CHARLES ALTIERI, The Art of Twentieth-Century Poetry: Modernism and After.

Abstract

ALTHOUGH there are many useful passages in Charles Altieri’s The Art of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, the overall effect of the book is compromised by its lack of coherent purpose. Although it purports to be an ‘introduction’ to modern (and post-modern) American poetry, it reads instead like a retrospective of Altieri’s writing and teaching career. The very first sentence of the book—‘Writing an introduction to modernist American poetry has proved an interesting experience in self-definition’ (p. 1)—sets the tone, with its emphasis on Altieri’s critical self-fashioning in relation to the texts he discusses. Altieri explains how the title of the book ‘is a way of celebrating this sense of freedom to set my own purposes’ (p. 2). The reader is left wondering how their purposes will be brought into the equation, if at all. Several passages in the book are highly quotable, and suggest interesting ways of approaching modern American poetry. Altieri is very good at translating the more complex critical problems surrounding modernist poetics into relatively simple language. For example, in the introductory first chapter he describes carefully how impersonal poetics ‘responded powerfully to social conditions that the poets felt they had to change’, (p. 6). The second chapter is very clear in its attempts to illustrate how Pound and Williams aimed to create poetry that could reflect new concepts of reality. However the title of the chapter, ‘The New Realism’, is potentially confusing to a reader who might not know what the ‘old realism’ was. The author’s interest in the connections between modernism and realism extend throughout the book. This attempt to pull modernist criticism in a new direction might be useful for literary critics, but it is potentially distracting for a reader being introduced to modernist poetry for the first time.