Enthusiasm: Odes & Otium

If “America” is a nation of enthusiasts (for good or ill), the poems in this book can be thought of as their anthems. The adventurer, the speculator, the minister, the naturalist, the bandit, the mother—all have some purchase here. Starting from the notion of the ode as “a poem sung by a chorus,” these poems campaign for a heroic “voice of history” spoken by individuals. The resulting tensions, between prose and poetic lines, between narrative and song, are revealed in the anxiety of genre:...