The Architecture of Address: The Monument and Public Speech in American Poetry

The Architecture of Addresstraces the evolution of an American species of lyric capable of public pronouncement without polemic. Beginning with Whitman, Jake Adam York seeks to describe a kind of poem wherein the most ambitious poets--including Hart Crane and Robert Lowell--occupy and reconstruct important public spaces. This study argues that American poets become civic actors when their poems imagine and reconstruct the conceptual architecture of the monument.