SOURCE: “Shifting Sands: The Columbia History of American Poetry,” in Hudson Review, Vol. XLVII, No. 4, Winter, 1995, pp. 641-7.

In the following review, Jarman provides an extended analysis of The Columbia History of American Poetry, noting both the volume's flaws and strengths.

In the mid-1600s, as the Massachusetts colonist Anne Bradstreet was writing the poems that would be published in London in 1650 as The Tenth Muse Lately sprung up in America, the oral tradition of Native American poetry was uniting use and beauty inextricably, though in ways unknown and even ignored until Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, two hundred years later, tried to capture them in Hiawatha. And in the early 1700s, the nonconformist minister and colonist Edward Taylor wrote the last of his “Preparatory Meditations” some twenty years before Lucy Terry, a slave, also in Massachusetts, wrote “Bars Flight” about an Indian massacre, the first formal poem known to...