Table of Contents

PART ONE. THE AGE OF HIGH MODERNISM 1 The 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 "A Plate of Vibrant Mercury." The Bridge. 5 The 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 The Period Style of the 1930s in England The Impact of Auden. Coming after the Modernists. Poetry as Thinking and Talking. The 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. The Later Auden. 8 The English Romantic Revival, 1934-1945 The Beginnings of the Romantic Revival: Dylan Thomas, David Gascoyne, and George Barker. Edwin Muir. The War Years. PART TWO. THE RESURGENCE OF POUND, WILLIAMS, AND STEVENS 9 Reappraising the Modernists 10 Ezra Pound: The Cantos Components of the Texture. Ideograms. Incremental Repetition. Major Form. The Pisan Cantos. Paradiso. 11 The Impact of William Carlos Williams The Williams Lyric. The Theory of the Poem. Paterson and the Last Poems. 12 The Later Poetry of Wallace Stevens Harmonium. "Winter Devising Summer in Its Breast." The Theory of Poetry Is the Theory of Life." The Myth of a Sufficing Naturalism. The 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 The Postwar Period: Introduction The Concept of a Period Style. Poetry in the United States. The 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. The Dream Songs. 17 Robert Lowell Style as "Hardship." Life Studies. Lowell's Later Career. 18 In and Out of the Movement: The Generation of the 1950s in England The Movement. The 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 The Poetry of Ireland Austin Clarke, Patrick Kavanagh. Thomas Kinsella. John Montague and Michael Longley. Seamus Heaney. 21 Open Form Derivation from Pound and Williams. The 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. The 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. The Nature of the Real. Unsaying What You Say While You Are Saying It. Reading Ashbery. A. R. Ammons. 27 The Achievement of James Merrill The 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

About the Author

David Perkins is John P. Marquand Professor of English Literature, Harvard University.

Reviews

[Perkins] is generous, sympathetic, sensitive, inquisitive, and has a goodly streak of common sense. These are the virtues one hopes for in a literary historian… Clearly Perkins has a talent for getting under the skins of different styles and into the heads of people who lived in the recent past.
*The Nation*

The scope of…inclusion is certainly impressive, with attention given to black and woman writers and to a broader range of British writing than might have been expected from an American critic: there can be few readers who will not find ways into new poetic territory from this enthusiastically written book.
*London Review of Books*

The author moves deftly between text and context, offering both panorama and portrait, and the dimensions of his extremely rich study can only be suggested here… It is amazing to observe the freshness and sensitivity with which Perkins approaches each poet… His opinions are strong and expressed with authority yet modesty… A landmark study.
*World Literature Today*

This is clearly the most important history of 20th-century poetry to appear. It is difficult to imagine a better book. Perkins’s work will surely be the standard history by which all future assessments will have to be judged.
*Choice*