Back The Heart of American Poetry

Edward Hirsch: The Heart of American Poetry

“Edward Hirsch is the most endearing of guides to the ecstasies of reading poetry.” —Susan Sontag

Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

Video The Heart of American Poetry, with Edward Hirsch
August 10, 2022

Interviews From Edward Hirsch, an “intensely personal” attempt to define the American experience through poetry
July 6, 2022

We live in unsettled times. What is America and who are we as a people? How do we understand the dreams and betrayals that have shaped the American experience? For poet and critic Edward Hirsch, poetry opens up new ways of answering these questions, of reconnecting with one another and with what’s best in us.

In this landmark new book from Library of America, Hirsch offers deeply personal readings of forty essential American poems we thought we knew—from Anne Bradstreet’s “The Author to Her Book” and Phillis Wheatley’s “To S.M. a Young African Painter, on seeing his Works” to Garrett Hongo’s “Ancestral Graves, Kahuku” and Joy Harjo’s “Rabbit Is Up to Tricks”—exploring how these poems have sustained his own life and how they might uplift our diverse but divided nation.

“This is a personal book about American poetry,” writes Hirsch, “but I hope it is more than a personal selection. I have chosen forty poems from our extensive archive and songbook that have been meaningful to me, part of my affective life, my critical consideration, but I have also tried to be cognizant of the changing playbook in American poetry, which is not fixed but fluctuating, ever in flow, to pay attention to the wider consideration, the appreciable reach of our literature. This is a book of encounters and realizations.”

Edward Hirsch is a celebrated poet and champion for poetry. He is the author of ten books of poems and six books of prose and has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a MacArthur Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Rome Prize, a Pablo Neruda Presidential Medal of Honor, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for literature. He serves as president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and lives in Brooklyn.

Printed on acid-free paper, this special publication features a unique design with specifications differing from those of Library of America series titles, including notch binding and cloth-covered cases.

Project support for this volume was provided by Alan M. Klein and other friends of Library of America.
Table of Contents

Introduction: The Education of a Poet
Anne Bradstreet, “The Author to Her Book”
Phillis Wheatley, “To S. M. a Young African Painter, on seeing his Works”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport”
Walt Whitman, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”
Herman Melville, “Shiloh”
Emily Dickinson, #479 [“Because I could not stop for Death”]
Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus”
Edwin Arlington Robinson, “Eros Turannos”
Amy Lowell, “Madonna of the Evening Flowers”
Robert Frost, “The Most of It”
Wallace Stevens, “Sunday Morning”
William Carlos Williams, from Spring and All, I [“By the road to the contagious hospital”]
Ezra Pound, “The River-Merchant’s Wife: a Letter”
Marianne Moore, “The Steeple-Jack”
T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
Hart Crane, “To Brooklyn Bridge”
Langston Hughes, “Harlem”
Sterling A. Brown, “Southern Road”
Theodore Roethke, “Cuttings” and “Cuttings (later)”
Elizabeth Bishop, “In the Waiting Room”
Robert Johnson, “Cross Road Blues” [Take 2]
Robert Hayden, “Middle Passage”
Muriel Rukeyser, “St. Roach”
Julia de Burgos, “Farewell in Welfare Island”
Gwendolyn Brooks, “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon”
Anthony Hecht, “‘More Light! More Light!’”
Denise Levertov, “O Taste and See”
Frank O’Hara, “The Day Lady Died”
Allen Ginsberg, “America”
John Ashbery, “Soonest Mended”
James Wright, “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio”
Philip Levine, “To Cipriano, in the Wind”
Adrienne Rich, “XIII (Dedications)” [from “An Atlas of the Difficult World”]
Sylvia Plath, “Daddy”
Lucille Clifton, [“won’t you celebrate with me”]
C. K. Williams, “My Mother’s Lips”
Michael S. Harper, “Dear John, Dear Coltrane”
Louise Glück, “Retreating Wind”
Garrett Hongo, “Ancestral Graves, Kahuku”
Joy Harjo, “Rabbit Is Up to Tricks”

15.50 List Price: $26.00 (Save: 40%) Free shipping on orders $50 and over

Or buy from our partners

Buy the eBook

Phone orders: 1-800-964-5778 Request product #410454

ISBN: 978-1-59853-726-0 480 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

Related Books

Walt Whitman Speaks

African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song LOA N°333

Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, & Letters LOA N°180

Harold Bloom: The American Canon: Literary Genius from Emerson to Pynchon

American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century (boxed set)

Library of America

CURATOR

A champion of America’s great writers and timeless works, Library of America guides readers in finding and exploring the exceptional writing that reflects the nation’s history and culture.

Learn More

PUBLISHER

From poetry, novels, and memoirs to journalism, crime writing, and science fiction, the more than 300 volumes published by Library of America are widely recognized as America’s literary canon.

Browse our books Subscribe

NON-PROFIT

With contributions from donors, Library of America preserves and celebrates a vital part of our cultural heritage for generations to come.

Support our mission

Edward Hirsch: The Heart of American Poetry

Related Books

Get 10% off your first Library of America purchase.