... approach the subject of Indians? What affective stances should poets assume? Was sentimental discourse, especially on Native Americans, inherently “savage”? This essay illuminates the period’s genre norms, concurrently questioning two current critical conventions. Demonstrating how poetry—including its...

... defended as Americanisms necessary to comprehend the new topography and life-forms that Europeans were finding in the New World. Cooper found such words not only among older usages in English, but also in French, Dutch, and especially Native American adoptions—and even in some neologisms of his own. Unlike...