We could almost title this course "Poets with Three Names." It is easy to forget that Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson were not the only important poets writing in the U.S. between 1800 and 1900. This course will set out to repopulate the century by attending not only to Whitman and Dickinson (each of whom will receive a good deal of attention), but also to such poets as Edgar Allen Poe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Cullen Bryant, Frances E.W. Harper, Henry David Thoreau, and Edwin Arlington Robinson. We will focus on a set of interlocking problems and concerns: the attempt to formulate a specifically and distinctively American poetry; poetry as popular culture and entertainment; the multiplicity of Americans, American poets, and American poetries; and poetry as a technology with which Americans tried to understand the Civil War. Our text will be the Library of America's anthology, Nineteenth-Century American Poetry (ed. John Hollander). Assignments will include memorization, an exercise on meter and stanza, two papers (5-7 pages), and a mid-term exam.