Modern American Poetry

The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Poetry comprises original essays by nineteen distinguished scholars. It offers a critical overview of major and emerging American poets of the twentieth century in addition to critical accounts of the representative schools, movements, regional settings, archival resources, and critical reception that define modern American poetry. The Companion stretches the narrow term of “literary modernism,” which encompasses works published from approximately 1890 to 1945, to include a more capacious and usable account of American poetry’s evolution from the twentieth century to the present. The essays collected here seek to account for modern American verse against the contexts of broad political, social, and cultural fields and forces. This volume gathers together major voices that represent the best in contemporary critical approaches and methods.

Walter Kalaidjian is professor and chair of the department of English at Emory University. He is the author of The Edge of Modernism: American Poetry and the Traumatic Past and editor of The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism .

CONTENTS

Introduction  xv
Walter Kalaidjian

1 The Emergence of “The New Poetry” 11
John Timberman Newcomb

2 Modern American Archives and Scrapbook Modernism 23
Bartholomew Brinkman

3 Experimental Modernisms 37
Alan Golding

4 The Legacy of New York 50
Cary Nelson

5 The Modern American Long Poem 65
Anne Day Dewey

6 American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance 77
James Smethurst

7 Objectivist Poetry and Poetics 89
Rachel Blau DuPlessis

8 American Poetry and the Popular Front 102
Alan Wald

9 Tracking the Fugitive Poets 116
Kieran Quinlan

10 Mid-Century Modernism 128
Stephen Burt

11 Psychotherapy and Confessional Poetry 143
Michael Thurston

12 Black Mountain Poetry 155
Kaplan Harris

13 Beat Poetry: HeavenHell USA, 1946–1965 167
Maria Damon

14 The Black Arts Movement and Black Aesthetics 180
Evie Shockley

15 New York School and American Surrealist Poetics 196
Edward Brunner

16 Land, Place, and Nation: Toward an Indigenous American Poetics 209
Janet McAdams

17 Transpacific and Asian American Counterpoetics 223
Yunte Huang

18 Language Writing 234
Barrett Watten

19 Poet-Critics and Bureaucratic Administration 248
Evan Kindley

Guide to Further Reading 259

Index 271