In this volume we feature 50 American poets beginning with the Colonist Anne Bradstreet in the 17th century, when American poetry was entirely rooted in its parental British forms. From here our classic poets take us through Centuries of history, through Independence and expansion Westward, across the cities and vast landscapes of their words. Along the journey we also meet the Imagists, the poets from the Harlem Renaissance by way of the Transcendentalists and the Fireside Poets.
The giants of the poetic way loom large; Walt Whitman. Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe, Paul Laurence Dunbar and Edna St Vincent Millay. Our rambling poetic stroll gives voice to the nation’s hopes, its dreams, its failings, its musings.
We cannot hope to define America but we do provide the many changing moods and flavours of the times as we discover the essence of its soul.
1 - Fifty Shades of America - An Introduction
2 - A Nation's Strength by Ralph Waldo Emerson
3 - America by Herman Melville
4 - The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus
5 - America the Beautiful by Katharine Lee Bates
6 - Brothers. American Drama by James Weldon Johnson
7 - We Wear the Mask by Paul Laurence Dunbar
8 - The Negro Speaks of Rivers by Langston Hughes
9 - Abraham Lincoln by James Russell Lowell
10 - Paul Revere's Ride (The Landlord's Tale) by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
11 - England and America by Florence T Holt
12 - Americanisation by G K Chesterton
13 - In Amsterdam by Eugene Field
14 - Broadway, New York, July 1916 by George Sterling
15 - New York at Night by Amy Lowell
16 - Harlem by Langston Hughes
17 - The Natives of America by Ann Plato
18 - An Indian Summer Day On the Prairie by Vachel Lindsay
19 - Pray To What Earth Does This Sweet Cold Belong by Henry David Thoreau
20 - Hymn To The North Star by William Cullen Bryant
21 - An Hymn To the Evening by Phillis Wheatley
22 - Trees by Joyce Kilmer
23 - from Song of Myself by Walt Whitman
24 - Sonnet 12 by Alan Seeger
25 - The Ancient Arteries of America by Daniel Sheehan
26 - A Crowded Trolley Car by Elinor Wylie
27 - The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost
28 - Yes, I Have a Thousand Tongues by Stephen Crane
29 - Thirteen Ways of Looking At a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens
30 - The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe
31 - Wild Nights, Wild Nights by Emily Dickinson
32 - Comment by Dorothy Parker
33 - To My Dear and Loving Husband by Anne Bradstreet
34 - The Boy She Used To Know by Damon Runyon
35 - Portrait D'une Femme by Ezra Pound
36 - Sonnet 18 - I, Being Born a Woman by Edna St Vincent Millay
37 - Evening Song by Willa Cather
38 - I Hear America Singing by Walt Whitman
39 - The Crowd at the Ball Game by William Carlos Williams
40 - It Couldn't Be Done by Edgar Albert Guest
41 - Hope is the Thing With Feathers by Emily Dickinson
42 - Colored Hats from Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein
43 - Solitude by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
44 - Sympathy by Paul Laurence Dunbar
45 - Chaplinesque by Hart Crane
46 - The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver by Edna St Vincent Millay
47 - Whispers of Immortality by T S Eliot
48 - A Grave by Edith Wharton
49 - Bury Me In a Free Land by Frances E W Harper
50 - To the Memory of the Americans Who Fell at Eutaw by Philip Freneau
51 - Star Spangled Banner by Francis Scott Kay