The American House Poem, 1945-2021

The house is perhaps the most recognizable emblem of the American ideals of self-making: prosperity, stability, domesticity, and upward mobility. Yet over the years from 1945-2021, the American house becomes more famous for the betrayal of those hopes than for their fulfilment: first, through the segregation of cities and public housing; then through the expansion of private credit that lays the ground for the subprime mortgage crisis of the early twenty-first century. Walt Hunter argues that, as access to housing expands to include a greater share of the US population, the house emerges as a central metaphor for the poetic imagination.

From the kitchenette of Gwendolyn Brooks to the duplex of Jericho Brown, and from the suburban imagination of Adrienne Rich to the epic constructions of James Merrill, the American house poem represents the changing abilities of US poets to imagine new forms of life while also building on the past. In The American House Poem, 1945-2021, Hunter focuses on poets who register the unevenly distributed pressures of successive housing crises by rewriting older poetic forms. Writing about the materials, tools, and plans for making a house, these poets express the tensions between making their lives into art and freeing their lives from inherited constraints and conditions.

Walt Hunter, Chair, Department of English and Associate Professor of English, Case Western Reserve University

Walt Hunter is the author of Forms of a World: Contemporary Poetry and the Making of Globalization (2019) and Some Flowers (2022). He is the recipient of awards from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, the James Merrill House, the South Carolina Arts Commission, and the National Endowment for the Humanities/Teagle Foundation. He is Chair of English and Associate Professor of English at Case Western Reserve University.

Introduction
1. Gwendolyn Brooks and Housing as a Civil Right
2. Unmaking a Home: Adrienne Rich and the Suburbs
3. An Immaterial World: James Merrill, Finance, and the Renovation of the House Poem
4. The American Poetic Subprime: Contemporary Poetry, Race, and Genre
Notes
Bibliography
Index