Introduction

Abstract

Abstract This introduction begins with a particularly important precursor for the American house poem, the British country-house poem, focusing on its flourishing in Ben Jonson, Aemilia Lanyer, and Andrew Marvell. The country-house poem generated a robust conversation about the nature of poetic genre that took its test cases from the early seventeenth century but offers enduring lessons for the study of modern and contemporary poetry. Building on the contributions made by Barbara Lewalski, Raymond Williams, and others, this chapter ties the renewals of the house poem as a genre to the cycles of historical capitalism. Looking at more recent theorists, the chapter also traces poetic subgenre as a way of encoding assumptions about gender, race, and style. Tying this analysis of genre to recent work in political economy, the emergence of the house poem as a genre appears inseparable from the emergence of the United States as a global economic power.