Welcome to the website of

Stephen J. Adams, Professor Emeritus, 

Western University Department of English and Writing Studies

My primary research interests have been related in one way or another to Ezra Pound⁠—the subject of my dissertation⁠—and music. On the literary side, I have branched out in the directions of Modernism and American literature in general, as well as into prosody and metrical theory. On the musical side, I have written about the Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer, and about musical and literary inter-relationships, especially as they relate to Pound.

Since co-editing The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia for Greenwood Press with Demetres Tryphonopoulos (now Dean at Augustana College, University of Alberta), I have completed a long-term project on the American ode. The Patriot Poets traces the development of two highly political genres within the American tradition, the ode and the progress poem—a genre previously unrecognized. Beginning with the Poet of the American Revolution, Philip Freneau, these genres have arisen in close connection with major crises in American history: the Revolution, the Civil War, the Great Depression, and the rise of American imperialism. It involves by-the-way questions about relationships among poetics, history, politics, and the purposes of poetry beyond lyric.