The American House Poem, 1945-2021 (Oxford Studies in American Literary History)

The house is perhaps the most recognizable emblem of the American ideals of self-making: prosperity, stability, domesticity, and upward mobility. Yet over the years from 1945-2021, the American house becomes more famous for the betrayal of those hopes than for their fulfilment: first, through the segregation of cities and public housing; then through the expansion of private credit that lays the ground for the subprime mortgage crisis of the early twenty-first century. Walt Hunter argues that, as access to housing expands to include a greater share of the US population, the house emerges as a central metaphor for the poetic imagination. From the kitchenette of Gwendolyn Brooks to the duplex of Jericho Brown, and from the suburban imagination of Adrienne Rich to the epic constructions of James Merrill, the American house poem represents the changing abilities of US poets to imagine new forms of life while also building on the past. In The American House Poem, 1945-2021 , Hunter focuses on poets who register the unevenly distributed pressures of successive housing crises by rewriting older poetic forms. Writing about the materials, tools, and plans for making a house, these poets express the tensions between making their lives into art and freeing their lives from inherited constraints and conditions. Cover The American House Poem, 1945–2021 Copyright Dedication Contents Acknowledgments Introduction The Country-House Poem: A Precedent Traditions of the House Poem: Colonial, Global, Vernacular From the Country-House to the Kitchenette Structure of the Book 1: Gwendolyn Brooks and Housing as a Civil Right Bronzeville Interiors An Epic at Home Housing Plots Disintegrating Compositions: The Ballad and the Couplet Missing “In the Mecca” Conclusion 2: Unmaking a Home: Adrienne Rich and the Suburbs Confined Spaces: Bradstreet and Dickinson as Precursors Other People’s Houses In the Kitchen, At the Window, In the Bedroom: Views from the Interior The House Poem as Poetic Sequence Conclusion 3: An Immaterial World: James Merrill, Finance, and the Renovation of the House Poem No Statelier Mansions: Sandover as Country-House Poem Entire Stories: “An Urban Convalescence, ”“The Broken Home,” and “Days of 1964” Chores and Chambers Conclusion 4: The American Poetic Subprime: Contemporary Poetry, Race, and Genre Inventing the Duplex Race, Debt, and Real Estate in the Twenty-FirstCentury The House Poem in the Subprime Era How to Build an American Home Over the Threshold Conclusion Notes Introduction Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Bibliography Index