Review of The Prairie in Nineteenth-Century American Poetry By Steven Olson

Authors

Mark Kamrath, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Date of this Version

1995

Comments

Published in Great Plains Quarterly 15:3 (Summer 1995). Copyright © 1995 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Abstract

The Prairie in Nineteenth-Century American Poetry is an important book about prairie and plains imagery in nineteenth-century American poetry. Situating his study among Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land, Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden, and Annette Kolodny's The Land Before Her, Olson argues that nineteenth- century American poets created a "new American poetry" (171) in the ways they describe the prairies and "symbolically incorporate people, imagination, ideology, and place in the United States" (vii).