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“We have many poets of the First Book,” the poet and critic Louis Simpson remarked in 1957, describing a sense that the debut poetry collection not only launched the contemporary poetic career but also had come to define it. Surveying American poetry over the past hundred years, this book explores the emergence of the poetic debut as a unique literary production with its own tradition, conventions, and dynamic role in the literary market. Through new readings of ranging from Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore to John Ashbery and Louise Glück, the book illuminates the importance of the first book in twentieth-century American literary culture, which involved complex struggles for legitimacy on the part of poets, critics, and publishers alike. The book investigates poets' diverse responses to the question of how to launch a career in an increasingly professionalized literary scene that threatened the authenticity of the poetic calling. It shows how modernist debuts evoke markedly idiosyncratic paths, while postwar first books evoke trajectories that balance professional imperatives with traditional literary ideals. Debut titles ranging from Simpson's The Arrivistes to Ken Chen's Juvenilia stress the strikingly pervasive theme of beginning, accommodating a new demand for career development even as it distances the poets from that demand. Combining literary analysis with cultural history, this book will interest scholars and students of twentieth-century literature as well as readers and writers of poetry.

What might it mean, existentially and spiritually, for humans to form an intimate relation with discrete sites or dwelling places on earth? In ancient Rome, the notion of a locale’s genius loci signaled recognition of its enchanted, enspirited identity. But in a digitalized America of unprecedented mobility, can place still matter as seed ground for the soul? Such questions had been broached already by “ecocritics” concerned with how place-inflected experience figures in literature and by theologians concerned with “ecotheology” and “ecospirituality.” Yet this book offers a uniquely integrative perspective, informed by a theological phenomenology of place, that takes fuller account of the spiritualities associated with built environments than ecocriticism typically does. Spirits of Place blends theological and cultural analysis with personal reflection while focusing on the multilayered witness presented by American literary texts. Its interpretive readings range across texts by an array of both canonical and lesser-known writers. Along the way, it addresses themes such as the religious implications of localism versus globalism; the diverse spiritualities associated with long-term residency, resettlement, and pilgrimage; what seems to hallow some sites more than others; and how the creative spirit of Imagination figures in place-identified apprehensions of the numinous. This study grants that, whether in Christian or other religious terms, no discrete place matters absolutely. Yet it demonstrates, above all, how and why hallowed geography and the sacramentality of place have mattered throughout our cultural history. The book concludes with a case study of one collegiate experiment in place-making and contemplative learning.