Introduction / Kerry Larson
I. Mandates, movements, and manifestoes. The reception of nineteenth-century American poetry / Mary Louise Kete ; American Indian poetry in the nineteenth century / Robert Dale Parker ; The poet as poetess / Virginia Jackson ; Transcendental poetics / Stephen Cushman ; Slavery and its metrics / Max Cavitch ; Weathering the news in US Civil War poetry / Eliza Richards ; The "twilight of the poets" in the era of American realism, 1875-1900 / Elizabeth Renker
II. Individual authors. Longfellow's ambivalence / Stephen Burt ; Sarah Piatt's grammar of convention and the conditions of authorship / Jess Roberts ; Poe and Southern poetry / John D. Kerkering ; The color line : James Monroe Whitfield and Albery Allson Whitman / Ivy G. Wilson ; Colonial violence and poetic transcendence in Whitman's "Song of myself" / Donald Pease ; Emily Dickinson's "turbaned seas" / Cristanne Miller.