Description
Book SynopsisWritten 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.
Trade Review“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’s differing vocations come together powerfully when it analyses the self-projections of ‘Prufrock.’” (
Year's Work in English Studies, November 2008)
"Altieri is thoroughly captivating, especially when his precise, synthetic, and innovative interpretations focus on beloved poets such as T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop and John Ashbery."
(The Wallace Stevens Journal)
Table of ContentsPreface and Acknowledgments vi
List of Abbreviations x
1 Introduction: The Art of Twentieth-Century American Poetry: An Overview 1
2 The New Realism in Modernist Poetry: Pound and Williams 11
3 The Doctrine of Impersonality and Modernism’s War on Rhetoric: Eliot, Loy, and Moore 52
4 How Modernist Poetics Failed and Efforts at Renewal: Williams, Oppen, and Hughes 97
5 The Return to Rhetoric in Modernist Poetry: Stevens and Auden 126
6 Modernist Dilemmas and Early Post-Modernist Responses 157
Notes 215
Works Cited 229
Further Reading 234
Index 243
