This second volume of The Library of America's two-volume collection of nineteenth-century American poetry follows the evolution of American poetry from the monumental mid-century achievements of Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson to the modernist stirrings of Stephen Crane and Edwin Arlington Robinson. The cataclysm of the Civil War--reflected in fervent antislavery protests, in marching songs and poetic calls to arms, and in muted post-bellum expressions...