Historical Poetics — Nineteenth-Century Anthologies

We met at Rutgers again at the Center for Cultural Analysis in a closed session only, in which we focused on the stories that nineteenth-century anthologies explicitly and implicitly tell about the history of poetry. The centerpiece of our discussion was the capacious and influential editorial work of Edmund Clarence Stedman, the American poet and literary man who was the first to conceptualize the field of Victorian poetry as such. In the morning session we discussed selections from Stedman’s Victorian Poets (1875) and studied the architecture of his companion volumes A Victorian Anthology, 1837-1895 (1895) and An American Anthology, 1787-1900 (1900). In the afternoon session, we discussed selections from anthologies and examples of anthologizing that members of the group brought along with them.

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