American Poetry and Prose (In 3 Volumes)

The present work entitled “American Poetry And Prose”, edited by Norman Foester is undoubtedly an outstanding literary history of American literature in three volumes: the Colonial Mind, the Romantic Movement (in Two parts) and the Realistic Movement. Volume I, Colonial Mind, includes earlier writings of American poets and essayists on different imaginative and realistic themes. The Volume II in two parts, deals with the Romantic Movement in American Poetry and Prose. The romantic movement replaced the rational man of the eighteenth century with the emotional man of the early nineteenth. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had written under the rich traditions of Christian and Classical authority. The Volume III, Realistic Movement in American Poetry and Prose, includes more realistic and powerful writings of 19th and early 20th century Europe as well as Western cultural and literacy trends. Realistic prose entered upon its great age in the 70’s and continued crescendo, but poetry had to wait for a revival until 1912. True, the new poetry had been announced by Whitman, and family Dickinson had written imagist verse in the middle of the century, but both Whitman and Miss Dickinson were dead by the time a movement became evident in the later 90’s. Undoubtedly, in the modern world cultural and field of literature, changed economic scene and technological advances American literature occupies an important place, but simultaneously owns much to European land in almost every field.