The History of America in Poems

When:

Coming in 2026

What it is:

This is a history of America in poems, learning about American history from the poet’s point of view, every era from Prehistoric to New Media.

This is not a history class. This is not a literature of the American canon class. This is not a writing class. But this class will include parts of all those categories.

The format

This is a PodClass. Each class will include:

• A podcast-type audio lecture
• A summary of poets, main points and important dates
  (plus other writers and artists within the topic we’re discussing)
• Online readings of poems
• One writing prompt or more

This is a private class/journey. There are no discussion groups, no graded assignments and no feedback provided on your ideas or writings.

You are free, however, to create your own IRL class groups in order to experience the course with other readers and writers. In fact, that sounds fun.

But you can also take the journey solo.

Who’s it for

• Poets (like me) who found gaps in their knowledge about American poets, American poetry movements and American literary history;
• Students who want to understand the evolution of poetry in America from the beginning to now;
• Historians who want to read what the poets had to say about their real-time experiences living in America (sort of like witness statements).

What we’ll do

We will learn about the common themes in American poetry and the major eras. We’ll read a lot of poems. You might even fly off on tangents and get wonderfully sidetracked when you find “new” poets you like and want to learn more about on your own.

There will also be an opportunity to try your hand at writing verse in every American poetic style in order to explore America’s defining themes in your own way, to more deeply engage with an historical poet’s sense of place and particular experience in American history. This isn’t required. (Nothing is required.) But it’s part of the full design of the class: write like a Colonial American, write from both sides of the Civil War, write something interactive.

There will be an online reading list and also a list of more obscure poems which you are encouraged to hunt down and uncover on your own. Like gold mining, you can dig online, through used book stores, in libraries or through your own bookshelves for historic poems.

We’ll be using many poems from The Oxford Book of American Poetry, edited by David Lehman. But there’s no need to buy the book (unless you want to).

Your commitment

You can be a casual student and read a fraction of the material or you can be an intense student and try to read as much as you can. This all depends upon your own personal goals and what you want to get out of the class. You can take individual classes (a pay-as-you-go model) and skip around at a per-class fee or you can commit to the full set, paying for access to all classes and every future class.

Bibliography

I have an M.F.A. in Poetry and run the websites bigbangpoetry.com and marymccray.com where I talk about my own journeys through poetry.

I have spent years researching the history of American poetry in books, essays an MOOCs (Massive Open Online Classes).

You are free to follow in my footsteps and read all the same books and take all the same classes (when available) if you want to find your own way. Here is a list to get you started:

• The Columbia History of American Poetry, edited by Jay Parini and Brett C. Miller
• The Cambridge History of American Poetry, edited by Alfred Bendixen and Stephen Burt
• The Harper American Literature, Volumes 1 and 2, edited by Donald McQuade, Robert Atwan, Martha Banta, Justin Kaplan, David Minter, and Helen Vendler
• The Anthology of Modern American Poetry, edited by Cary Nelson
• The Anthology of Contemporary American Literature, edited by Cary Nelson
• A History of American Poetry by Richard Gray
• The Norton Anthology of Native American Poetry, edited by Joy Harjo
• A New Literary History of America, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors
• Poetry in America, a series on PBS hosted by Elisa New
• Smithsonian Associates’ online lectures on literature
• The Poetry of New England run by Elisa New at Harvard on EdX
• Nature and Nation run by Elisa New at Harvard on EdX
• Civil War Poetry run by Elisa New at Harvard on EdX
• Walt Whitman run by Elisa New at Harvard on EdX
• Emily Dickinson run by Elisa New at Harvard on EdX
• Modern & Contemporary American Poetry (“ModPo”)  MOOC run by Al Filreis on Coursera (every fall) at the University of Pennsylvania – explores the evolution from Modern to Contemporary American poetry
• Modern Poetry run by Elisa New at Harvard on EdX – explores modernism as organized from the cities of New York, Chicago and London
• Modern American Poetry run by Cary Nelson at The University of Illinois on Coursera – expanding the modernist canon to include writers  previously left out for partisan and factional reasons
• Electronic Literature run by Mark Sample at Davidson College on EdX
• Reading Literature in the Digital Age at FutureLearn
• Big Bang Poetry: “Your Education int he History of American Poetry“
• Mary McCray: “Digital Poetry: Where We Can Go…“
• Mary McCray: “Digital Media Poetry Primer“