Explorers, colonists, native dwellers - all of these people played a role in early American settlement, and the legacy they left was a turbulent one. During the first three decades of the twentieth century, as the United States asserted itself as a world power, poets began to revisit this legacy and to create their own interpretations of national history. In The Colonial Moment, Jeffrey Westover shows how five major poets - Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, Hart Crane, and Langston Hughes - drew from national conflicts to assess America's new role as leader of an empire....