This chapter discusses what happens to modernism, the revolutionary movement that dominated the first half of the twentieth century, as it becomes institutionalized, and examines the movement’s legacy after 1945. It discusses how the poetry of the post-1945 period became dominated by a major schism between “academic” and “anti-academic” poetry (or, as Robert Lowell called it, the “cooked” versus the “raw”). The chapter charts the advent of the New Criticism and explains its main principles, goals, and practitioners, focuses on examples of formalist poems in the New Critical mode by Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, and James Merrill, and introduces the new, alternative forms of poetry that came to be known as “The New American Poetry.”

This chapter introduces the book’s main objectives and scope. After introducing modernism, the period that preceded the poetry under consideration in this book, this chapter provides an overview of the main features of post-1945 American poetry, explores poetry’s continuing relevance and cultural role in our current moment, and discusses three central, overlapping themes and issues that this book argues are at the center of contemporary poetry: self, language, and culture.

A summary of the book’s conclusions regarding Elliott Carter’s late music, on his fusing of technical and expressive concerns, the patterns of harmonic, rhythmic, and textural change in his music, and his engagement with modernist poetry and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music, as well as the comic elements in his late compositions.

A study of Elliott Carter’s song cycles and other text settings from the period 1998-2011, with close readings of both poetry and music. Included are individual analytical essays on Tempo e tempi (poetry by Eugenio Montale, Salvatore Quasimodo, and Giuseppe Ungaretti), Of Rewaking (poems by William Carlos Williams), In the Distances of Sleep (poems by Wallace Stevens), Mad Regales (poems by John Ashbery), “La Musique” (poem by Charles Baudelaire), On Conversing with Paradise (texts from Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos), Poems of Louis Zukofsky, What Are Years (poems by Marianne Moore), A Sunbeam’s Architecture (poems by e e cummings), Three Explorations (poems by T. S. Eliot), The American Sublime (poems by Wallace Stevens).