The Cambridge Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Poetry

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by Christopher Beach

Cambridge University Press

Due/Published November 2003, 224 pages, paper

ISBN 0521891493

The Cambridge Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Poetry is designed to give readers a brief but thorough introduction to the various movements, schools, and groups of American poets in the twentieth century. It will help readers to understand and analyze modern and contemporary poems. The first part of the book deals with the transition from the nineteenth-century lyric to the modernist poem, focussing on the work of major modernists such as Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and W. C. Williams. In the second half of the book, the focus is on groups such as the poets of the Harlem Renaissance, the New Critics, the Confessionals, and the Beats. In each chapter, discussions of the most important poems are placed in the larger context of literary, cultural, and social history.

 Contents

Introduction; 1. A new century; 2. Modernist expatriates: Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot; 3. Lyric modernism: Wallace Stephens and Hart Crane; 4. Gendered modernism; 5. William Carlos Williams and the modernist American scene; 6. From the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts Movement; 7. The New Criticism and poetic formalism; 8. The Confessional Movement; 9. Lyric as meditation; 10. The New American Poetry and the postmodern avant-garde.