Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Mapping America, Re-Mapping The World: The Cosmopolitanism Of Agha Shahid Ali's A Nostalgist's Map Of America, Xiwen Mai

Graduate English Association New Voices Conference 2007

Published in 1991, Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali‘s collection A Nostalgist‘s Map of America is a book about the poet‘s travel in America. From ―"the dead center of Pennsylvania" to Indian reservations in New Mexico, the collection weaves multiple landscapes, texts, and emotions into a map of America, on which the poet‘s traveling routes lead to thinking about language, identity, colonial and neocolonial politics. While critics like Lawrence Needham, Jeannie Chiu, and Rajini Srikanth, in reading the collection, have all focused on his themes of nostalgia, melancholy, and loss as an exile, this paper argues that Ali‘s ―"map of America" …

“Send Me A Nice Little Letter All To Myself”: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’S Fan Mail And Antebellum Poetic Culture, Jill E. Anderson

University Library Faculty Publications

This paper examines fan mail written to poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow during the 1840s and 1850s, as he made the transition from emerging poet to being one of the best-known and most influential American poets of his time. Longfellow’s admirers wrote him letters praising his poetry, but also making requests for tokens of his presence and esteem: handwritten lines of his poetry, pencils, portraits, locks of hair, and in one case, his daughter’s hand in marriage. Claiming to “know” Longfellow through his poetry, admirers often also identified themselves as being in “debt” to Longfellow for his beautiful poetry, and sought …

Sex, Drugs, And Mingling Spirits: Teaching Nineteenth-Century Women Poets, Cheryl Walker

Scripps Faculty Publications and Research

Book abstract:

Twentieth-century modernism reduced the list of nineteenth-century American poets to Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and (less often) Edgar Allan Poe. The rest were virtually forgotten. This volume in the MLA series Options for Teaching marks a milestone in the resurgence of the study of the rest. It features poets, like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Lydia Huntley Sigourney, who were famous in their day, as well as poets who were marginalized on the basis of their race (Paul Laurence Dunbar, Alexander Posey) or their sociopolitical agenda (Emma Lazarus, John Greenleaf Whittier). It also takes a fresh look at poets …