The Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674373405 ISBN 13: 9780674373402

Publisher: Belknap Press, 1985

Synopsis

Join Professor Helen Vendler in her course lecture on the Yeats poem "Among School Children". View her insightful and passionate analysis along with a condensed reading and student comments on the course.

The poetry collected in this volume reveals the range and power of the contemporary American imagination. The verve, freedom, and boldness of American English are combined with the new harmonies of modern cadence. Here are distillations of twentieth-century perception, feeling, and thought, and reflections of changing social realities, scientific and psychoanalytic insights, and the strong voices of feminism and black consciousness. This is a book for those who value fresh and original poetry and for readers worldwide who are curious about contemporary American experience.

Helen Vendler relies on her own taste and judgment in singling out excellent poems, beginning with the late modernist flowering of Wallace Stevens and continuing to the present. Her wide-ranging Introduction places recent American poetry in its aesthetic and social contexts. The anthology provides an extensive offering of the work of major poets and introduces many writers who are only now beginning to make their reputation. Thirty-five poets are included, with a representative selection from the earlier to later work of each and a significant number of long poems. Brief biographies of the poets are appended.

About this title

About the Author:

Helen Vendler is A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University.

Review:

For a statement of how poetry exists and how we come to it, these 7,000 words [in the preface] cannot be bettered...Then there's the question of difficulty, and Helen Vendler is admirable again...Those, and her more particular statements about new American poets and their interrelations, are worth the book's price. So, on the whole, are the poems. (Hugh Kenner Boston Globe)

Towards the end of her multi-faceted introductory essay, Helen Vendler says that she has made "a sampling of what to my taste seems satisfying" in the great flood of recent American poetry. Since she is one of the foremost critics of poetry in America, her taste has more than purely personal significance. In fact, her "sampling" amounts to a progress report on what has happened in American poetry from the 1950s to the present. (Peter Hainsworth Times Literary Supplement)

[Vendler] is at her best when discussing the history of formal changes within poems themselves. Her thoughts on endings, (i.e. contemporary release from resounding closure) are illuminating, ingeniously conceived as a "tentativeness of gesture," a response to society's pluralism of view...[She] pinpoint[s] "the absence of the transcendent" as American poetry's most haunting loss and enumerates post-modernist strengths in her most intriguing, elliptical style...Vendler's anthology does what most anthologies do: It gives poets and critics more cause for argument--and perhaps provides new insight into which lyrics...can be called truly American. (Carol Muske Los Angeles Times Book Review)

The anthology that Vendler has assembled...is both personal and revisionist, revealing her particular vision of the canon of recent American poetry (though Vendler of course knows that it is not critics or anthologists in the end who determine our canons)...On the crucial question to be asked of a collection like this--how well does it represent the best developments in the era it covers? Vendler has done her work so well that it will surely be many years before anyone does it better. (Yale Review)

In her present capacity as poetry review for the New Yorker, and (in the past) for the New York Times Book Review, Helen Vendler has been most influentially involved in deciding exactly which volumes are to be deemed memorable. She is the best close reader of poems to found on the literary pages, and she exercises, by common consent, a powerful role in the establishment of poetic reputation on the trans-Atlantic scene. She is judicious but not mealy-mouthed and operates with as firm a sense of what she would resist as what she favours. (Seamus Heaney The Observer)

About this edition

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Publication date: 1985
• ISBN 10: 0674373405
• ISBN 13: 9780674373402
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 452
• Editor: Vendler Helen