The sporting muse

the long version

"Scholars of popular culture know that sports - how they are conceived, organized, played, and celebrated - can teach us much about society. In this study of contemporary American sports poetry, Don Johnson considers what we can learn from the poems that sports have inspired." "From tribal victory chants to Thayer's "Casey at the Bat" to the poems of the twenty-first century, the study first considers the history of sports poetry. With detailed readings of many poems, individual chapters focus on poems about baseball; football; basketball; women's sports; golf, racquet sports, and boxing; and fans and spectators." "This study demonstrates that a considerable body of sports poetry exists in American culture, and offers that poetry the serious analysis it deserves."--Jacket.