The Citizen Poets of Boston: A Collection of Forgotten Poems, 1789-1820

by Paul Lewis (Editor)

Overview

Welcome to Boston in the early years of the republic. Prepare to journey by stagecoach with a young man moving to the “bustling city”; stop by a tavern for food, drink, and conversation; eavesdrop on clerks and customers in a dry-goods shop; get stuck in what might have been Boston’s first traffic jam; and enjoy arch comments about spouses, doctors, lawyers, politicians, and poets. As Paul Lewis and his students at Boston College reveal, regional vernacular poetry—largely overlooked or deemed of little or no artistic value—provides access to the culture and daily life of the city. Selected from over 4,500 poems published during the early national period, the works presented here, mostly anonymous, will carry you back to Old Boston to hear the voices of its long-forgotten citizen poets. A rich collection of lost poetry that will beguile locals and visitors alike.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611689303
Publisher:	University Press of New England
Publication date:	04/05/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	234
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

PAUL LEWIS is a professor of English at Boston College specializing in American humor and the literary history of Boston.

Table of Contents

Preface • A Note on Spelling, Punctuation, Capitalization, and Notes • Introduction • COMING TO BOSTON • The Stage Coach. Inscribed to Mira • Epigram. [As two Divines] • An Intended Inscription, Written for the Monument on Beacon-Hill, in Boston, and Addr

What People are Saying About This

David E. E. Sloane

“The Citizen Poets of Boston is a major contribution to our understanding of nineteenth-century American poetry. The breadth of study has brought to light poems that are far beyond previous conceptions of the values and capabilities of popular poets in the period from 1790 to 1830. The collection is stunning not only in the literary values of the various poems as comic and serious literature but also in its revelation of the details of the urban life of Boston in a unique, formative period of northeastern culture. In forty years of study in this field I have seen few works that rival this one in interest and importance.”

Megan Marshall

“The Citizen Poets of Boston is an overflowing cornucopia—a ‘wonder-horn,’ to borrow Nathaniel Hawthorne’s phrase—of verse that brings a bustling world of yesterday back to rhyming, rhythmic life. Energetically compiled by a team of students and skillfully edited by their professor, Paul Lewis, with illuminating thematic essays and comprehensive notes on sources, this book is also a valuable teaching tool and guide for scholars of the early republic.”

Editorial Reviews

In poems [Lewis] calls “buckboard time machines” the rhythms of a city and its people come alive. Stories are swapped in taverns; traffic slows to a crawl in Charlestown; a rivalry between Boston and New York is articulated.” —Boston Globe

“The book’s biggest contribution is its generous representation of anonymous work appearing in book form for the first time.”

 
—New England Quarterly

From the Publisher