Paul Lewis, editor of “The Citizen Poets of Boston: A Collection of Forgotten Poems, 1789–1820”

Welcome to Boston in the early years of the republic. Prepare to journey by stage coach with a young man moving to the “bustling city”; stop by a tavern for food and conversation; eavesdrop on clerks and customers in a dry goods shop; and get stuck in what might have been Boston’s first traffic jam. Selected from over 4,500 poems published locally during the early national period, these mostly anonymous works reveal the vibrant, lost world of Boston’s post-revolutionary poetry and provide access to the culture and daily life of the city. The Citizen Poets of Boston anthology evolved out of an exhibition on Boston’s literary history thatPaul Lewis, Professor of English at Boston College, curated in 2012 at the Boston Public Library and the Massachusetts Historical Society. Some of the Boston College students who helped research the exhibition will join Lewis in reading and discussing these long-neglected poems.