A Concise Companion To Twentieth Century American Poetry

This Concise Companion gives readers a rich sense of how thepoetry produced in the United States during the twentieth centuryis connected to the country’s intellectual life more broadly. Helps readers to fully appreciate the poetry of the period bytracing its historical and cultural contexts. Written by prominent specialists in the field. Places the poetry of the period within contexts such as: war;feminism and the female poet; poetries of immigration andmigration; communism and anti-communism; philosophy andtheory. Each chapter ranges across the entire century, comparing poetsfrom one part of the century to those of another. New syntheses make the volume of interest to scholars as wellas students and general readers.

Written by a leading authority on William Carlos Williams, this book provides a wide-ranging and stimulating guide to twentieth-century American poetry. A wide-ranging and stimulating critical guide to twentieth-century American poetry. Written by a leading authority on the innovative modernist poet, William Carlos Williams. Explores the material, historical and social contexts in which twentieth-century American poetry was produced. Includes a biographical dictionary of major writers with extended entries on poets ranging from Robert Frost to Adrienne Rich. Contains a section on key texts considering major works, such as ‘The Waste Land’, ‘North & South’, ‘Howl’ and ‘Ariel’. The final section draws out key themes, such as American poetry, politics and war, and the process of anthologizing at the end of the century.

Includes more than six hundred A-to-Z entries which provide concise information on particular poems, poets, and subjects which have contributed to this literary form.

Publisher Description

An anthology of twentieth-century American poetry, featuring Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, Derek Walcott, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, Anne Sexton, and many others.

This Companion brings together essays on some fifty-four American poets, from Anne Bradstreet to contemporary performance poetry. This book also examines such movements in American poetry as modernism, the Harlem (or New Negro) Renaissance, "confessional" poetry, the Black Mountain School, the New York School, the Beats, and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry.

"Concise and well-written essays." - Choice "A valuable tool for students interested in 20th-century American poetry.' - Booklist/RBB This volume contains over 400 entries that treat a broad range of individual poets and poems, along with many articles devoted to topics, schools, or periods of American verse in the twentieth century. Entries fall into three main categories: poet entries, which provide biographical and cultural contexts for the author's career; entries on individual works, which offer closer explication of the most resonant poems in the 20th-century canon; topical entries, looking at eras, school, themes, and verse traditions of the USA. Comprehensive and fully indexed, this crucial resource is available now in paperback.