existence. In our final section, we gather a diverse collection of essays on poetry that engages with public struggles: over borders, war, capitalism, or racial inequality.
Some scholars claim that shifts in literary critical practice, notably the rise of New Historicism and various reactions to it, have led to the sidelining of poetry in favor of narrative. However, as we can see from the intellectual diversity and depth of this volume, the death of poetry has been greatly exaggerated. The 37 essays in A Companion to American Poetry demonstrate the continued relevance of poetry and poetics for broader fields that animate literary scholarship today, including indigenous studies, queer and transgender studies, diasporic and Black studies, maker methodologies, science and technology studies, and visual cultural studies, among others. We hope these essays not only offer new understandings and perspectives but also speak to the ongoing vitality of American poetry, as well as its important, always timely, contributions to American and world culture.
References
1 Eliot, T.S. (1920). Tradition and the Individual Talent. The Sacred Wood. Available at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/57795/57795-h/57795-h.htm. (Accessed: 13 July 2021).
2 Worldmaking and Ambition in History Poems by Early American Women: The Examples of Anne Bradstreet and Sarah Wentworth Morton
Tamara HarveyGeorge Mason University
Arme, arme, Soldado’s arme, Horse, Horse, speed to your Horses,
Gentle-women, make head, they vent their plot in Verses;
They write of Monarchies, a most seditious word,
It signifies Oppression, Tyranny, and Sword:
March amain to London, they’l rise, for there they flock,
But stay a while, they seldome rise till ten a clock.
R.Q. (Bradstreet, 1650, n.p.)
The humor in R.Q.’s prefatory poem to Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse (1650) is neither original nor subtle, which may explain why it was the only prefatory poem to be dropped from Several Poems (1678).1 And yet its representation of both monarchy and literary gentle-women epitomizes the broad trends in scholarship on the poem R.Q. would seem to have in mind, Bradstreet’s “The Four Monarchies.” Bradstreet renders Sir Walter Ralegh’s2 five volume The Historie of the World in over 3500 lines of iambic pentameter couplets. According to Gillian Wright, Bradstreet’s poem is a “politic history,” a subgenre of early modern verse history that uses condensation and an epigrammatic style to render its subject (p. 85). At times this yields pithy epitomes of long, scholarly discourse, though just as frequently the effort to turn Ralegh’s prose into poetry leads to confusing inversions and other infelicities. Modern readers, it is fair to say, don’t love this poem. To make sense of it, scholars have read it as a reflection of extratextual concerns that resonate more readily with modern interests, situating Bradstreet politically within transatlantic Puritan concerns during the English Civil War and literarily as a woman writer who must work against broad characterizations of women’s abilities and nature. How the poem fails and how it treats failure is a frequent focus of these approaches. Bradstreet herself attributed faults in the poem to her gender and personal circumstances: “To fill the world with terrour and with woe,/My tyred brain leavs to some better pen,/This task befits not women like to men” (1678, p. 185).3 In this poem, written during the English Civil War and published in the year following the beheading of Charles I, Bradstreet also repeatedly demonstrates that “Royalty no good conditions brings” (1678, p. 172), but falters in concluding the poem in ways that may be attributed to her unwillingness to imagine political solutions that fully reject monarchy.4
In this chapter, I argue that attention to the concept of worldmaking and its attendant failures provides useful grounds for comparing women writers across time. I expand on recent readings of Bradstreet’s longest and most neglected poem, “The Four Monarchies,” and then consider The Virtues of Society (1799), one of three long history poems written by Sarah Wentworth Morton during the early US republic. My goal is to suggest that understanding the ways these poets engage the intellectual project of imagining and theorizing the world at moments of significant global transformation provides insights into their work individually as well as providing a framework for examining the work of other early women writers. In each case I focus on the poet’s representation of a heroic woman situated in world-historical space, Semiramis and Lady Harriet Ackland, respectively, in order to explore their engagement with historical genres, learned debates, and depictions of exceptional women.
Though both personal and political approaches to literature are relevant and revelatory, they often sidestep the manifest purpose of a poem such as Bradstreet’s—to tell the history of the world. Recent attention to worldmaking and a rapidly changing global imaginary during the early modern period provides a more robust framework for reading Bradstreet’s ambitious attempt at a universal history. Ayesha Ramachandran describes early modern “worldmaking” as “the methods by which early modern thinkers sought to imagine, shape, revise, control, and articulate the dimensions of the world,” synthesizing fragments into a comprehensive whole (pp. 6–7). Understanding Bradstreet’s poem as a form of worldmaking helps us better appreciate her literary ambition. It also helps us account for her evident failures in this poem without attributing them solely to her gender and personal circumstances or the responses of New England Puritans to the English Civil War. “[T]he great secret of the early modern system-makers,” Ramachandran explains, is that “worldmaking is possible, even necessary, because of the insurmountable gap between our fragmentary apprehension of the phenomenal world and our desire for complete knowledge of it” (p. 10). Early modern worldmaking frequently drew on metaphors of the body to imagine the world (Ramachandran 2015, p. 23 ff.). Bradstreet’s apology that “my Monarchies their legs do lack” (1678, p. 191) is as much a gesture toward the worldmaking design of the poem as it is a confession that it, like all such projects, fell short of that design.
While shared marginalization, female embodiment, and the experience of being writers whose authority is automatically doubted are understandable grounds for comparing women across time, history poems are seldom subjects for this kind of comparison. Perhaps this is because they seem too impersonal for comparisons of embodied experience while also emerging from specific historical contexts that get in the way of comparative analysis based on genre and political engagement. By attending to the worldmaking design of these poems, I build on scholarship on women’s engagement of politics in poetry and their self-consciously ambitious attempts to represent global space and world history. Wright observes with regard to Bradstreet’s “Monarchies,” “What matters in the ‘I’ of politic history is not the biographical baggage which he or she (overtly at least) brings to the task, but rather the qualities of discrimination, political judgement and apt expression which are manifest in the narrative” (p. 88). Insofar as it is possible, I focus here on qualities of discrimination and design rather than on their personal circumstances to compare these writers. One challenge, of course, is that their approaches to history differ in important ways. Bradstreet’s worldmaking is a form of universal history that was a generation old when she was writing the poems that make up The Tenth Muse, while Morton’s neoclassicism draws on the epic and her more complete
