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Anthology of Modern American Poetry
 
 
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Anthology of Modern American Poetry [Paperback]

Cary Nelson (Editor)
3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)

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Book Description

0195122712 978-0195122718 January 13, 2000
Anthology of Modern American Poetry contains more than 750 poems by 161 American poets, including many who have not been anthologized before. Spanning a period from Walt Whitman to Sherman Alexie, this collection is the first to review the twentieth century comprehensively. It presents not only the canonical poetry of the last hundred years but also numerous poems by women, minority, and progressive writers only rediscovered in the past two decades.

Uniquely comprehensive, Anthology of Modern American Poetry represents Robert Frost with 23 poems, Wallace Stevens with 22, and Marianne Moore with 14, including her most ambitious long poems. William Carlos Williams is represented not only by his exquisite short lyrics, but also with an experimental combination of poetry and prose. With 29 poems, Langston Hughes is given full treatment for the first time in any comprehensive anthology. Substantial selections by contemporary poets like John Ashbery, Sylvia Plath, Frank O'Hara, Philip Levine, Lucille Clifton, Judy Grahn, Adrian Louis, Yusef Komunyakaa, Mart�n Espada, and Sherman Alexie are also included.

Anthology of Modern American Poetry is the first anthology to give full treatment to American long poems and poem sequences. T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Gertrude Stein's "Patriarchal Poetry," William Carlos Williams's The Descent of Winter, Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree," Muriel Rukeyser's "The Book of the Dead," Melvin Tolson's Libretto for the Republic of Liberia, Theodore Roethke's "North American Sequence," Gwendolyn Brooks's "Gay Chaps at the Bar," Kenneth Rexroth's "The Love Poems of Marichiko," both Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" and his "Wichita Vortex Sutra," and both Adrienne Rich's "Shooting Script" and her "Twenty-One Love Poems" are all included in their entirety.

Anthology of Modern American Poetry offers the most detailed annotations available in an anthology of this type. Many works benefit from specially commissioned research that provides students with such help as the identification of the inventive references in Melvin Tolson's poetry, translation of all foreign language passages, and illumination of obscure references. This is also the only American poetry anthology to present selected poems in the beautifully illustrated form in which they first appeared. In addition, an accompanying website featuring readings of poems and historical background is available at http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps.

Ideal for courses in modern American poetry, modern American literature, modern or contemporary poetry, creative writing-poetry, and American studies, Anthology of Modern American Poetry introduces students to the last 100 years of our poetic heritage in a uniquely rich and provocative format.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"A fascinating anthology, full of surprising choices and old favorites. The layout and printing are exceptional, inviting to the eye."--Charles L. O'Neill, St. Thomas Aquinas College

"A fine, eclectic group of poems. A superb selection for the classroom--at last!"--David Clippinger, Pennsylvania State University

About the Author

Cary Nelson is at University of Illinois at Urbana. Emory Elliott is at University of California. Emory Elliott is at University of California. Linda Kerber is at University of Iowa. Walton Litz is at Princeton University. Terence Martin is at Indiana University.

Product Details

  • Paperback: 1249 pages
  • Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (January 13, 2000)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0195122712
  • ISBN-13: 978-0195122718
  • Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.8 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 3.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #77,998 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

 

Customer Reviews

6 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
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24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Questionable editing, June 12, 2002
This review is from: Anthology of Modern American Poetry (Paperback)
Anthologies are tough things to edit, I'm sure. After all, any anthology of literature printed by, say, Oxford, or Norton especially, has the kind of power necessary to grant its contents canonical status in literary study. Furthermore, the Norton anthologies tend to have immediate canonical status themselves.

Perhaps this is why Nelson takes so many chances with this anthology, some for better, and some for worse. I did not want to stick him with a 2 star rating, so I gave him a 3, but whereas I normally consider a 3-star rating as a kind of "yes, I liked it while I was reading it," this time I give it because I'm trying to average the times he made excellent choices with the times he seems to miss the mark.

The most questionable of Nelson's decisions? Easy. His decision to publish Japanese haiku from World War 2. No, that's not the questionable part. But he edits them all together to form one long poem. He takes haiku from many different authors and turns it into a Harmonium-era Stevens poem. This move defies all sense.

However, it also illustrates what is great in Nelson's anthology: inclusiveness. He goes to great lengths to include authors you might not find in other anthologies; and if you would find them, chances are you will find more poems by these poets in Nelson's anthology, or at least different poems. It bests the Norton Anthology in the Harlem Renaissance department, that's for sure. I'd never heard of Angelina Welde Grimke, for instance, who's just an amazing poet who was writing Plath well before Plath.

It is indeed irksome that this inclusiveness is sometimes at the expense of the "major" poets in the American canon: poets like Stevens get ridiculously short treatment, and half of the time, their most important or recognizeable poems are left out entirely. While I appreciate that Nelson wants to open up the canon a little bit (okay, a lot, and there's nothing wrong with that), his anthology feels a little incomplete in a field in which the Norton still casts the tallest shadow. Meaning that, while no anthology can stand alone and requires supplementation, Nelson's requires much more supplementation merely because his exclusions fly in the face of what is, for better or worse, required reading by current canonical standards.

So, if you plan to use this anthology in a class, you will probably need to supplement many of the authors with photocopies. But chances are you were going to do that anyway.

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Reassessing the canon, February 4, 2008
This review is from: Anthology of Modern American Poetry (Paperback)
Editor Cary Nelson grappled with many questions when compiling this anthology. He was determined to include some of our 'fierce but forgotten political poets.' But beyond that he decided to urge a major reassessment of the canon, including giving major coverage to Langston Hughes, for example. And to provide significant space for long poems and sequences and poems about race relations. Many of the poets were gay and many were socialists, or blacklisted. Many are Latino and Native American and African American. This is no lily white, square anthology.

The printed book is accompanied by an online journal and multimedia site, called MAPS. http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/

Cary Nelson teaches modern poetry and literary theory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Nelson's Modern American Poetry, April 7, 2007
This review is from: Anthology of Modern American Poetry (Paperback)
This is an important anthology because it questions assumptions about taste as being standard and unchanging. Nelson invites the reader to try to use a historical imagination as well as to step outside of traditional biases, because over time poetry (even American poetry) has served different purposes for different communities as lively explosions of language and not simply as academic pretensions. While some poetry may seem just plain bad, Nelson's anthology shows us the number of ways that poetry was alive and exciting during the twentieth century. And even today poetry is not dead, exactly...it just smells funny.
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Inside This Book (learn more)
First Sentence:
It has been said repeatedly, with some considerable justice, that much of twentieth-century American poetry is a dialogue with Walt Whitman. Read the first page
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
patriarchal poetry, muh brown, whuh folks, bitter river, sixteen bales, poem title, right vanishing point, relieves threes, pretty bird, many daisies, toy hats, remarkable interpretation, let her try, thy vanity, poem sequences, glass pen
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
San Francisco, African American, Native American, Spanish Civil War, The Waste Land, Anthology of Modern American Poetry, New Mexico, Ezra Pound, West Virginia, New Jersey, Walt Whitman, Gauley Bridge, University of California, New Orleans, Aido Hwedo, Hawk's Nest, Langston Hughes, American Civil War, Hard Rock, Long Island, New England, North Carolina, Supreme Court, University of Iowa, Great Depression
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