Stephen Cushman

Biography

Stephen Cushman has published seven collections of poetry, most recently Keep the Feast (LSU, 2022), as well as two books of criticism and three books about the Civil War. He is general editor of the fourth edition of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (2012) and Robert C. Taylor Professor of English at the University of Virginia. 

See Work

POETRY / Spring 2006

Beside the Point

By Stephen Cushman

The sky has never won a prize.
The clouds have no careers.
The rainbow doesn’t say my work,
thank goodness.

ESSAYS / Spring 2005

Whitman and Patriotism

By Stephen Cushman

What some might call Whitman’s essentialism is only one of the features of his statement about the United States that might mark it, in some eyes, as dated, obsolete, historically confined and limited. Another is his use of the plural verb...

CRITICISM / Winter 2002

Spoon River Bard

By Stephen Cushman

Turn to the Edgar Lee Masters entry in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (I happen to be looking at the 14th edition, published in 1968, the centennial anniversary of Masters’s birth), and you will find brief quotations from five poems that...

CRITICISM / Autumn 2003

Master of Melody

By Stephen Cushman

But disorderliness does not mean that the essays and the volume as a whole have no continuity or coherence. As an index would have shown (alas, there is none, but more on this absence later), names and topics recur throughout Melodies...

POETRY / Summer 1997

The Kingdom of Things

By Stephen Cushman

When the heart valve buckles
or the brain vessel ruptures and I,
at last accomplished, stumble sloshed
in blood over the edge of the earth
into the faulty recall of a few people,
don’t weep for me.

POETRY / Autumn 2001

The Alabama Sharecropper’s Wife

By Stephen Cushman

has a name of her own, you know. So?
So ask her what in tarnation she thinks
she’s doing here among the bathers, nudes
reclining, torsos of Venus, costumed odalisques