Description
Drawing on previously unexplored archival materials at the Library of Congress and materials at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Amy Paeth describes the interactions of federal bodies, including the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department, and the National Endowment for the Arts, with literary organizations and with private patrons, including “Prozac heiress” Ruth Lilly. The consolidation of public and private interests is crucial to the development of state verse culture, recognizable at the first National Poetry Festival in 1962, which followed Robert Frost’s “Mission to Moscow,” and which became dominant in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
The American Poet Laureate contributes to a growing body of institutional and sociological approaches to U.S. literary production in the postwar era and demonstrates how poetry has played a uniquely important, and largely underacknowledged, role in the cultural front of the Cold War.
Book Information
ISBN 9780231194389
Author Amy Paeth
Format Hardback
Page Count 328
Imprint Columbia University Press
Publisher Columbia University Press