Twentieth-Century American Poetics: Poets on the Art of Poetry

by Gioia, Dana; Mason, David; Schoerke, Meg

• ISBN13: 9780072414721
• ISBN10: 0072414723
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-12-24
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education

Summary

This comprehensive chronological anthology includes 58 essays on poetry by 53 poets. Starting with James Weldon Johnson and Robert Frost, the book offers diverse and often conflicting accounts of the nature and function of poetry. The collection includes rarely anthologized essays by Jack Spicer, Rhina Espaillat, Anne Stevenson, and Ron Silliman, as well as work by some of the finest younger critics in America, including William Logan, Alice Fulton, and Christian Wiman.

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938)

Preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry

Robert Frost (1874-1963)

The Sound of Sense

The Figure a Poem Makes

Amy Lowell (1874-1925)

Preface to Some Imagist Poets 1916

Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)

Composition as Explanation

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)

The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)

A New Measure

The Poem as a Field of Action

Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

A Retrospect

How to Read

Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962)

Poetry, Gongorism, and a Thousand Years

Marianne Moore (1887-1972)

Idiosyncrasy and Technique

T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

Reflections on Vers Libre

Tradition and the Individual Talent

Louise Bogan (1897-1970)

The Springs of Poetry

Hart Crane (1899-1932)

General Aims and Theories

Allen Tate (1899-1979)

Tension in Poetry

Yvor Winters (1900-1968)

Foreword to The Testament of a Stone

Langston Hughes (1902-1967)

The Negro Poet and the Racial Mountain

Louis Zukofsky (1904-1978)

An Objective

Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982)

Disengagement: The Art of the Beat Generation

Charles Olson (1910-1970)

Projective Verse

J.V. Cunningham (1911-1985)

The Problem of Form

Robert Hayden (1913-1980)

Introduction to Kaleidoscope: Poems by Negro Poets

Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980)

from The Life of Poetry

Randall Jarrell (1914-1965)

The Obscurity of the Poet

William Stafford (1914-1993)

Some Arguments Against Good Diction

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)

The New Black

Robert Duncan (1919-1988)

The Homosexual in Society

Denise Levertov (1923-1997)

Some Notes on Organic Form

Louis Simpson (b. 1923)

Reflections on Narrative Poetry

Donald Justice (b. 1925)

Meters and Memory

Jack Spicer (1925-1965)

On Spoken Poetry

Robert Bly (b. 1926)

A Wrong Turn

Robert Creeley (b. 1926)

To Define

Poems Are a Complex

Frank O'Hara (1926-1966)

Personism: A Manifesto

John Ashbery (b. 1927)

The Invisible Avant-Garde

W.S. Merwin (b. 1927)

On Open Form

Donald Hall (b. 1928)

Poetry and Ambition

Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)

When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision

Rhina Espaillat (b. 1932)

Bilingual/Biligue

Anne Stevenson (b. 1933)

Writing as a Woman

Charles Simic (b. 1938)

Negative Capability and Its Children

Jack Foley (b. 1940)

"'What about All This…' Speculations on Poetry and My Relation to It"

Robert Pinsky (b. 1940)

Responsibilities of the Poet

Lyn Hejinian (b. 1941)

The Rejection of Closure

Louise Glück (b. 1944)

Disruption, Hesitation, Silence

Mary Kinzie (b. 1944)

The Rhapsodic Fallacy

Shirley Geok-lin Lim (b. 1944)

The Scarlet Brewer and the Voice of the Colonized

Ron Silliman (b. 1946)

The Political Economy of Poetry

Timothy Steele (b. 1948)

Tradition and Revolution: The Modern Movement and Free Verse

Julia Alvarez (b. 1950)

So Much Depends

Dana Gioia (b. 1950)

Can Poetry Matter?

William Logan (b. 1950)

Four of Five Motions Toward a Poetics

Rita Dove (b. 1952) and Marilyn Nelson (b. 1946)

from "A Black Rainbow: Modern Afro-American Poetry"

Alice Fulton (b. 1952)

Of Formal, Free, and Fractal Verse: Singing the Body Electric

Christian Wiman (b. 1966)

A Piece of Prose