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The poet Langston Hughes was central tomid-century transnational exchanges and ColdWar translation. This essay examines the poet's centrality through a new lens, presenting a case study on Czech translations of Hughes's poetry between 1950 and 1963 that draws on archival materials, especially the correspondence between Hughes and one of his Czech translators, Jiří Valja; paratexts; and analysis of translations. The essay shows how Hughes's poetry was translated into Czech against the backdrop of ColdWar publishing politics and aesthetic norms, how the translations of Hughes's work operated in these contexts, and how Cold War translation emerged as a specific site of inquiry with its own challenges, contacts, and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though her publications were slight after she permanently moved to Greenwich Village, in New York City, in 1940, Djuna Barnes labored over scores of literary and nonliterary typescript drafts from the 1940s to the 1980s. This unpublished artwork constitutes a geriatric avant-garde that deepened her earlier investments in modernist aesthetics. Archived documents record the elderly writer performing the principles of high modernism--innovation, experimentalism, and novelty--across an unprecedented array of genres, such as the poem, the pharmacy order, the grocery list, the medicine regimen, the memo, and personal correspondence. This article reassesses gerontophobic depictions of Barnes as an aged recluse who lived a creatively fruitless late life. The underexplored works of her senior years are a unique version of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls "a senile sublime." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"The earth, for us, is flat and bare. / ... Poetry / Exceeding music must take the place / Of empty heaven and its hymns ..." Such claims saturate Wallace Stevens's work: poetry, Stevens affirms and reaffirms, is a potential source of value in a secular world. This essay tracks his attempts to realize this potential--to write a poem that would satisfy his metaphysical need. His work is relentlessly self-critical and experimental, and over his career he develops extravagant (and ultimately hermetic) responses to a stubborn philosophical problem. My aim is to reframe critical approaches to a central topic in Stevens's poetry and to reevaluate his relation to philosophy. In the process, I hope to suggest answers to more general questions: What is experimental poetry? How do poets think in verse? Why do poets write difficult poems? What makes a poem difficult in the first place? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the ways in which American poetic practice and thematics map a conception of private real property as it has developed uniquely on the North American continent. I explore how the Land Ordinance of 1790, the Preemption Act, the Homestead Act, and other land-use policies shaped a conception of the developing landscape as divisible into a vast agglomeration of private enterprises mediated primarily by the transfer of title deeds. The impact of private real property beliefs and practices, I argue, has shaped both the practice and the reception of American poetry (and other cultural products) for at least the last 150 years. I incorporate the insights of cultural geography – particularly the work of John B. Jackson, Carl Sauer, and Scott Freundschuh – to understand how the last century's building practices and the reorganization of the landscape, particularly in western metropolitan areas, find imaginative expression in poetry. Although mine is not a law-in-literature approach, I contend that modern/postmodern poetry operates in a way that depends on the very exchange values of the late capitalist property system it often critiques. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Representations of Jessie Fremont, the wife of the Republican presidential candidate in 1856, had a prominent role in the campaign poetry of that year. The Jessie poems bind the period's cult of domesticity to the party's figurative anti-slavery system. According to these poems, Northerners intent on conciliating the Slave Power were spreading their own sterility, whereas men willing to make a home for Jessie in the White House were reproducing, through their own redemption, a future free West. The code of domesticity thus helped these poems to define collective political action as growing out of the strengths of free labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Provides information on the poetic work of American author L. Frank Baum, mainly focusing on the book `The Wonderful Wizard of Oz'. Information on L. Frank Baum as witness and author; Detailed information the political geography of Oz.

The article discusses the description of the Hudson River in New York and New Jersey in American poetry. It also compares the style of the poems with Edmund Spencer's epic poem "The Faerie Queen." The setting for the poem "A Fragment, in Imitation of Spenser," is New Lebanon in New York's Hudson River valley, not far from a Shaker village which was then located at New Lebanon Springs. The style of the poem as well as its stanzaic form, written by Elihu Hubbard Smith, bears out the intended imitation of "The Faerie Queen," but excepting the encounter with the procession of enthusiasts, whom the youth prudently shuns, there are, no knightly adventures and no confrontations with evil.