This free, not-for-credit online course offered through HarvardX spans the poetry of America’s early years, directly before and after the birth of the Republic. We examine the creation of a national identity through the lens of an emerging national literature, focusing on such poets as Phillis Wheatley, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Allan Poe, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, among others. Distinguished guest discussants in this part of the course include writer Michael Pollan, economist Larry Summers, Vice President Al Gore, Mayor Tom Menino and others.

Before you begin, you can get a head start on Poetry in America: Nature and Nation using the Module 2 Reading List.

We also invite you to explore the following resources to learn more about the history and literature of the early Republic:

PRIMARY SOURCES

• Creating an American Culture, 1775-1800: A Brief History with Documents, ed. by Eve Kornfeld
• Public Poet, Private Man:  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at 200, Houghton Library at Harvard University (Online Exhibition)
• Earliest-dated publication of “The Raven,” Houghton Library at Harvard University

FURTHER READING

• New England Literary Culture: From Revolution through Renaissance, by Lawrence Buell
• Emerson, by Lawrence Buell
• The American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings (Modern Library Classics), edited by Lawrence Buell
• Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance, by Lawrence Buell
• Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America, by David Shields
• Oracles of Empire: Poetry, Politics, and Commerce in British America, 1690-1750, by David Shields
• Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America, by Cathy N. Davidson
• The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America, by Michael Warner
• American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman, by Max Cavitch
• Longfellow Redux, by Christoph Irmscher
• The American Enlightenment, 1750-1820, by Robert A. Ferguson
• The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange, by Meredith McGill
• Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority 1750-1800, by Jay Fliegelman
• Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe’s Circle, by Eliza Richards
• Prophetic Waters: The River in Early American Life and Literature, by John Seelye
• Beautiful Machine: Rivers and the Republican Plan, 1755-1825, by John Seelye
• Revolutionary Writers: Literature and Authority in the New Republic, 1725-1810, by Emery Elliott
• A Cultural History of the American Revolution: Painting, Music, Literature, and the Theatre in the Colonies and the United States from the Treaty of Paris to the Inauguration of George Washington, by Kenneth Silverman
• Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860, by Richard Slotkin
• Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind, by Roy Harvey Pearce

Featured Partners

HarvardX

HarvardX is a University-wide strategic initiative, overseen by the Office of the Vice Provost for Advances in Learning, to enable faculty to build and create open online learning experiences for residential and online use, and to enable groundbreaking research in online pedagogies.

Harvard

Harvard University is devoted to excellence in teaching, learning, and research, and to developing leaders in many disciplines who make a difference globally.