The Cambridge Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Poetry

by Christopher Beach

• ISBN13: 9780521814690
• ISBN10: 0521814693
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-11-24
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Introduction	1	(6)
A new century: from the genteel poets to Robinson and Frost	7	(16)
Modernist expatriates	23	(26)
Ezra pound
T.S. Eliot
Lyric modernism	49	(23)
Wallace Stevens
Hart Crane
Gendered modernism	72	(21)
William Carlos Williams and the modernist American scene	93	(21)
From the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts movement	114	(23)
The New Criticism and poetic formalism	137	(17)
The confessional moment	154	(19)
Lyric as meditation	173	(16)
The New American Poetry and the postmodern avant-grade	189	(21)
Notes	210	(5)
Glossary	215	(2)
Index	217