The Poetical Works of Edmund Clarence Stedman

Edmund Clarence Stedman stood at the center of American literary life in the late nineteenth century, and this comprehensive collection gathers the work that earned him that position. Here are poems that move from the bloody drama of John Brown at Harper's Ferry to the wistful longing of Penelope waiting for Odysseus, from the bohemian streets of San Francisco to the formal celebrations of Gilded Age society. Stedman possessed a poet's ear for music and a storyteller's sense of narrative drive, and these pages contain both the lyrical quiet of nature poems and the vigorous swing of historical verse. The collection captures an era when American poetry was finding its own voice between the shadows of British tradition and the bright possibilities of a young nation. For readers interested in understanding how America spoke to itself in verse during the decades after the Civil War, this volume offers a vivid portrait: romantic, sometimes sentimental, always earnest, and unmistakably of its moment.