The Princeton Handbook of World Poetries--drawn from the latest edition of the acclaimed Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics--provides a comprehensive and authoritative survey of the history and practice of poetry in more than 100 major regional, national, and diasporic literatures and language traditions around the globe. With more than 165 entries, the book combines broad overviews and focused accounts to give extensive coverage of poetic traditions throughout the world. For students, teachers, researchers, poets, and other readers, it supplies a one-of-a-kind resource, offering in-depth treatment of Indo-European poetries (all the major Celtic, Slavic, Germanic, and Romance languages, and others); ancient Middle Eastern poetries (Hebrew, Persian, Sumerian, and Assyro-Babylonian); subcontinental Indian poetries (Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Urdu, and more); Asian and Pacific poetries (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Mongolian, Nepalese, Thai, and Tibetan); Spanish American poetries (those of Mexico, Peru, Argentina, Chile, and many other Latin American countries); indigenous American poetries (Guarani, Inuit, and Navajo); and African poetries (those of Ethiopia, Somalia, South Africa, and other countries, and including African languages, English, French, and Portuguese). Complete with an introduction by the editors, this is an essential volume for anyone interested in understanding poetry in an international context. * Drawn from the latest edition of the acclaimed Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics* Provides more than 165 authoritative entries on poetry in more than 100 regional, national, and diasporic literatures and language traditions throughout the world* Features extensive coverage of non-Western poetic traditions* Includes an introduction, bibliographies, cross-references, and a general index

In December 1885, under the watchful eye of Mark Twain, the publishing firm of Charles L. Webster and Company released the first volume of the Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. With a second volume published in March 1886, Grant's memoirs became a popular sensation. Seeking to capitalize on Grant's success and interest in earlier reminiscences by Joseph E. Johnston, William T. Sherman, and Richard Taylor, other Civil War generals such as George B. McClellan and Philip H. Sheridan soon followed suit. Some hewed more closely to Grant's model than others, and their points of similarity and divergence left readers increasing fascinated with the history and meaning of the nation's great conflict. The writings also dovetailed with a rising desire to see the full sweep of American history chronicled, as its citizens looked to the start of a new century. Professional historians engaged with the memoirs as an important foundation for this work. In this insightful book, Stephen Cushman considers Civil War generals' memoirs as both historical and literary works, revealing how they remain vital to understanding the interaction of memory, imagination, and the writing of American history. Cushman shows how market forces shaped the production of the memoirs and, therefore, memories of the war itself; how audiences have engaged with the works to create ideas of history that fit with time and circumstance; and what these texts tell us about current conflicts over the history and meanings of the Civil War.

On 5 and 6 May 1864, the Union and Confederate armies met near an unfinished railroad in central Virginia, with Lee outmanned and outgunned, hoping to force Grant to fight in the woods. The name of the battle--Wilderness--suggests the horror of combat at close quarters and an inability to see the whole field of engagement, even from a distance. Indeed, the battle is remembered for its brutality and ultimate futility for Lee: even with 26,000 casualties on both sides, the Wilderness only briefly stemmed Grant's advance.

Stephen Cushman lives fifty miles south of this battlefield. A poet and professor of American literature, he wrote Bloody Promenade to confront the fractured legacy of a battle that haunts him through its very proximity to his everyday life. Cushman's personal narrative is not another history of the battle. "If this book is a history of anything," he writes, "it's the history of verbal and visual images of a single, particularly awful moment in the American Civil War." Reflecting on that moment can begin in the present, with the latest film or reenactment, but it leads Cushman back to materials from the past. Writing in an informal, first-person style, he traces his own fascination with the conflict to a single book, a pictorial history he read as a boy. His abiding interest and poetic sensibility yield a fresh perspective on the war's continuing grip on Americans--how it pervades our lives through films and songs; novels such as The Red Badge of Courage, The Killer Angels, and Cold Mountain; Whitman's poetry and Winslow Homer's painting; or the pull of the abstract idea of the triumph of freedom.

With maps and a brief discussion of the Battle of the Wilderness for those not familiar with the landscape and actors, Bloody Promenade provides a personal tour of one of the most savage engagements of the Civil War, then offers a lively discussion of its aftermath.

The Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms--drawn from the latest edition of the acclaimed Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics--provides an authoritative guide to the most important terms in the study of poetry and literature. Featuring 226 fully revised and updated entries, including 100 that are new to this edition, the book offers clear and insightful definitions and discussions of critical concepts, genres, forms, movements, and poetic elements, followed by invaluable, up-to-date bibliographies that guide users to further reading and research. Because the entries are carefully selected and adapted from the Princeton Encyclopedia, the Handbook has unrivalled breadth and depth for a book of its kind, in a convenient, portable size. Fully indexed for the first time and complete with an introduction by the editors, this is an essential volume for all literature students, teachers, and researchers, as well as other readers and writers. * Drawn from the latest edition of the acclaimed Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics* Provides 226 fully updated and authoritative entries, including 100 new to this edition, written by an international team of leading scholars* Features entries on critical concepts (canon, mimesis, prosody, syntax); genres, forms, and movements (ballad, blank verse, confessional poetry, ode); and terms (apostrophe, hypotaxis and parataxis, meter, tone)* Includes an introduction, bibliographies, cross-references, and a full index

The Princeton Handbook of World Poetries--drawn from the latest edition of the acclaimed Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics--provides a comprehensive and authoritative survey of the history and practice of poetry in more than 100 major regional, national, and diasporic literatures and language traditions around the globe. With more than 165 entries, the book combines broad overviews and focused accounts to give extensive coverage of poetic traditions throughout the world. For students, teachers, researchers, poets, and other readers, it supplies a one-of-a-kind resource, offering in-depth treatment of Indo-European poetries (all the major Celtic, Slavic, Germanic, and Romance languages, and others); ancient Middle Eastern poetries (Hebrew, Persian, Sumerian, and Assyro-Babylonian); subcontinental Indian poetries (Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Urdu, and more); Asian and Pacific poetries (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Mongolian, Nepalese, Thai, and Tibetan); Spanish American poetries (those of Mexico, Peru, Argentina, Chile, and many other Latin American countries); indigenous American poetries (Guarani, Inuit, and Navajo); and African poetries (those of Ethiopia, Somalia, South Africa, and other countries, and including African languages, English, French, and Portuguese). Complete with an introduction by the editors, this is an essential volume for anyone interested in understanding poetry in an international context. * Drawn from the latest edition of the acclaimed Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics* Provides more than 165 authoritative entries on poetry in more than 100 regional, national, and diasporic literatures and language traditions throughout the world* Features extensive coverage of non-Western poetic traditions* Includes an introduction, bibliographies, cross-references, and a general index

Through three editions over more than four decades, "The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics" has built an unrivaled reputation as the most comprehensive and authoritative reference for students, scholars, and poets on all aspects of its subject: history, movements, genres, prosody, rhetorical devices, critical terms, and more. Now this landmark work has been thoroughly revised and updated for the twenty-first century. Compiled by an entirely new team of editors, the fourth edition--the first new edition in almost twenty years--reflects recent changes in literary and cultural studies, providing up-to-date coverage and giving greater attention to the international aspects of poetry, all while preserving the best of the previous volumes

At well over a million words and more than 1,000 entries, the "Encyclopedia" has unparalleled breadth and depth. Entries range in length from brief paragraphs to major essays of 15,000 words, offering a more thorough treatment--including expert synthesis and indispensable bibliographies--than conventional handbooks or dictionaries.

This is a book that no reader or writer of poetry will want to be without. Thoroughly revised and updated by a new editorial team for twenty-first-century students, scholars, and poets More than 250 new entries cover recent terms, movements, and related topics Broader international coverage includes articles on the poetries of more than 110 nations, regions, and languages Expanded coverage of poetries of the non-Western and developing worlds Updated bibliographies and cross-references New, easier-to-use page design Fully indexed for the first time

Civil War Witnesses and Their Books: New Perspectives on Iconic Works serves as a wide-ranging analysis of texts written by individuals who experienced the American Civil War. Edited by Gary W. Gallagher and Stephen Cushman, this volume, like its companion, Civil War Writing: New Perspectives on Iconic Texts (2019), features the voices of authors who felt compelled to convey their stories for a variety of reasons. Some produced works intended primarily for their peers, while others were concerned with how future generations would judge their wartime actions. One diarist penned her entries with no thought that they would later become available to the public. The essayists explore the work of five men and three women, including prominent Union and Confederate generals, the wives of a headline-seeking US cavalry commander and a Democratic judge from New York City, a member of Robert E. Lee's staff, a Union artillerist, a matron from Richmond's sprawling Chimborazo Hospital, and a leading abolitionist US senator. Civil War Witnesses and Their Books shows how some of those who lived through the conflict attempted to assess its importance and frame it for later generations. Their voices have particular resonance today and underscore how rival memory traditions stir passion and controversy, providing essential testimony for anyone seeking to understand the nation's greatest trial and its aftermath.

In December 1885, under the watchful eye of Mark Twain, the publishing firm of Charles L. Webster and Company released the first volume of the Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. With a second volume published in March 1886, Grant's memoirs became a popular sensation. Seeking to capitalize on Grant's success and interest in earlier reminiscences by Joseph E. Johnston, William T. Sherman, and Richard Taylor, other Civil War generals such as George B. McClellan and Philip H. Sheridan soon followed suit. Some hewed more closely to Grant's model than others, and their points of similarity and divergence left readers increasing fascinated with the history and meaning of the nation's great conflict. The writings also dovetailed with a rising desire to see the full sweep of American history chronicled, as its citizens looked to the start of a new century. Professional historians engaged with the memoirs as an important foundation for this work. In this insightful book, Stephen Cushman considers Civil War generals' memoirs as both historical and literary works, revealing how they remain vital to understanding the interaction of memory, imagination, and the writing of American history. Cushman shows how market forces shaped the production of the memoirs and, therefore, memories of the war itself; how audiences have engaged with the works to create ideas of history that fit with time and circumstance; and what these texts tell us about current conflicts over the history and meanings of the Civil War.

In the title poem of this impressive debut collection, Stephen Cushman speaks as much of his poetics as he does of his role as father to a young child: ""I perform the offices of comfort / as best I can. . . . I put it all on the line / one piece at a time."" In many poems in this volume, Cushman puts himself on the line with respect to family life, focusing on a parent or grandparent, spouse or child. In others he roams freely among subjects, pausing along the way before photographs from the Civil War, an engraving of Envy, a newspaper clipping about two climbers frozen on a mountain, wolves in a zoo, a woman who directs airplanes in from a runway. Meanwhile, the poems also move from place to place, some lighting in the Blue Ridge of central Virginia, some on the coast of Maine, others looking abroad to an island in Greece. Whether about family, history, religion, travel, or the natural world, these poems blend the everyday with the visionary, combining attention to detail with larger uncertainties. No matter how far a poem may wander in geography or subject matter, sooner or later it returns to the work of performing the offices of comfort, sometimes triumphantly with joy or humor, sometimes reluctantly with an acknowledgment of incompleteness and insufficiency. Finally, at a moment in the history of American poetry when partisans of formal and free verse view each other with mutual suspicion, Cushman's poems demonstrate the pleasures and powers of treating the varieties of verse design as a poet's rightful inheritance.

The ""red list"" of Stephen Cushman's new volume of poetry is the endangered species register, and the book begins and ends with the bald eagle, a bird that bounded back from the verge of extinction. The volume marks the inevitability of such changes, from danger to safety, from certainty to uncertainty, from joy to sadness and back again. In a single poem that advances through wordplay and association, Cushman meditates on subjects as vast as the earth's fragile ecosystem and as small as the poet's own deflated fantasy of self-importance: ""There aren't any jobs for more Jeremiahs."" Simultaneously teasing the present and eulogizing what has been lost, Cushman speaks like a Shakespearean jester, freely and foolishly, but with penetrating insight.

Stephen Cushman's Riffraff embodies the spirit of its title, a Middle English word for "every particle" or "things of small value." In this striking collection, scraps of the overlooked, and distasteful -- a prostitute passed in the street, the speaker's own forgotten dreams, toothless dogs rolling in deer offal -- become occasions to meditate on the rich experiences from which we too often turn away.

The poems reflect on the possibilities of language, the natural world, politics, history, eros, aging, family, and spiritual devotion. Without pretension, Cushman values "adepts who can dwell in the kiosk of a kiss." Skillfully, he transmutes his own curiosity and surprise into moments of shared instruction. "Keep low," he whispers. "Stay put. / Learn from the leaves."

Riffraff culls what we have discarded, saves from abandonment the notions we have taken for granted, and, indeed, venerates every particle.

In his second collection of poems, Stephen Cushman explores, appraises, and celebrates many different forms of connections -- domestic, social, historical, and religious. With an easygoing voice, an engaging humor, and a sure understanding of his craft, he addresses subjects from marriage and travel to urbanism and the Civil War, illustrating the rewards of a sensitive regard for the junctions in everyday life and language.

Invoking "all the lessons they ever taught me / about ordination in the ordinary, " he reflects on members of his family, affirming attachments of marriage and blood. Beyond those immediate ties lie the connections of history -- which take him to ancient Egypt, wartime Virginia, and Greece under Nazi occupation -- as well as the broader bonds of struggling to love neighbors and strangers: a panhandler on a city street, an inmate in a county jail, a nun at a convent window, a fellow passenger in a subway car. In trying to make and maintain any of these links, Cushman avoids lapses of sentimental piety, admitting instead, in the words of the title poem, "I worship the sacred and savor the profane."

Deftly balancing reverence and irreverence, the poems in Cussing Lesson both bless and curse. Whatever mode Cushman chooses and whatever form he employs, connections made by heart and head find their expression in his finely tuned confluence of words.

The Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms--drawn from the latest edition of the acclaimed Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics--provides an authoritative guide to the most important terms in the study of poetry and literature. Featuring 226 fully revised and updated entries, including 100 that are new to this edition, the book offers clear and insightful definitions and discussions of critical concepts, genres, forms, movements, and poetic elements, followed by invaluable, up-to-date bibliographies that guide users to further reading and research. Because the entries are carefully selected and adapted from the Princeton Encyclopedia, the Handbook has unrivalled breadth and depth for a book of its kind, in a convenient, portable size. Fully indexed for the first time and complete with an introduction by the editors, this is an essential volume for all literature students, teachers, and researchers, as well as other readers and writers. * Drawn from the latest edition of the acclaimed Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics* Provides 226 fully updated and authoritative entries, including 100 new to this edition, written by an international team of leading scholars* Features entries on critical concepts (canon, mimesis, prosody, syntax); genres, forms, and movements (ballad, blank verse, confessional poetry, ode); and terms (apostrophe, hypotaxis and parataxis, meter, tone)* Includes an introduction, bibliographies, cross-references, and a full index

Stephen Cushman's Keep the Feast sings in the tradition of the psalmists and devotional poets, offering an intimate, ecstatic doxology, both exultant and indicting, spiritual and secular. His poems make prodigious and intrepid forays into the realms of history, sexuality, religious ardor, the imperiled planet, and the reasons for making art. At the heart of this three-part book lies the title poem, which takes as a formal model Psalm 119, the longest psalm in the Bible. In luminous verse, Cushman's speaker rejoices in the commitments of faith, finding in them a way of living with the paradoxes of twenty-first-century life and of holding belief in an often-unfathomable world.

Civil War Writing is a collection of new essays that focus on the most significant writing about the American Civil War by participants who lived through it, whether as civilians or combatants, southerners or northerners, women or men, blacks or whites. Collectively, as contributors show, these writings have sustained their influence over generations and include histories, memoirs, journals, novels, and one literary falsehood posing as an autobiographical narrative. Several of the works, such as William Tecumseh Sherman's memoirs or Mary Chesnut's diary, are familiar to scholars, but other accounts, including Charlotte Forten's diary and Loreta Velasquez's memoir, offer new material to even the most omnivorous Civil War reader. In all cases, a deeper look at these writings reveals why they continue to resonate with audiences more than 150 years after the end of the conflict. As supporting evidence for historical and biographical narratives and as deliberately designed communications, the writings discussed in this collection demonstrate considerable value. Whether exploring the differences among drafts and editions, listening closely to fluctuations in tone or voice, or tracing responses in private correspondence or published reviews, the essayists examine how authors wrote to different audiences and out of different motives, creating a complex literary record that offers rich potential for continuing evaluation of the country's greatest national trauma. Overall, the essays in Civil War Writing underscore how participants employed various literary forms to record, describe, and explain aspects and episodes of a conflict that assumed proportions none of them imagined possible at the outset.

In the 1830s Alexis de Tocqueville prophesied that American writers would slight, even despise, form--that they would favor the sensational over rational order. He suggested that this attitude was linked to a distinct concept of democracy in America. Exposing the inaccuracies of such claims when applied to poetry, Stephen Cushman maintains that American poets tend to "overvalue" the formal aspects of their art and in turn overestimate the relationship between those formal aspects and various ideas of America. In this book Cushman examines poems and prose statements in which poets as diverse as Emily Dickinson and Ezra Pound describe their own poetic forms, and he investigates links and analogies between poets' notions of form and their notions of "Americanness.."

The book begins with a brief discussion of Whitman, who said, "The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem." Cushman takes this to mean that American poetry has succeeded in making fictions about itself which persuade its readers that its uniqueness transcends merely geographical boundaries. He explores the truth of this statement by considering the Americanness of Emily Dickinson, Ezra Pound, Elizabeth Bishop, and A. R. Ammons. He concludes that the uniqueness of American poetry lies not so much in its forms as in its formalism and in the various attitudes that formalism reveals.

Originally published in 1993.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

In the 1830s Alexis de Tocqueville prophesied that American writers would slight, even despise, form--that they would favor the sensational over rational order. He suggested that this attitude was linked to a distinct concept of democracy in America. Exposing the inaccuracies of such claims when applied to poetry, Stephen Cushman maintains that American poets tend to overvalue the formal aspects of their art and in turn overestimate the relationship between those formal aspects and various ideas of America. In this book Cushman examines poems and prose statements in which poets as diverse as Emily Dickinson and Ezra Pound describe their own poetic forms, and he investigates links and analogies between poets' notions of form and their notions of "Americanness.". The book begins with a brief discussion of Whitman, who said, "The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem." Cushman takes this to mean that American poetry has succeeded in making fictions about itself which persuade its readers that its uniqueness transcends merely geographical boundaries. He explores the truth of this statement by considering the Americanness of Emily Dickinson, Ezra Pound, Elizabeth Bishop, and A. R. Ammons. He concludes that the uniqueness of American poetry lies not so much in its forms as in its formalism and in the various attitudes that formalism reveals. Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

War destroys, but it also inspires, stimulates, and creates. It is, in this way, a muse, and a powerful one at that. The American Civil War was a particularly prolific muse--unleashing with its violent realities a torrent of language, from soldiers' intimate letters and diaries to everyday newspaper accounts, great speeches, and enduring literary works. In Belligerent Muse, Stephen Cushman considers the Civil War writings of five of the most significant and best known narrators of the conflict: Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, William Tecumseh Sherman, Ambrose Bierce, and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. Considering their writings both as literary expressions and as efforts to record the rigors of the war, Cushman analyzes their narratives and the aesthetics underlying them to offer a richer understanding of how Civil War writing chronicled the events of the conflict as they unfolded and then served to frame the memory of the war afterward. Elegantly interweaving military and literary history, Cushman uses some of the war's most famous writers and their works to explore the profound ways in which our nation's great conflict not only changed the lives of its combatants and chroniclers but also fundamentally transformed American letters.