The Art of Twentieth-Century American Poetry Modernism and After [Paperback]

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.

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• Encourages readers to identify with the modernists’ sense of the revolutionary possibilities of their art.
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• Embraces four generations of modernist American poets up through to the 1980s.
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• Gives readers a sense of the ambitions, the disillusionments and the continuities of modernist poetry.
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• Includes close readings of particular poems which show how readers can use these works to connect with what concerns them.

Preface and Acknowledgments.

List of Abbreviations.

1 Introduction: The Art of Twentieth-Century American Poetry: An Overview.

2 The New Realism in Modernist Poetry: Pound and Williams.

3 The Doctrine of Impersonality and Modernism’s War on Rhetoric: Eliot, Loy, and Moore.

4 How Modernist Poetics Failed and Efforts at Renewal: Williams, Oppen, and Hughes.

5 The Return to Rhetoric in Modernist Poetry: Stevens and Auden.

6 Modernist Dilemmas and Early Post-Modernist Responses.

Notes.

Works Cited.

Further Reading.

Index

“Altieri’s powerful readings [are] excellent analyses of poems by Oppen and Bishop, as well as by a host of others, [that] offer insights both into the details of the texts and the wider intellectual issues at stake, while the book&#lÓ_