Beginnings: America/Howe

Lurking behind or hovering, like a ghost, above this work — the explicit concern of which is the relation of mind to world in the work of a constellation of poets and philosophers — is the particularly fraught designation “American.” Tracing a scattered lineage, I have found myself traversing Concord and Cambridge, the terrain of the “American Renaissance” — ground that has been profoundly contested in recent decades, perhaps most visibly by Sacvan Bercovitch. I was well underway in this project before it struck me that eight of the ten writers whose work I explore are, like myself, native New Englanders.

Throughout the writing of this book I have been haunted by the persistence of two facts — the intimate, almost-voiceless reality of motherhood and the (to me) frighteningly distant, dangerously abstract reality of war. The former has made me wonder about the relevance of women's lives to the writings of the mostly canonical, mostly male writers about whom I have written. The latter has made me wary of further enshrining the idea of “America” which has rendered the brutality of the United States all but invisible to its own citizens.