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  • Cited by 2
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
December 2014
Print publication year:
2014
Online ISBN:
9780511762284

Book description

The Cambridge History of American Poetry offers a comprehensive exploration of the development of American poetic traditions from their beginnings until the end of the twentieth century. Bringing together the insights of fifty distinguished scholars, this literary history emphasizes the complex roles that poetry has played in American cultural and intellectual life, detailing the variety of ways in which both public and private forms of poetry have met the needs of different communities at different times. The Cambridge History of American Poetry recognizes the existence of multiple traditions and a dramatically fluid canon, providing current perspectives on both major authors and a number of representative figures whose work embodies the diversity of America's democratic traditions.

Reviews

'… a physically imposing fifty-chapter book, consisting of more than 1300 densely packed pages and weighing almost four pounds. But this rather daunting volume turns out to be not just an essential addition to any serious poetry library but an exciting and absorbing reconceptualization of American poetry … The History has a lot of possible uses. Individual chapters could be very helpfully assigned to students in American literature classes. It will make a valuable reference work for when you suddenly need to figure out who the Connecticut Wits were. Scholars will find new ideas in the chapters dealing with their areas of expertise (or at least I did in Robin Schulze’s discussion of Marianne Moore’s cosmopolitanism). The book’s greatest value, however, is in providing a series of orientations - detailed but manageable - to fifty different permutations of American poetry. For readers with the time, it is enormously satisfying to read it cover to cover: even the most knowledgeable reader will gain insight into the richness, variety, and surprising harmony of American poetry.'

Rachel Trousdale Source: Twentieth-Century Literature

'… all a student would need to gain working knowledge of American poetry through the end of the last millennium. … Those looking for a roundup of the best late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century literary criticism on American poetry will find more gathered here than in any other single volume.'

Elisa New Source: Modern Philology

'Celebrated teachers as well as critics, Bendixen and Burt position themselves as knowledgeable enthusiasts, not as kingmakers or gatekeepers, in order to bring to poetry a vital curiosity … Burt and Bendixen imagine their field in full 3D: as a set of intersecting planes, formed by means of poetic affinities, identities, and unexpected resemblances.'

Walt Hunter Source: Essays in Criticism

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Contents


Page 2 of 3


  • Chapter 22 - The Twentieth Century Begins
    pp 497-518
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The term genteel tradition appear frequently in American literary histories and criticism, indicating conventional forms of literature that respect, and adhere to, the cultural, social, and economic status quo. One particular group of poets that literary history has long identified as emblematic of the genteel tradition is the New York School. Bayard Taylor, George H. Boker, and Richard Henry Stoddard saw New York as the literary future, overtaking in primacy the long-standing rank of Boston as the center of American letters. Taylor in particular produced what Richard Cary calls staggering amounts of writing, including travel books and encyclopedias, novels, poetry, poetical drama, literary histories, translations, histories, short stories, critical essays, and parodies. A rigid concept of the genteel tradition has prevented people complex matrix of related poetic practices, both across the era more generally and within the careers of individual poets.
  • Chapter 23 - Robert Frost and Tradition
    pp 519-541
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Children's poetry is barely studied and barely taught, except as an instrumental teaching tool in colleges of education. American children's poetry, like American literature more generally, took on distinctive characteristics after about 1820, as more work was written and published by Americans. The practice of addressing adults and children together in volumes of poetry spanned the whole nineteenth century, although it was slightly more common during the antebellum period. Most scholarly work on the child like qualities of women authors stresses that, although the voice seems innocent, it is really an adult voice making an adult point. The few poems that Emily Dickinson published in her lifetime appeared mostly in intergenerational venues, like the Springfield Republican, that routinely published poems for a child/adult mixed readership. After the Civil War, children's poetry became relatively less concerned with useful lessons and more concerned with sales.
  • Chapter 24 - T. S. Eliot
    pp 542-556
  • View abstract

    Summary

    American popular poetry often fuses local color with dialect and doggerel. It is marked by several distinguishing characteristics. The authors address a popular audience, focusing their work on unique characters, local scenes, specific events and social issues, sometimes with an emphasis on social or political satire. Popular poetry often exemplifies the qualities associated with literary realism. The new popular tradition was born in the common regions of American life, both agrarian and urban, using language and images that were simple, earthy, local, and comic. Bret Harte's poems show local characters engaged in trivial cheating, card playing or aping their betters. His treatment of Truthful James and the Heathen Chinee is slightly more satirical than Hay's style. An epic impulse is at the foundation of much American writing, both serious and comic. Native Americans played an important role in the development of poems with characteristically American themes.
  • Chapter 25 - William Carlos Williams
    pp 557-582
  • The Shock of the Familiar
  • View abstract

    Summary

    A great deal of critical attention has been paid to naturalism in fiction, not as much has been paid to the movement's impact on poetry, perhaps in part because naturalist poets themselves appeared most successful in other genres, especially fiction and social science. The most important and influential American naturalist poets, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edwin Markham and Stephen Crane, were writing for a popular press, with the line between muckraking journalism and poetry at times significantly blurred. Gilman's politics build on a foundational naturalism: while individuals are controlled by their environment, she also believes that that environment is susceptible to change. Also like Gilman, Markham became widely famous for a single blockbuster poem. Crane's naturalism is on full display, as his speaker finds himself in a world where man is beast, caught in a jungle that allows for no comfort in any guiding light.
  • Chapter 27 - Marianne Moore and the Printed Page
    pp 603-627
  • View abstract

    Summary

    American literary culture's foremost living practitioners, the Fireside Poets Longfellow, Lowell, Emerson, Bryant, Holmes and Whittier, were lionized as the nation's greatest creative spirits. The middle-aged avant-gardists of the 1910s were more oriented toward the exploration of new forms than were their turn-of-the-century predecessors, but both groups' exhibit qualities that mark them as modern in outlook. They are among the earliest manifestations of a defining tendency of twentieth-century American poetry, away from long-standing homiletic and patriotic traditions celebrating normative social values and toward the elaboration of oppositional subject positions. Although the climate of crisis and anxiety in American poetry would not ease substantially until 1912, some attempt to renew interest in contemporary verse can be detected from the middle of the first decade of the century. American verse was economically impossible dreams, insisting on poetry's self-sufficient identity in the modern literary scene.
  • Chapter 28 - The Formalist Modernism of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Helene Johnson, and Louise Bogan
    pp 628-649
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Robert Frost became the most well-known English-language poet of the twentieth century. Frost's choice was deliberate. There is a kind of success called of esteem, he wrote in a letter early in his career and it butters no parsnips. His first volume, A Boy's Will, takes its title from Longfellow, and its opening work, called Into My Own, presents a speaker who would be only more sure of all of his thought was true. Cognition does not apprehend the world so much as work on and in it, Frost believes, through the effortful links by which one turns the alien and unknown into the significant and owned. Frost was deeply read in English-language poetry and knew classical literature in the original, his uniquely rhymed sonnet recalls a Virgilian georgic tradition manifest also in Marvell's and Wordsworth's verse. The question of the renewal marks one final philosophical theme that pervades Frost's poetry and deepens particularly his poems of marriage.
  • Chapter 29 - The Romantic and Anti-Romantic in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens
    pp 650-669
  • View abstract

    Summary

    T.S.Eliot was the figure who defined modernist poetry for educated Americans. His isolated childhood had produced considerable alienation from quotidian society, making it necessary for him ultimately to find a sense of belonging only in a relation to transcendental domain. The Waste Land has five sections that are beautifully correlated with the movements of Beethoven's quartets. Each builds on juxtapositions and allusions to reflect a different aspect of spiritual crisis. The poem asks whether there is an alternative to this death by water, and so whether there is any possibility of reading water as baptismal. After The Waste Land Eliot was done with trying by secular poetry to establish a spiritual core for his culture. He devoted his secular energies to founding and editing the review The Criterion, which from 1922 to 1939 tried to represent the best writing in Europe about its cultural dilemmas.
  • Chapter 30 - Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and the East Coast Projectivists
    pp 670-700
  • View abstract

    Summary

    In accounts of American poetry, William Carlos Williams is a marker of the development of modernism, of the avant-garde and of a democratic art of everyday speech. However, he has become important to the literary chronology. Williams's success in addressing his present with appropriate poetic quickness remains apparent, but it is also clear that the poem is a century old. Williams's sense of his own cultural deficit may be a constant, but even his yelling shows that he was keeping up with the latest manifestos from Europe. This Is Just to Say poem's simple vocabulary, narrative economy and realism, in the sense that Williams actually ate those plums and then scrawled those lines, make it suitable for eighth grade pedagogy. For him, art could not begin without the artist's attentive imbrication with the matters of everyday life. One of his short stories, Comedy Entombed furnishes an example.
  • Chapter 31 - Langston Hughes and His World
    pp 701-727
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter considers the trajectory of Mina Loy's writing life from its beginnings in distinctly European avant-gardes through the influence of her early visits to the United States to a late poem titled America A Miracle. Loy's writing moves along a spectrum from reaction against futurist precepts in the language and style of European artistic movements to a late articulation of similar principles. Loy's early poetry is equally marked by her location among European avant-gardes. In New York, modernists were less interested in outraging cultural norms and less political in opposing specific cultural institutions than European avant-gardists. Loy's stylistic innovation in part imitates and in part extends Futurist aesthetics, just as she is both inspired by Futurist practices of art and energized to formulate her rejection of its ideas. Like Loy, Hilda Doolittle published under a name independent of the patronymics of her father and husbands.
  • Chapter 32 - The Objectivists and the Left
    pp 728-749
  • View abstract

    Summary

    In many ways, the world of print that Marianne Moore and her modernist peers entered offered an embarrassment of riches when it came to publishing. At the end of the nineteenth century, the American middle class remained a reading market lost between the relatively expensive and high-toned book magazines aimed at America's educated elite and the lowbrow penny story papers pitched at the working classes. The increasing status of art as commodity and publishing as big business meant that both American artists and the venues that printed them needed to think harder than ever before about the audiences they wished to attract. The choice of book publisher had just as many consequences for a poet's career as the choice of periodical venues when it came to coding a poet's work for consumption. Moore lumps the new Americans together with the ancient imperial Romans and Egyptians.
  • Chapter 33 - “All the Blessings of This Consuming Chance”
    pp 750-774
  • Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Theodore Roethke, and the Middle-Generation Poets
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The lyric poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Helene Johnson and Louise Bogan is in conversation with modernist experiments, although each of these poets emphasized different aspects of twentieth century politics and culture and, at least to some extent, aspired to reach different audiences. Millay had wide popular appeal during her career and is still read beyond the academy. Johnson has always been obscure beyond her literary circle. Bogan was better known as a critic than a poet and is now read chiefly by other writers. Millay's poetic oeuvre is remarkable for the variety of received, modified, and invented forms she employs, but she is most admired for her dexterity with the sonnet. Johnson magnifies the poem's latent tension by establishing iambic pentameter and then disturbing aural pattern. Bogan certainly resisted the strictures of her Catholic upbringing and describes her teenaged self as a radical and a Fabian.
  • Chapter 34 - Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, and the Lost World of Real Feeling
    pp 775-794
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Wallace Stevens's poem makes a greater claim: the earth is held as the object of his perfect and compulsory love. His loathing of things as they are points to the future modernist's need to transform them through the projection of his imagination. Notably missing from his list of consolations is religion itself, although he was still taking communion. In the early journal entry already cited, Stevens defined his five consolations namely love, nature, friendship, work and phantasy. Each was posited on the foundation of physical well-being, there being nothing good in the world except it. By the time he wrote Yellow Afternoon, Stevens seemed to possess the consolations only of nature and phantasy. Stevens's renewed romanticism, always followed by its accompanying disavowals and reconstitutions, evolving into his own amassing grand poem and marking his unique testimony to modernism in the last century.
  • Chapter 35 - Writing the South
    pp 795-820
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams have often been figured as the authors of a counterculture in American poetry. Pound's attraction to continental culture was by no means restricted to Gallic discernment, and his decision to expatriate figures centrally in his extended debate with Williams about the appropriate course for modern American poetry. Pound's and Williams's essays on each other's work are remarkably perceptive and although their criticism can be severe, their praise, is also genuine. The concept of ideogrammic juxtaposition was integral to the development of an open field method of projectivist composition. Pound imagined poetic vocabulary differently, prizing cheng ming, the principle of the rectification of names, which points to the revelatory clarity of words that are, so to speak, unwobbling pivots. The stylistic distinction between Pound and Williams as incipient open form poets relevant to projectivist writers is a matter of individualized structures and distinctive rhythms.
  • Chapter 36 - San Francisco and the Beats
    pp 823-843
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Over the course of the depression that followed the stock market crash of October 1929, American poets on the left wrote an enormous amount of often passionate poetry addressing their social contexts. Revolutionary American poetry of the 1930s was inevitably written in the atmosphere of the modernist formal revolution. The Objectivists are thorough-going modernists, looking forward in both aesthetic and political terms. Carl Rakosi is an unabashedly lyrical poet, but with a propensity toward satire that often aims at social targets. As a movement and as individual poets, the Objectivists had been largely forgotten by the end of the 1930s. George Oppen and Rakosi had ceased writing, and Charles Reznikof had to some extent forgone poetry for prose writing. One index of the shift in Louis Zukofsky's concerns is the second half of A-9, written a decade after the first.
  • Chapter 37 - The New York School
    pp 844-868
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Robert Lowell was the most esteemed American poet of his era, enjoying a reputation comparable to that of his great modernist predecessors T.S.Eliot and William Butler Yeats. Lowell's influence on later generations continues to be felt and of the middle-generation poets he is second only to Bishop in this regard. Lowell was drawn to address the turmoil of his era in no small measure because his own life was itself manifestly turbulent. The careers of John Berryman and Theodore Roethke parallel that of Lowell in several crucial ways. Although both were slightly older than Lowell, Roethke was born in 1908, and Berryman in 1914, they rose to their greatest prominence, as Lowell did, in the 1950s and 1960s. Berryman remained rather uncomfortably close to his mother throughout his life, and the death of his father became one of the overarching concerns of The Dream Songs.
  • Chapter 38 - The Uses of Authenticity
    pp 869-893
  • Four Sixties Poets
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Elizabeth Bishop noted that her poetry differed both from the standardized somewhat machine-made Academic poem and from poetry that comes through with a sort of shocking vulgarity and coarseness of mind. Bishop, as Lowell's commentary at the 1964 reading notes, was also a poet who refused to write the standard academic poem fashionable at mid-century, nor did she write the kind of confessional poem that was quickly supplanting it. The critical ambivalence about Losses surfaced in part because Jarrell's postwar subject matter was emerging in that volume, in poems such as Moving. Like Jarrell's late poem The Lost World, moving also frames the perceptions of the child against the more jaded reflections of the adult. The woman's predicament hearkens back to Jarrell's polemical essays criticizing American consumer culture, as she wanders the aisles of the supermarket among the detergents cheer, joy and all vainly seeking their emotional equivalents.
  • Chapter 39 - James Merrill and His Circles
    pp 894-912
  • View abstract

    Summary

    John Crowe Ransom, John Orley Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren laid the foundations for twentieth-century southern poetry at Vanderbilt University in the twenties. This chapter considers how lack of academic opportunities helped determine southern poetry's history. The poem Bells for John Whiteside's Daughterformer concerns a traumatic event, the death and funeral of an energetic young girl and consists of five quatrains that develop according to the three-stage progression of the elegy, moving from lament to praise to consolation. Ransom's student Tate of Winchester, Kentucky, hared his teacher's skepticism of a materially oriented culture and also portrayed science as the imagination's bête noire, where Ransom relied on traditional forms, realistic settings and irony. In the 1960s and 1970s the issue of race continued to tug at Warren and other southern poets, particularly Tate, who was embarrassed by the publication of a letter he wrote to editor Lincoln Kirstein in 1933.
  • Chapter 41 - The 1970s and the “Poetry of the Center”
    pp 937-958
  • View abstract

    Summary

    In the 1950s San Francisco acquired a reputation, which it has since maintained, as a mecca for poetry. In the popular imagination, San Francisco poetry is synonymous with the beat Movement, which first rose to prominence there. This chapter presents the salient features of milieu and then discusses what have been seen as the two strains within it, the spontaneous and the hermetic. Making a virtue of eschewing fame, the hermetic wing turned inward, viewing the scene of writing as akin to magic, in which spirits might direct the making of poetry, and addressing the poem principally to a group of like-minded initiates. In addition to spiritualistic composition and a penchant for occult sources, such as the Grail myth or the tarot deck, there are two other strikingly hermetic qualities to Spicer's oeuvre. The other hermetic aspect of Spicer's poetry involves his relationship to language.
  • Chapter 42 - Latino Poetry and Poetics
    pp 959-977
  • View abstract

    Summary

    If critics declare that a particular poet is affiliated with or has been influenced by the New York School, their auditors are sure to nod knowingly. Significantly, these New York School scions need not live in the five boroughs, nor even be American by birth or residence. They are implicitly credited with inheriting a bundle of traits identified closely with one or more precursors. Their most frequently pursued ekphrastic strategy is probably homology, the attempt to coax language to approximate what visual artists can achieve in their own media of choice. The modulations of tone in New York School poetry tend to vexing dilemmas instead of offering resolutions. Audiences are encouraged to speculate how and whether a poem might obliquely address the relevant issues, but in the end there might be no answer, or only a provisional one. Guest's verse is marked by a turn toward the ethereal and the fantastic.
  • Chapter 43 - Asian American Poetry
    pp 978-1002
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Adrienne Rich, James Wright, Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov all did some of their best and most influential work in the 1960s and in response to the changes that vexed decade brought. These four poets offer a range of versions of authenticity and at the same time show the variety of possibilities open to poets about the uses of authenticity. In the 1950s Rich wrote two books of well-received poetry. Her first book, A Change of World, published while she was still an undergraduate at Radcliffe, was chosen by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Award. Like Wright, Olson thrived on assertions of the imagination's freedom from every critical absolute, including the insistence on total liberation from the past. In 1950 Duncan published Medieval Scenes. Duncan and Levertov's letters record a long series of acts of mutual encouragement: two poets on opposite coasts, almost never meeting, engaged in an intense, affectionate, wide-ranging conversation.
  • Chapter 44 - Psychoanalytic Poetics
    pp 1003-1026
  • View abstract

    Summary

    James Merrill is far more conservative than most of his cohort, writing in rhyme and standard meter. In a period whose poetry is marked by self-revelation, emotional intensity and extremity, he is decidedly cool, discreet and even remote. This chapter explains Merill's two poems: Jim's Book and Water Street. His first volume, Jim's Book, financed by his father, was published when he was only sixteen. Another limited edition followed four years later and it was not until his third commercially published volume, Water Street, that his work became widely noticed. One of the ways Merrill developed to deflect his meanings is through riddles, refusing to utter key words. A similar but far more elaborate riddling passage occurs in Strato in Plaster. Merrill is an inveterate punster and puns can be said to be the accidental mismatch between sounds and ideas.
  • Chapter 45 - American Poetry of the 1980s
    pp 1027-1047
  • The Pressures of Reality
  • View abstract

    Summary

    A common way to characterize the shift from modern to contemporary American poetry is as a turn from sweeping, impersonal myths and symbols to more locally grounded, experiential stories and images. Science and technology are often grouped together, but their roles in contemporary poetry are quite distinct, particularly so now that technology has begun to change the ways in which poems are written, circulated, and read. This chapter provides a historical overview of poetry's engagement with science. In the early twentieth century, poets began to embrace science more whole heartedly, often drawing parallels between the work of major discoverers like Marie Curie and Albert Einstein and the literary innovations being carried out under the banner of modernism. A.R. Ammons insists on the equal validity of prayer and cell, soul and chemistry. Frederick Seidel has ventured into the complexities of modern physics than most of his peers, particularly in The Cosmos Poems.
  • Chapter 46 - Black and Blues Configurations
    pp 1048-1078
  • Contemporary African American Poetics
  • View abstract

    Summary

    As the decade began, poets likened America to the Roman Empire, but their vision of a great civilization undermined by imperialist adventures was a dead-end model, a warning equivalent to confessing despair. Robert Pinsky's The Situation of Poetry looked back and forward, a cross between an overview and a manifesto; it summarized the decade of poetry. The Virgilian clarity that salvages Wright from emotional wreckage is scarcely evident in his own poetry, which ends with a sentence fragment. Pinsky has moved closer to the position that Philip Levine, also a student of Yvor Winters, developed in the 1970s. W.S. Merwin's free verse in the 1960s of ered grim, symptomatic sketches of a deeply distressed culture that were widely adapted by other poets. Robert Hass's lyrics seem produced expediently, but their rag-tag quality belies the constellations of meaning they assemble.
  • Chapter 47 - Amy Clampitt, Culture Poetry, and the Neobaroque
    pp 1079-1102
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The term Latino guides the conversation toward more specific avenues of inquiry. The same process applies to an examination of Latino poetry and poetics. In the meantime, what's worth examining is how the three main U.S. Latino populations have shaped their respective literatures in order to come to terms with their identity, language, and history. Although their immigrant trajectories and political leanings are distinct, the Chicano, Puerto Rican, and Cuban American poetry communities have followed parallel journeys from marginalized voices to visible presences in twentieth-century American letters. In the Chicano community there is no dividing line between a poet and an activist. The relationship between the United States and its unincorporated territory, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, bears a long and conflicted history. Politically, the Chicano community has always expressed admiration for the Cuban Revolution of 1959 but maintains a conflicted opinion about its leader, Fidel Castro.
  • Chapter 48 - Modern and Contemporary Children’s Poetry
    pp 1103-1122
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Asian American poetry has always been interested in both polarities, but in varying proportions and to varying degrees of success. With Pound, Asia came to function as central to the West's conception of itself, which relied on an imaginary idealization of the East in orientalizing terms. From the late 1960s to the mid-1990s, Asian American poetry developed and diversified rapidly and, for the first time, embraced the term Asian American as an organizing rubric. The legacies of the labor and internment experiences of the first half of the twentieth century were invisibility and silence for Asian Americans, who were marked as perpetually foreign and marginalized from representational politics. This chapter highlights the characteristics of avant-garde art. The avant-garde art work typically engages in some kind of theoretical work, which is frequently staged by the formal and stylistic properties of the work.
  • Chapter 49 - Multilingualism in Contemporary American Poetry
    pp 1123-1143
  • View abstract

    Summary

    W.H. Auden's scenario implies that psychoanalysis will produce a new poem. Poets protested that the term confessional ignored meticulous craftsmanship and knowing self-dramatization. Poets from midcentury have explored psychoanalytic models of personhood, voice, and dialogue to complicate models of lyric expressivity. Mouths recur throughout Plath's poetry, mediating between the realm of bodies, blood, and wounds and the potentially more ethereal realm of voice. The sequence of poems about beekeeping that closes Sylvia Plath's Ariel manuscript links poetic creation with organic production and reproduction. To speak because one is shattered might be to utter a cry of emotional devastation. Although it might equally be to recognize that to speak is to be open to, and broken open by, the conditions of speech: psychoanalytic, linguistic, social, and historical. In the new century, the divide between sincere lyric and experimental poetry has been perceived to have broken down.

Page 2 of 3


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