American Studies- 20th Century Resources: Poetry

A historical timeline of more than four hundred 20th-century poems. "[A] prodigious harvest . . . an entire universe of poetry lives here" (Booklist, starred review).   This groundbreaking anthology presents in chronological order over four hundred poems written during the twentieth century. The authors, both published poets themselves, give an overview of each period of history, while notes to the poems place each one in its historical context and trace the century's poetic development. Concise biographies for each poet complete the anthology. By organizing the poems in chronological order, readers will see poets in a new light. Here A. E. Houseman, for example, rubs shoulders with T. S. Eliot, showing that traditional forms can hold their own against the modernist orthodoxy. All the major events of the twentieth century are reflected in the choice of poems within these pages. Including poems by Noël Coward, Rudyard Kipling, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Robert Frost, G. K. Chesterton, Ezra Pound, Philip Larkin, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, William Carlos Williams, W. H. Auden, e. e. cummings, Dylan Thomas, Kingsley Amis, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Frank O'Hara, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, John Updike, Robert Penn Warren, among a host of others, this richly rewarding collection captures the history of the twentieth century within one monumental volume.  

This spirited anthology of contemporary American poetry focuses on the new poem -- the hybrid -- a synthesis of traditional and experimental styles. As Cole Swensen argues in the introduction to this comprehensive new anthology, the long-acknowledged "fundamental division" between experimental and traditional is disappearing in American poetry in favor of hybrid approaches that blend trends from accessible lyricism to linguistic exploration. The focus in American Hybrid is on the blend; the more than seventy poets featured here -- including Jorie Graham, Albert Goldbarth, and Lyn Hejinian -- have found new and often unique ways to reconfigure the innumerable and sometimes conflicting voices of the past thirty years. The editors have crafted short introductory essays on each of the poets in the anthology, providing biographical backgrounds and positioning them within the current of contemporary poetry. This new anthology is essential reading for those who care about the present moment -- and the future -- of American verse.

In the years between the beginning of the twentieth century and the end of World War II, American poetry was transformed, producing a body of work whose influence was felt throughout the world. Now for the first time the landmark two-volume Library of America anthology of twentieth-century poetry through the post-War years restores that era in all its astonishing beauty and explosive energy. This first volume of the set, organized chronologically by the poets' birthdates, takes the reader from Henry Adams (1838-1918) to Dorothy Parker (1893-1967), and in the process reveals the unfolding of a true poetic renaissance. Included are generous selections from some of the century's greatest poets- Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, H.D., Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot. Here they are seen as part of an age that proposed new and often contentious definitions of what American poetry could be and fresh perceptions of a society undergoing rapid and often tumultuous change. The multifarious aesthetic influences brought to bear-Chinese and Japanese poetry, the African-American sermon, the artistic revolutions of Cubism and Dada, the cadences of jazz, the brash urgencies of vernacular speech-resulted in a poetic culture of dynamic energy and startling contrasts. The poets of this era transformed not only style but traditional subject matter- there are poems here on a silent movie actress, a lynching, the tenements of New York, the trench warfare of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the landscape of Mars. Here too are folk ballads on events like the assassination of McKinley and the sinking of theTitanic; popular and humorous verse by Don Marquis and Franklin P. Adams; the famous "Spectra" hoax; song lyrics by Ma Rainey, Joe Hill, and Irving Berlin; and poems by writers as unexpected as Djuna Barnes, Sherwood Anderson, John Reed, and H. P. Lovecraft. Included are some of the century's most important poems, presented in full- Pound'sHugh Selwyn Mauberley, Eliot'sThe Waste Land, Steven'sNotes Toward a Supreme Fiction. LIBRARY OF AMERICAis an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

"With the resurgence of interest in the Beats comes this timely anthology of both poetry and prose selections... . The volume introduces the ambivalence of the age and would make a welcome gift not only for teenagers, but for their parents, as well." - Kirkus Reviews

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * Maya Angelou shares her path to living well and with meaning in this absorbing book of personal essays.   Dedicated to the daughter she never had but sees all around her, Letter to My Daughter transcends genres and categories: guidebook, memoir, poetry, and pure delight. Here in short spellbinding essays are glimpses of the tumultuous life that led Angelou to an exalted place in American letters and taught her lessons in compassion and fortitude: how she was brought up by her indomitable grandmother in segregated Arkansas, taken in at thirteen by her more worldly and less religious mother, and grew to be an awkward, six-foot-tall teenager whose first experience of loveless sex paradoxically left her with her greatest gift, a son. Whether she is recalling such lost friends as Coretta Scott King and Ossie Davis, extolling honesty, decrying vulgarity, explaining why becoming a Christian is a "lifelong endeavor," or simply singing the praises of a meal of red rice-Maya Angelou writes from the heart to millions of women she considers her extended family. Like the rest of her remarkable work, Letter to My Daughter entertains and teaches; it is a book to cherish, savor, re-read, and share. "I gave birth to one child, a son, but I have thousands of daughters. You are Black and White, Jewish and Muslim, Asian, Spanish speaking, Native Americans and Aleut. You are fat and thin and pretty and plain, gay and straight, educated and unlettered, and I am speaking to you all. Here is my offering to you."--from Letter to My Daughter

Contemporary American poetry has plenty to offer new readers, and plenty more for those who already follow it. Yet its difficulty--and sheer variety--leaves many readers puzzled or overwhelmed. The critic, scholar, and poet Stephanie Burt sets out to help. Beginning in the early 1980s, where critical consensus ends, Burt canvasses American poetry of the past four decades, from the headline-making urgency of Claudia Rankine's Citizen to the stark pathos of Louise Glück, the limitless energy of Juan Felipe Herrera, and the erotic provocations of D. A. Powell. The Poem Is You: Sixty Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them is a guide to the diverse magnificences of American poetry today. It presents a wide range of poems selected by Burt for this volume, each accompanied by an original essay explaining how a given poem works, why it matters, and how the poem speaks to other parts of art and culture. Included here are some classroom classics (by Ashbery, Komunyakaa, Hass), less famous poems by very famous poets (Glück, Kay Ryan), and poems by prizewinning poets near the start of their careers (such as Brandon Som), and by others who are not--or not yet--well known. The Poem Is You will appeal to poets, teachers, and students, but it is intended especially for readers who want to learn more about contemporary American poetry but who have not known where or how to start. It describes what American poets have fashioned for one another, and what they can give us today.

"The history of poetry and of Poetry in America are almost interchangeable, certainly inseparable," wrote A. R. Ammons. Founded by Harriet Monroe in 1912, Poetry magazine established its reputation immediately by printing T. S. Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," Carl Sandburg's "Chicago Poems," Wallace Stevens's "Sunday Morning," and the first important poems of Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, and many other then unknown, now classic authors. Publishing monthly without interruption, Poetry has become America's most distinguished magazine of verse, presenting, often for the very first time, virtually every notable poet of the last nine decades--an unprecedented record. Decade by decade, this bountiful ninetieth-anniversary anthology from Poetry includes the poems of the major talents--along with several lesser known--in all their variety: William Butler Yeats, Edgar Lee Masters, Sara Teasdale, D. H. Lawrence, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Vachel Lindsay, Robert Graves, May Sarton, Langston Hughes, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Hart Crane, Robert Penn Warren, Dylan Thomas, e. e. cummings, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Merrill, John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Robinson Jeffers, Theodore Roethke, Karl Shapiro, Anne Sexton, Thom Gunn, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Maxine Kumin, Ted Hughes, Adrienne Rich, and Galway Kinnell. In recent decades, Poetry has presented Seamus Heaney, Rita Dove, Billy Collins, Kay Ryan, Eavan Boland, Stephen Dunn, Mary Oliver, Yusef Komunyakaa, Jane Kenyon, James Tate, Sharon Olds, Louise Gl ck, Marilyn Hacker, and many, many others. T. S. Eliot called Poetry "an American institution." The Poetry Anthology is sure to be an American keepsake.

Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology galvanized attention on its publication in 1994, making "the avant-garde accessible" (Chicago Tribune) and filling "an enormous gap in the publication annals of contemporary poetry" (Marjorie Perloff). Now, two decades later, Paul Hoover returns to suggest what postmodernism means in the twenty-first century. This revised and expanded edition features 114 poets, 557 poems, and 15 poetics essays, addressing important recent movements such as Newlipo, conceptual poetry, and Flarf. Bringing together foundational postmodern poets like Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, and Allen Ginsberg with new voices like Christian Bok, Kenneth Goldsmith, and Katie Degentesh, this edition of Postmodern American Poetry is the essential collection for a new generation of readers.