revisits and deeply historicizes this question. Ryan Cull explores the relationship of a diverse set of poets, including Walt Whitman, Jean Toomer, Hart Crane, James Merrill, Thylias Moss, and Claudia Rankine, to a series of movements intended to build inclusion: the St. Louis Hegelians, cultural pluralism, identity politics, and multiculturalism. In tracing the tensions in lyric poetry's merger with the pursuit of recognition, Cull offers a new history of the political work of lyric poetry while exposing the discursive roots of the nation's faltering progress toward becoming a more inclusive democracy.