How Did Poetry Survive?: The Making of Modern American Verse

This book traces the emergence of modern American poetry at the turn of the nineteenth century. With a particular focus on four "little magazines"--Poetry, The Masses, Others, and The Seven Arts--John Timberman Newcomb shows how each advanced ambitious agendas combining urban subjects, stylistic experimentation, and progressive social ideals. While subsequent literary history has favored the poets whose work made them distinct--individuals singled out usually on the basis of a novel technique--Newcomb provides a denser, richer view of the history that hundreds of poets made.

John Timberman Newcomb is a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the author of Would Poetry Disappear? American Verse and the Crisis of Modernity.