American Poetry : The Twentieth Century, Volume 1 : Henry Adams to Dorothy Parker - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1883011779 ISBN 13: 9781883011772

Publisher: Library of America, 2000

Synopsis

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 the Titanic; 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’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Eliot’s The Waste Land, Steven’s Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is 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.

About this title

About the Author

Robert Hass is one of America's most acclaimed poets, winner of both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. He was poet laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997.

John Hollander (1929–2013) published nearly two dozen books of poetry, including Selected Poetry (1993), Figurehead (1999), and A Draft of Light (2008), as well as five books of criticism. He received the Bollingen Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship, and was Sterling Professor of English at Yale University.

Carolyn Kizer (1925-2014) was the author of more than a dozen works of poetry, prose, and translation. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1985.

Nathaniel Mackey is a poet, novelist, anthologist, literary critic, and editor. He is the Reynolds Price Professor of Creative Writing at Duke University and a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets.

Marjorie Perloff teaches courses and writes on twentieth and twenty-first century poetry and poetics. She is Professor Emerita of English at Stanford University and Florence R. Scott Professor of English Emerita at the University of Southern California.

Reviews

These two volumes make up the first half of the largest anthology of 20th-century American poetry ever attempted. Over 200 poets are represented, all born before 1914, and presented in birth-date order. The scale here is unprecedented, and the spectrum broad, inclusive and generous. The effect is breathtaking. The first volume begins with anonymous ballads, establishing a theme of popular song that is sustained throughout both volumes, including blues, folks songs and Broadway tunes. This suggests the music that was in the air at the time much of this work was being written, as well as asserting the value of these songs as poetry in their own right. "I can tell the wind is rising/ leaves trembling on the trees/ umm hmm hmm hmm/ all I need my little sweet woman/ and to keep my company" (Robert Johnson, vol. 2). The emphasis in vol. 1 is on the richness of modernism, with enormous selections of Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, H.D., Marianne Moore and T.S. Eliot. Several of these are long enough to comprise an entire volume of selected poems. (Mina Loy gets more than the usual page or two.) The selections are solidly edited, presenting the most representative and well-known poems across each writer's oeuvre. The second volume includes many more poets, and tends toward shorter selections, though Hart Crane is featured prominently. Multiple and simultaneous layers of American poetics are represented side-by-side in both volumes: lyricism, early confessional poetry, Imagism, light verse, Objectivism, the Harlem Renaissance, hoaxes, the Fugitives, among others. One of the greatest pleasures of these books is discovering (or re-discovering) poets like Abraham Lincoln Gillespie, Lola Ridge, John G. Neihardt or dadaist Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven, energetic and distinct poets who have long since been dropped from most cullings, or were never included in the first place. This anthology, edited by Robert Hass, John Hollander, Carolyn Kizer, Nathaniel Mackey and Marjorie Perloff, will be an invaluable and lasting resource to anyone interested in American poetry. Its inclusive take on the multiplicity of work leaves all the differences intact, all the layers in context. It brilliantly illuminates the shifting substance of American poetry. (Apr.) FYI: Geoffrey O'Brien is editor-in-chief of the Library of America, and the author of The Times Square Story and other nonfiction, as well as of Floating City: Selected Poems 1978-1995. His The Browser's Ecstasy: A Meditation on Reading is due from Counterpoint in June.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Part of the distinguished Library of America series, this impressive anthology was edited by Robert Hass, John Hollander, Carolyn Kizer, Nathaniel Mackey, and Marjorie Perloff, who arranged the poets chronologically by date of birth. Readers will appreciate the diversity of the poetry, including generous selections of the high moderns (Robert Frost, e.e. cummings, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, and Theodore Roethke). There is also vers de societ (Dorothy Parker, Phyllis McGinley, Ogden Nash, and Virginia Adair). African American writers include Arna Bontemps, Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Richard Wright, and Claude McKay. Even musicians and composers are well represented (Woody Guthrie, Bessie Smith, Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin, and Oscar Hammerstein). The two volumes contain more than 1500 poems by over 200 different poets, with excellent biographical and textual notes and an index of first lines. Essential for all poetry collections.
-Daniel L. Guillory, Millikin Univ., Findlay, IL
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Library of America
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1883011779
• ISBN 13: 9781883011772
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 1000