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State Verse Culture: American Poets Laureate, 1945-2015, Amy Paeth

Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations

This dissertation argues that the state is the silent center of poetic production in the United States after WWII. “State Verse Culture” is the first history of the national poet, the Poet Laureate Consultant to the Library of Congress, whose office sits at the nexus of institutional actors of postwar poetry. Drawing on archival research at the Library of Congress and the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, it traces the collusion of 1) federal bodies (The Library of Congress, The State Department, National Endowment for the Arts) with 2) literary-professional organizations (Poetry Society of America, Poetry magazine/The Poetry Foundation ...