Bringing together over 100 years of creative and vital American poetry in one volume, Anthology of Modern American Poetry includes over 750 poems by 161 American poets ranging from Walt Whitman to Sherman Alexie. It represents not only the traditionally familiar poetic works of the last hundred years but also includes numerous poems by women, minority, and progressive writers only rediscovered in the past two decades. It is also the first anthology to give full treatment to American long poems and poetic sequences.
"A bibliography of poetry composed in what is now the United States of America and printed in the form of books or pamphlets before 1821"--Provided by publisher.
Contains poems by A.R. Ammons, Alan Ansen, John Ashbery, Marvin Bell, Michael Benedikt, John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Bly, Philip Booth, Edgar Bowers, Tom Clark, Gregory Corso, Henri Coulette, Robert Greeley, J.V. Cunningham, James Dickey, William Dickey, Alan Dugan, Alvin Feinman, Edward Field, Donald Finkel, Isabella Gardner, Jack Gilbert, Allen Ginsberg, Louise Gluck, Paul Goodman, John Haines, Donald Hall, Kenneth O. Hanson, Anthony Hecht, Daryl Hine, Daniel Hoffman, John Hollander, Richard Howard, Barbara Howes, Robert Huff, Richard Hugo, David Ignatow, Randall Jarrell, LeRoi Jones, Donald Justice, Weldon Kees, X.J. Kennedy, Galway Kinnell, Carolyn Kizer, Kenneth Koch, Al Lee, Denise Levertov, Philip Levine, Laurence Lieberman, John Logan, Robert Lowell, William H. Matchett, E.L. Mayo, William Meredith, James Merrill, W.S. Merwin, Howard Moss, Stanley Moss, Lisel Mueller, Howard Nemerov, Frank O'Hara, Charles Olson, Robert Pack, Donald Petersen, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Theodore Roethke, James Schuyler, Winfield Townley Scott, Anne Sexton, Karl Shapiro, Charles Simic, Louis Simpson, L.E. Sissman, William Jay Smith, W.D. Snodgrass, Gary Snyder, William Stafford, Mark Strand, Robert Sward, May Swenson, James Tate, Constance Urdang, Peter Viereck, David Wagoner, Ds.
Throughout the 19th century, American poetry was a profoundly populist literary form. It circulated in New England magazines and Southern newspapers; it was read aloud in taverns, homes, and schools across the country. Antebellum reviewers envisioned poetry as the touchstone democratic genre, and their Civil War–era counterparts celebrated its motivating power, singing poems on battlefields. Following the war, however, as criticism grew more professionalized and American literature emerged as an academic subject, reviewers increasingly elevated difficult, dispassionate writing and elite readers over their supposedly common counterparts, thereby separating “authentic” poetry for intellectuals from “popular” poetry for everyone else.\ Conceptually and methodologically unique among studies of 19th-century American poetry, Who Killed American Poetry? not only charts changing attitudes toward American poetry, but also applies these ideas to the work of representative individual poets. Closely analyzing hundreds of reviews and critical essays, Karen L. Kilcup tracks the century’s developing aesthetic standards and highlights the different criteria reviewers used to assess poetry based on poets’ class, gender, ethnicity, and location. She shows that, as early as the 1820s, critics began to marginalize some kinds of emotional American poetry, a shift many scholars have attributed primarily to the late-century emergence of affectively restrained modernist ideals. Mapping this literary critical history enables us to more readily apprehend poetry’s status in American culture—both in the past and present—and encourages us to scrutinize the standards of academic criticism that underwrite contemporary aesthetics and continue to constrain poetry’s appeal. Who American Killed Poetry? enlarges our understanding of American culture over the past two hundred years and will interest scholars in literary studies, historical poetics, American studies, gender studies, canon criticism, genre studies, the history of criticism, and affect studies. It will also appeal to poetry readers and those who enjoy reading about American cultural history.
American poetry's two characteristics -- American English as a poetic resource -- Convention and idiosyncrasy -- Auden and Eliot : two complicating examples -- On the present and future of American poetry.
