Poetry and Public Discourse in Nineteenth-Century America

By linking social and literary discourses through topics and concerns central to both, this book explores poetry as a cultural form that actively participated in the shaping of nineteenth-century American life.  Far from being the self-reflective art object of twentieth-century aesthetic theory, it finds, poetry has offered the American public a unique rhetorical arena in which civic, economic, and religious trends intersect with each other in mutual definition and investigation.