The Art of Twentieth-Century American Poetry Modernism and After

by Altieri, Charles

• ISBN13: 9781405121071
• ISBN10: 1405121076
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-03-24
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

Written by a leading critic, this invigorating introduction to modernist American poetry conveys the excitement that can be generated by a careful reading of modernist poems.Encourages readers to identify with the modernists' sense of the revolutionary possibilities of their art. Embraces four generations of modernist American poets up through to the 1980s. Gives readers a sense of the ambitions, the disillusionments and the continuities of modernist poetry. Includes close readings of particular poems which show how readers can use these works to connect with what concerns them.

Author Biography

Charles Altieri is Stageberg Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. His previous publications include The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects (2003), Subjective Agency: A Theory of First-person Expressivity and its Social Implications (Blackwell, 1994), Postmodernism Now (1999), and Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry (1990).

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments	vi
List of Abbreviations	x
Introduction: The Art of Twentieth-Century American Poetry: An Overview	1	(10)
The New Realism in Modernist Poetry: Pound and Williams	11	(41)
The Doctrine of Impersonality and Modernism's War on Rhetoric: Eliot, Loy, and Moore	52	(45)
How Modernist Poetics Failed and Efforts at Renewal: Williams, Oppen, and Hughes	97	(29)
The Return to Rhetoric in Modernist Poetry: Stevens and Auden	126	(31)
Modernist Dilemmas and Early Post-Modernist Responses	157	(58)
Notes	215	(14)
Works Cited	229	(5)
Further Reading	234	(9)
Index	243