In December 1885, under the watchful eye of Mark Twain, the publishing firm of Charles L. Webster and Company released the first volume of the Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. With a second volume published in March 1886, Grant’s memoirs became a popular sensation. Seeking to capitalize on Grant’s success and interest in earlier reminiscences by Joseph E. Johnston, William T. Sherman, and Richard Taylor, other Civil War generals such as George B. McClellan and Philip H. Sheri...

War destroys, but it also inspires, stimulates, and creates. It is, in this way, a muse, and a powerful one at that. The American Civil War was a particularly prolific muse — unleashing with its violent realities a torrent of language, from soldiers' intimate letters and diaries to everyday newspaper accounts, great speeches, and enduring literary works. In Belligerent Muse, Stephen Cushman considers the Civil War writings of five of the most significant and best known narrators o...

The "red list" of Stephen Cushman's new volume of poetry is the endangered species register, and the book begins and ends with the bald eagle, a bird that bounded back from the verge of extinction. The volume marks the inevitability of such changes, from danger to safety, from certainty to uncertainty, from joy to sadness and back again. In a single poem that advances through wordplay and association, Cushman meditates on subjects as vast as the earth's fragile ecosystem and as small as th...

Stephen Cushman’s Keep the Feast sings in the tradition of the psalmists and devotional poets, offering an intimate, ecstatic doxology, both exultant and indicting, spiritual and secular. His poems make prodigious and intrepid forays into the realms of history, sexuality, religious ardor, the imperiled planet, and the reasons for making art. At the heart of this three-part book lies the title poem, which takes as a formal model Psalm 119, the longest psalm in the Bible. In luminou...

Hothead is a haibun-patterned, book-length declamation in which no topic is off limits—Buddha, Jesus, Lincoln, America, global warming, eros, mental illness, the natural world, technology, the aging body. Cushman’s poetry shows us how to live in a world in which it is difficult to balance “the place where light and dark meet.” With an outmoded laptop named Patience as his daily consort, the speaker navigates through themes of love, politics, and belief. “There’s got to be someone,...

Stephen Cushman's Riffraff embodies the spirit of its title, a Middle English word for "every particle" or "things of small value." In this striking collection, scraps of the overlooked, and distasteful -- a prostitute passed in the street, the speaker's own forgotten dreams, toothless dogs rolling in deer offal -- become occasions to meditate on the rich experiences from which we too often turn away.The poems reflect on the possibilities of language, the natural world, politics, hi...

Between the end of May and the beginning of August 1864, Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant and General Robert E. Lee oversaw the transition between the Overland Campaign—a remarkable saga of maneuvering and brutal combat—and what became a grueling siege of Petersburg that many months later compelled Confederates to abandon Richmond. Although many historians have marked Grant’s crossing of the James River on June 12 to June 15 as the close of the Overland Campaign, this volume interprets ...

Lens of War grew out of an invitation to leading historians of the Civil War to select and reflect upon a single photograph. Each could choose any image and interpret it in personal and scholarly terms. The result is a remarkable set of essays by twenty-seven scholars whose numerous volumes on the Civil War have explored military, cultural, political, African American, women’s, and environmental history.The essays describe a wide array of photographs and present an eclecti...

A collection of ten new essays from some of our finest Civil War historians working today, Gateway to the Confederacy offers a reexamination of the campaigns fought to gain possession of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Each essay addresses how Americans have misconstrued the legacy of these struggles and why scholars feel it necessary to reconsider one of the most critical turning points of the American Civil War.The first academic analysis that delineates all three Civil War campaigns foug...

An essential handbook for literary studiesThe Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms—drawn from the latest edition of the acclaimed Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics—provides an authoritative guide to the most important terms in the study of poetry and literature. Featuring 226 fully revised and updated entries, including 100 that are new to this edition, the book offers clear and insightful definitions and discussions of critical concepts,...

An authoritative and comprehensive guide to poetry throughout the worldThe Princeton Handbook of World Poetries—drawn from the latest edition of the acclaimed Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics—provides a comprehensive and authoritative survey of the history and practice of poetry in more than 100 major regional, national, and diasporic literatures and language traditions around the globe. With more than 165 entries, the book combines br...

Through three editions over more than four decades, The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics has built an unrivaled reputation as the most comprehensive and authoritative reference for students, scholars, and poets on all aspects of its subject: history, movements, genres, prosody, rhetorical devices, critical terms, and more. Now this landmark work has been thoroughly revised and updated for the twenty-first century. Compiled by an entirely new team of editors, the fourth...