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In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, during the period of the American Revolution and the early republic, political poems appeared regularly in newspapers and pamphlets. commenting on the issues and controversies engaging the new nation. Given the sheer number of poems that engaged explicitly with politics, one might wonder why the form has remained largely ignored by scholars of early American literature even as many other once obscure forms—sentimental novels, diaries, travelogues, belles letters—have enjoyed unprecedented scholarly interest in recent decades. Part of the reason may stem from frustrations involved with reading poems that are so highly topical—often requiring, even as a condition of first-level comprehension, a familiarity with names and references that, while wholly recognizable in their own time, are obscure to modem readers. Yet beyond this is the fact that American political verse from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has never fully shaken off the verdict, delivered by its earliest generation of scholarly readers. that it is simply unworthy of serious attention as literature. Even the term commonly used to describe it—"verse." as opposed to "poetry"— suggests an occasional or forgettable, rather than enduring, form of expression, not quite deserving the designation of poetry. Nor was such verse considered by early critics as worthy of the designation "American." as the tendency of eighteenth-century American poets to model their works on those of British precursors suggested an unforgivable failure, as one critic described it. to declare their "literary independence" from Britain.

Though_________in his musical expression, the American jazz bassist and composer Charles Mingus

eventually developed a personal voice that proved to be much more than a simple mixture of jazz styles.

The poet Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) was the premier Black writer of poetry that used the dialect of rural African Americans of the southern United States. Although Dunbar's works were both popular with readers am! acclaimed by literary critics during his lifetime, after the First World War a radical shift occurred, at least in critical opinion of his poetry, and twentieth-century critical evaluation of his work has been generally negative. Some critics attacked his work on social grounds for failing to challenge plantation stereotypes of African Americans. Other critics, such as the poet James Weldon Johnson, argued from aesthetic grounds that dialect poetry in general was too limited as an artistic medium, and capable of producing only two effects: pathos and humor. The negative critical trend only began to reverse itself in the 1970s, when scholars began to emphasize the importance of mythic, psyclwlogical. and historical dimensions of Dunbar's works, focusing on the interior and exterior realities of African American life after the Civil War.

Which of the following can be inferred from the passage concerning Litrary critics’ evaluations of Dunbar's poetry?

The relevance of the literary personality—a writer's distinctive attitudes, concerns, and artistic choices—to the analysis of a literary work is being scrutinized by various schools of contemporary criticism. Deconstmctionists view the literary personality, like the writer's biographical personality, as irrelevant. The proper focus of literary analysis, they argue, is a work's intertextuality (interrelationship with other texts), subtexts (unspoken, concealed. or repressed discourses), and metatexts (self-referential aspects), not a perception of a writer's verbal and aesthetic "fingerprints." New historicists also devalue the literary personality, since, in their emphasis on a work's historical context, they credit a writer with only those insights and ideas that were generally available when the writer lived. However, to readers interested in literary detective work—say scholars of classical (Greek and Roman! literature who wish to reconstruct damaged texts or deduce a work's authorship— the literary personality sometimes provides vital clues.

It can be inferred from the passage that on the issue of how to analyze a literary work, the new historic its would most likely agree with the deconstructionists that