Spring dawn is glinting
On a dew-wet garbage can
In a city street.
—Haiku 177 by Richard Wright
In honor of great poetry and in celebration of spring, we are having a sale of 45% off select titles from our collection of poetry and poetry criticism—from transcendentalists to modernists to contemporary writers.
To receive 45% off, use code NPM16 at our website. This offer is good through May 2nd.
Whitman, Poe, and the American Culture of Mourning
By unveiling a heretofore marginalized literary relationship between Poe and Whitman, Adam C. Bradford rewrites our understanding of these authors and suggests a more intimate relationship among sentimentalism, romanticism, and transcendentalism than has previously been recognized. Bradford’s insights into the culture and lives of Poe and Whitman will change readers’ understanding of both literary icons.
Robert Frost stood at the intersection of romanticism and 
modernism and made both his own. He used the values and techniques of nineteenth-century poetry, but Jonathan N. Barron argues that it was his commitment to realism that gave him popular as well as scholarly appeal and created his enduring legacy. How Robert Frost Made Realism Matter investigates early innovative poetry and reveals a voice of dissent that anticipated “The New Poetry”—a voice that would come to dominate American poetry as few others have.
Rereading Robert Frost
Earl J. Wilcox and Jonathan N. Barron bring a new freshness and depth to the study of one of America’s greatest poets. While some critics discounted Frost as a poet without technical skill, rhetorical complexity, or intellectual depth, over the past decade scholars have begun to view Robert Frost’s work from many new perspectives. Critical hermeneutics, culture studies, feminism, postmodernism, and textual editing all have had their impact on readings of the poet’s life and work. This collection of essays is the first to account for the variety of these new perceptions.
Published here in full are Ralph Waldo Emerson’s nine poetry notebooks, the single 
greatest source of information about his creative habits in poetry. Emerson kept rough drafts, revised versions, and fair copies of hundreds of poems in these notebooks, so that the genesis and development of poems both famous and obscure can be traced closely. The notebooks have been remarkably little consulted, primarily because their unedited textual condition makes them difficult to use. This edition makes them accessible by presenting a faithful transcription of each notebook, a detailed analysis of the history of each poem, an introduction, and a cross-referenced index.
Madness and Wisdom in Modern Poetry
William Pratt brings alive the energy, freshness, and originality of technique that made Baudelaire, Pound, Yeats, Rilke, Eliot, and others the initiators of the revolution in poetry. He brings a comprehensive and revealing perspective to other major themes: modernism as an age of irony; poets as both madmen and geniuses; the modern poet as tragic hero; the dominance of religious or visionary truths over social or political issues; and the combination of radical experiments in poetic form with an apocalyptic view of Western civilization. His detailed treatment of the Fugitive poets and his recognition of their prominent role in twentieth-century literature constitute an important historical revision.
Donna L. Potts closely examines the pastoral genre in the work of six Irish poets writing today. Through the exploration of the poets and their works, she reveals the wide range of purposes that the pastoral has served in both Northern Ireland and the Republic: a postcolonial critique of British imperialism; a response to modernity, industrialization, and globalization; a way of uncovering political and social repercussions of gendered representations of Ireland; and, more recently, a means for conveying environmentalism’s more complex understanding of the value of nature.
In the last years of his life, Richard Wright, the fierce and 
original American novelist known for Native Son and Black Boy, wrote over four thousand haiku. Yoshinobu Hakutani considers Wright the poet and his late devotion to the spare, unrhymed verse that dwells on human beings’ relationship to the natural world rather than on their relationships with one another, a strong departure from the intense and often conflicted relationships that had dominated his fiction.
Poems
Winner of the prestigious Poets’ Prize for 1990, Miller Williams is one of America’s most accomplished and productive contemporary poets. In this collection, we find the same wit, intelligence, wisdom, and humanity that readers of poetry have come to expect of Williams. These poems are about the daily lives and language of ordinary people.
