Patrick Redding is an Assistant Professor of English at Manhattanville College. He is currently working on a book entitled, Democracy Unbound: American Poetry and the Scope of Equality, 1850-1940, which explores how egalitarian ideals shaped cultural debates about poetic form, artistic judgment, the human body, and public space.
Patrick Redding
Contributions
Thinking Outside the Box of Modernist Time
When I started my current position in the fall of 2010, I inherited an upper-level course with a simple title: “American Poetry.” The course description noted that the seminar would “trace the ‘Romantic’ and ‘Modern’ sensibility from Emerson to T. S. Eliot and beyond to living poets of the Americas.” To fulfill this aim, my predecessor had started with Whitman and Dickinson, passed through Frost and Hughes, and concluded with Sharon Olds, Derek Walcott, and Yusef Komunyakaa.