Library of America special publication.

"We live in unsettled times. What is America and who are we as a people? How do we understand the dreams and betrayals that have shaped the American experience? For poet and critic Edward Hirsch, poetry opens up new ways of answering these questions, of reconnecting with one another and with what's best in us. In this landmark new book from Library of America, Hirsch offers deeply personal readings of forty essential American poems we thought we knew--from Anne Bradstreet's "The Author to Her Book" and Phillis Wheatley's "To S.M. a Young African Painter, on seeing his Works" to Garrett Hongo's "Ancestral Graves, Kahuku" and Joy Harjo's "Rabbit Is Up to Tricks"--exploring how these poems have sustained his own life and how they might uplift our diverse but divided nation. "This is a personal book about American poetry," writes Hirsch, "but I hope it is more than a personal selection. I have chosen forty poems from our extensive archive and songbook that have been meaningful to me, part of my affective life, my critical consideration, but I have also tried to be cognizant of the changing playbook in American poetry, which is not fixed but fluctuating, ever in flow, to pay attention to the wider consideration, the appreciable reach of our literature. This is a book of encounters and realizations.""--Provided by publisher

Introduction: The education of a poet -- "The author to her book" / Anne Bradstreet -- "To S. M. a young African painter, on seeing his works" / Phillis Wheatley -- "The Jewish cemetery at Newport" / Henry Wadsworth Longfellow -- "Out of the cradle endlessly rocking" / Walt Whitman -- "Shiloh" / Herman Melville -- #479 ["Because I could not stop for death"] / Emily Dickinson -- "The new colossus" / Emma Lazarus -- "Eros turannos" / Edwin Arlington Robinson -- "Madonna of the evening flowers" / Amy Lowell -- "The most of it" / Robert Frost -- "Sunday morning" / Wallace Stevens -- from Spring and All, I ["By the road to the contagious hospital"] / William Carlos Williams -- "The river-merchant's wife: a letter" / Ezra Pound -- "The steeple-jack" / Marianne Moore -- "The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock" / T.S. Eliot -- "To Brooklyn Bridge" / Hart Crane -- "Harlem" / Langston Hughes -- "Southern Road" / Sterling A. Brown -- "Cuttings" and "Cuttings (later)" / Theodore Roethke -- "In the waiting room" / Elizabeth Bishop -- "Cross road blues" [Take 2] / Robert Johnson -- "Middle passage" / Robert Hayden -- "St. Roach" / Muriel Rukeyser -- "Farewell in Welfare Island" / Julia de Burgos -- "A Bronzeville mother loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi mother burns bacon" / Gwendolyn Brooks -- "More light! More light!" / Anthony Hecht -- "O taste and see" / Denise Levertov -- "The day lady died" / Frank O'Hara -- "America" / Allen Ginsberg -- "Soonest mended" / John Ashbery -- "Autumn begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio" / James Wright -- "To Cipriano, in the wind" / Philip Levine -- "XIII (Dedications" [from "An atlas of the difficult world"] / Adrienne Rich -- "Daddy" / Sylvia Plath -- ["won't you celebrate with me"] / Lucille Clifton -- "My mother's lips" / C. K. Williams -- "Dear John, Dear Coltrane" / Michael S. Harper -- "Retreating wind" / Louise Glück -- "Ancestral graves, Kahuku" / Garrett Hongo -- "Rabbit is up to tricks" / Joy Harjo