• The American Poet Laureate
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The American Poet Laureate

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The American Poet Laureate shows how the state has been the silent center of poetic production in the United States since World War II. It is the first history of the national poetry office, the U....
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  • 16 May 2023
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The American Poet Laureate shows how the state has been the silent center of poetic production in the United States since World War II. It is the first history of the national poetry office, the U.S. poet laureate, highlighting the careers of Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Frost, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Pinsky, Tracy K. Smith, Juan Felipe Herrera, and Joy Harjo at the nation’s Capitol. It is also a history of how these state poets participated in national arts programming during the Cold War.

Drawing on previously unexplored archival materials at the Library of Congress and materials at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Amy Paeth describes the interactions of federal bodies, including the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department, and the National Endowment for the Arts, with literary organizations and with private patrons, including “Prozac heiress” Ruth Lilly. The consolidation of public and private interests is crucial to the development of state verse culture, recognizable at the first National Poetry Festival in 1962, which followed Robert Frost’s “Mission to Moscow,” and which became dominant in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

The American Poet Laureate contributes to a growing body of institutional and sociological approaches to U.S. literary production in the postwar era and demonstrates how poetry has played a uniquely important, and largely underacknowledged, role in the cultural front of the Cold War.

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Price: $35.00
Pages: 328
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Publication Date: 16 May 2023
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780231194396
Format: Paperback
BISACs: LITERARY CRITICISM / Poetry, LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Public Policy / Cultural Policy, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 20th Century, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 21st Century
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Amy Paeth’s book is a study of why poetry is, as T. S. Eliot claimed, so stubbornly national. Focusing on poet laureates, Cold Warriors, cultural diplomats, and inaugural poets, she historicizes and complicates this relationship. It’s the best sort of literary scholarship: smart, surprising, and field-changing.
Amy Paeth is a lecturer in critical writing at the University of Pennsylvania, teaching courses in literature, writing, and cultural studies.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. State Verse Scandals: The Bollingen Affair and Postwar Poets at the Library of Congress, 1945–1956
2. Inaugurating National Poetry: Robert Frost and Cold War Arts, 1956–1965
3. The Politics of Voice: The Poet-Critic, the Creative Writer, and the Poet Laureate, 1965–1990
4. Civil Versus Civic Verse: National Projects of U.S. Poets Laureate, 1990–2022
Epilogue: “An Invisible Berlin Wall”—the Cold War, the U.S. Inaugural Poem, and the Future of State Verse
Appendix I: Occupants of the U.S. National Poetry Office
Appendix II: Fellows in American Letters at the Library of Congress
Appendix III: U.S. Inaugural Poets
Notes
Bibliography
Index