How do you get to grips with an early American poem? A good toolbox of critical approaches and perspectives will include formal analysis, material texts, cultural work, race and gender, reception and reading practices, together with an inquisitiveness about the various ways in which a poem makes connections. It also helps to know some of the key uses to which poetry was put by English-speaking colonists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Worn pages show Puritan readers using devotional poems to support their daily piety in early New England. Manuscript elegies offered consolation to bereaved family members, and published broadsides shaped the values of the wider community. Commemorating a public figure could enable a socially marginalized writer, such as Phillis Wheatley, to find an authoritative poetic voice. Epistolary exchanges of poems among coteries allowed some educated eighteenth-century women to pursue their friendships and intellectual development despite being barred from public careers. Throughout the period, allusions ranging from homage to parody, illustrate the transatlantic adaptation of British genres and styles to American circumstances. In the revolutionary period, anonymous and ephemeral newsprint poetry whipped up patriotic feeling, while a handful of poets published their work in elegant volumes.

This part of the book considers how to study the work of a poet. It uses the poets Emily Brontë and Srinivas Rayaprol as case studies to illustrate how to build up a picture of a poet’s career, how to get to grips with their central interests and their ways of addressing them, and how to develop a response to a writer in the context of the broader critical debate around their work.

This section outlines the contents and purpose of the book. It asks why we should read poetry, what a poem is, and how we can connect with poems and understand and enjoy them.

This closing section offers a brief reflection on how to start exploring the rich and varied history of poetry in English.

This part of the book demonstrates the many ways in which we can come to understand and enjoy a poem. It takes the reader through a series of shorter sections, each of them showing how by asking a particular question of a poem – about its verbal effects, about its form, about its emotional impact, about its subject matter – we can start to develop an understanding of it. The sections offer accessible introductions to technical matters such as rhyme and metre, but they also show how questions of technique in poetry are inseparable from the questions of what a poem has to say and to show us. Examples from a broad range of poetry written in English are used to illustrate the different approaches.