Born in the USA - Exploring America in Poems - The Massachusetts Poets: A celebration of American poetry

Written by Emily Dickinson, Amy Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson and 5 more

Narrated by Richard Mitchley, Patricia Rodriguez and Eric Meyers

Poetry. A form of words that seems so elegantly simple in one verse and so cleverly complex in another. Each poet has a particular style, an individual and unique way with words and yet each of us seems to recognise the path and destination of where the verses lead, even if sometimes the full comprehension may be a little beyond us.

Through the centuries every culture has produced verse to symbolize and to describe everything from everyday life, natural wonders, the human condition and even in its more hubristic moments, the crushing triumph of an enemy.

In the volumes of this series we take a look through the prism of individual regions of the United States through the centuries and decades.

The United States may be many things: the world’s policeman, a bully, a shameless purveyor of mass market culture but it also, in its better moments, a standard bearer for truth, transparency, equality and the more positive qualities of democracy.

Little wonder that’s its poets are rightly acknowledged as wonders of their art. Leading lights in the fight against slavery and for equality, even if the rest of the Nation is finding it problematic to catch up.

In this volume we have collected verse from poets born in the tiny Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Its history is scarred with tragedy, much of its own making, and yet its natural beauty and its kaleidoscope of cultures summon the envy of us all when put to verse by the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Amu Lowell, Emily Dickenson, William Cullen Bryant and James Russell Lowell.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Copyright Group
• Release date: Nov 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9781835478479

Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was an American poet. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, Dickinson was raised in a prominent family of lawyers and politicians alongside two siblings. For seven years, she studied at Amherst Academy, excelling in English, classics, and the sciences. Dickinson suffered from melancholy and poor health from a young age, taking several breaks from school to stay with family in Boston. After graduation, Dickinson enrolled at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, withdrawing ten months later to return home to Amherst. Through her friend Benjamin Franklin Newton, she was introduced to the poetry of William Wordsworth and Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose influence would prove profound as she embarked on a literary life of her own. Despite her status as one of the greatest American poets of the nineteenth century, Dickinson published only ten poems and one letter during her lifetime, only a sampling of nearly two thousand poems discovered after her death. Cast as an eccentric by contemporaries and later critics alike, Dickinson was an enigmatic figure whose experimental forms and extensive use of symbols have inspired generations of readers and poets. By the 1870s, following the death of her father, Dickinson had largely withdrawn from public life. Spending much of her time caring for her ailing mother, she still managed to write poems and send letters to friends and family. In 1886, following her death, Dickinson’s younger sister Lavinia discovered her collection of poems and began the long and arduous process of bringing them to print.