The Cambridge Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Poetry

by Christopher Beach

Overview

Intended as a concise but thorough introduction to the various movements of twentieth century American poets, this book will help readers understand and analyze modern and contemporary poems. It covers the work of major modernists such as Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and Marianne Moore, as well as the poets of the Harlem Renaissance, the New Critics, the Confessionals, and the Beats.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521891493
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	10/23/2003
Series:	Cambridge Introductions to Literature
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	234
Sales rank:	1,029,574
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.55(d)

About the Author

Christopher Beach is Adjunct Assistant Professor at Claremont Graduate University. He is the author of several books in the field of American poetry and one book on American cinema. His most recent books are Poetic Culture: Contemporary American Poetry and Institution and Class, Language, and American Film Comedy. He is also the editor of Artifice and Indeterminacy: An Anthology of New Poetics.

Table of Contents

Introduction; 1. A new century; 2. Modernist expatriates: Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot; 3. Lyric modernism: Wallace Stephens and Hart Crane; 4. Gendered modernism; 5. William Carlos Williams and the modernist American scene; 6. From the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts Movement; 7. The New Criticism and poetic formalism; 8. The Confessional Movement; 9. Lyric as meditation; 10. The New American Poetry and the postmodern avant-garde.

Editorial Reviews

"...Beach's criticism is not only level-headed but astute...The result: a reading lesson that telescopes a major trend in postwar poetry. Even after reading Christopher Beach's The Cambridge Introductin to Twentieth-Century American Poetry we may not know precisely why the deer and the dachshund are one. But we will have received what may be the most clear and comprehensive course in Stevens, Eliot, Moore, et al that is available in book form." North Dakota Quarterly

From the Publisher