American Poetry: What, Me Worry?

Abstract

Stephen Burt is worried about American poetry, but I'm not certain that I understand his fears. One of the coeditors of an ambitious new collection of essays surveying the history of American poetry from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century, Burt expresses an exasperation common to editors and anthologists: there are too many poems worth talking about to include in such a volume; the proliferation of topics and approaches makes the field of study feel incoherent; and difficult choices about inclusion and exclusion have to be made, making the final shape of the volume feel no more necessary, no more legitimate than a number of foregone possibilities. Burt seems to be worried that his and Alfred Bendixen's snapshot of the state of the field in 2015 might constrain future scholarship, that their choices will be taken as authoritative. But he is also concerned that their Cambridge History of American Poetry won't be authoritative enough, that a variety of forces—in particular, contemporary critics' and poets' commitment to thinking about poetry as process—are arrayed against our continuing to value the poem-as-object. And if the poem-as-object fades in importance so will the anthology itself, that box of precious gems that has long been a staple of middle-class poetry-reading and university instruction [Figure 1].