It should no longer be necessary to speak with careful qualification of Ezra Pound's “ alleged ” fascism, or “ alleged ” anti-Semitism. The man who saw in Mussolini the greatest European leader since Napoleon (and believed that both were brought down by Jewish usurers), who in his wartime broadcasts praised Mein Kampf for its “ keen historical analysis ” and advised his hearers to read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, who in those same broadcasts spoke of “ kikes, sheenies and oily people ” and referred to American “ Jewspapers,” who in his Cantos quotes approvingly a forged statement by Franklin warning Americans to keep out the Jews, who gave most of his energies during the last year and a half of the war to propagandizing for Mussolini's Salo Republic and was described by its officials as “ the collaborator Ezra Pound ” — that man can accurately be termed a fascist.

There is no comprehensive study of Federalist opposition to the War of 1812. The fragmentary studies that exist suggest a party divided between New England extremists on the one hand and moderates in the Middle and Southern States on the other. In this interpretative framework, Federalists to the south and west are invariably portrayed as “good” Federalists, that is, as patriots who consciously and decisively rejected New England's leadership in order to support the war or at least maintain a discreet neutrality. A closer examination of the subject, however, suggests that this view is largely false.

Early on a December morning in 1848, long before anyone else stirred, two slaves, a man and woman, made their bid for freedom from a plantation, just outside Macon, Georgia. She, almost white, was dressed as a slave master, he as her valet. In four days they were in Philadelphia; three weeks later they moved to the safer city of Boston where they remained until the passing of the infamous Fugitive Slave Bill in September 1850 forced them to flee to England. Nineteen years were spent under the “ mane of the British lion ” free from the “ claws of the American eagle.” Finally, after the Civil War they returned as farmers to their native Georgia. Their bold odyssey in 1848 brought them fame and renown. It was a story of love, determination and resilience, the virtues of frontier America, conquering all odds. No other escape, with the possible exception of Frederick Douglass' and Josiah Henson's, created such a stir in ante-bellum America as did the Crafts'.

Sergei Eisenstein, the Russian film-maker, called An American Tragedy “ as broad and shoreless as the Hudson … as immense as life itself.” It allowed, he wrote, “ almost any point of view of itself.” This rare quality of multi-faceted massiveness has fathered a large number of critical studies, which all vary in their reading of the text and the significance they attribute to Dreiser's protagonist, Clyde Griffiths. For Irving Howe, Clyde represents “ the passivity, rootlessness and self-alienation of urban man,” while for F. O. Matthiessen, he is “ a victim of the contemporary American dream.” Richard Lehan views him deterministically as “ a young man … caught in and finally destroyed by the crush of conflicting forces,” while Ellen Moers generalizes him into “ the Everyman of desire.” These interpretations acknowledge Clyde's representative stature, but make only imprecise gestures towards its origins. The vagueness they suffer from has its root in an individualist emphasis upon the character and fate of the protagonist and a corresponding lack of specificity in describing the social framework with which that character interacts. Eisenstein regarded Clyde's crime as “ the sum total of those social relations, the influence of which he was subjected to at every stage of his unfolding biography and character.” An analysis of these “ social relations,” particularly as elaborated in the closely integrated themes of youth, class, and consumerism, is a prerequisite to a more exact identification of Clyde's social representativeness.

The use of American Indian oral literature as a source of inspiration or as a guide to composition, and the continuing attempts at translation from this literature have grown rapidly in the past ten years. While there have been efforts at direct translation of Indian songs and poems for many years, it is only a comparatively recent development which has seen some contemporary American poets not only beginning to formulate new approaches to translation but also discovering the possibilities of using some aspects of American Indian oral culture in their own original poetry. Ethnopoetics has emerged as a general term to describe a poetic movement of sorts dedicated to the exploration of the potential of primitive oral literature and its translation into English. Like many general labels, it is an incomplete and unsatisfactory term with which to describe the wide variety, and varying quality, of work being produced by poets associated with the movement; however it is a term adopted by the poets themselves and is respected as such.