Realist Poetics in American Culture, 1866-1900

The terms ''poetry'' and ''realism'' have a complex and often oppositional relationship in American literary histories of the postbellum period. The core narrative holds that ''realism'', the major literary ''movement'' of the era, developed apace in prose fiction, while poetry, stuck in a hopelessly idealist late-Romantic mode, languished and stagnated. Poetry is almost entirely absent from schol...