A History of Modern Poetry

Abstract

PART ONE. THE AGE OF HIGH MODERNISM 1 Ascendancy of T. S. Eliot, 1925-1950 2 Eliot's Later Career The Hollow Men and Ash Wednesday. Four Quartets. 3 Modes of Modern Style in the United States E. E. Cummings. Archibald MacLeish. Robinson Jeffers. 4 Hart Crane Plate of Vibrant Mercury. Bridge. 5 Poetry of Critical Intelligence Sources and History of the Style. Metaphysical Wit. Samples of the Style. Laura Riding. Robert Graves. William Empson. John Crowe Ransom. Allen Tate. Yvor Winters. 6 Period Style of the 1930s in England Impact of Auden. Coming after the Modernists. Poetry as Thinking and Talking. English Tradition. Freud, Marx, and Lawrence. Politics and Romantic Convention. Day-Lewis, MacNeice, and Spender. 7 W. H. Auden Auden in the 1930s. Long Poems of the 1940s. Poetry as Conversation. Later Auden. 8 English Romantic Revival, 1934-1945 Beginnings of the Romantic Revival: Dylan Thomas, David Gascoyne, and George Barker. Edwin Muir. War Years. PART TWO. THE RESURGENCE OF POUND, WILLIAMS, AND STEVENS 9 Reappraising the Modernists 10 Ezra Pound: Cantos Components of the Texture. Ideograms. Incremental Repetition. Major Form. Pisan Cantos. Paradiso. 11 Impact of William Carlos Williams Williams Lyric. Theory of the Poem. Paterson and the Last Poems. 12 Later Poetry of Wallace Stevens Harmonium. Winter Devising Summer in Its Breast. Theory of Poetry Is the Theory of Life. Myth of a Sufficing Naturalism. Major Poetry of the Final Phase. 13 Other Modernist Poets David Jones. Basil Bunting. David Ignatow. Louis Zukofsky and the Objectivists. PART THREE. POSTMODERNISM 14 Postwar Period: Introduction Concept of a Period Style. Poetry in the United States. Development of Contemporary Poetry. 15 Robert Penn Warren, Theodore Roethke, and Elizabeth Bishop Robert Penn Warren. Minor American Poets and the Return of Romantic Values. Theodore Roethke. Elizabeth Bishop. 16 Breaking Through the New Criticism Richard Wilbur. Randall Jarrell. John Berryman. Homage to Mistress Bradstreet. Dream Songs. 17 Robert Lowell Style as Hardship. Life Studies. Lowell's Later Career. 18 In and Out of the Movement: Generation of the 1950s in England Movement. Style of the 1950s. Orientations to an Audience. Roy Fuller, C. H. Sisson, and R. S. Thomas. Larkin and His Contemporaries. 19 English Poetry in the 1960s and 1970s Charles Tomlinson. Ted Hughes. Geoffrey Hill. Thom Gunn. 20 Poetry of Ireland Austin Clarke, Patrick Kavanagh. Thomas Kinsella. John Montague and Michael Longley. Seamus Heaney. 21 Open Form Derivation from Pound and Williams. Theory of Open Form. Syntax as Kinesis. Charles Olson. Robert Creeley. Denise Levertov, Edward Dorn, and Paul Blackburn. Robert Duncan. 22 Poetry in New York and San Francisco Frank O'Hara and the 'New York School. Minor Poets of San Francisco. Countercultural Ethos. Allen Ginsberg. 23 Against Civilization A Shared Style. A Modal Poem. Robert Bly. James Wright. Galway Kinnell. W. S. Merwin. Gary Snyder. 24 Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Adrienne Rich Sylvia Plath. Anne Sexton. Adrienne Rich. 25 Black Poets of America Melvin Tolson. Robert Hayden. Gwendolyn Brooks. Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones). 26 Meditations of the Solitary Mind: John Ashbery and A. R. Ammons John Ashbery. Nature of the Real. Unsaying What You Say While You Are Saying It. Reading Ashbery. A. R. Ammons. 27 Achievement of James Merrill Changing Light at Sandover. Merrill's Trilogy in Literary History. Readers versus the Ouija Board. 'The Book of Ephraim. Mirabell and Scripts for the Pageant. Acknowledgments Index