Customer Reviews

The Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry

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This anthology will give you a sense of the serious type of poetry written recently in America. That means like Whitman, Eliot, Auden, and these kinds of names. This book moves basically from Stevens to the present. It will give you a good feel for each of the poets represented, and if you like what you find you can go look into their work. The introduction is great as well.

This anthology in no way represents the rich and varied life of Contemporary American Poetry, which is what Vendler claims to have bound here. If that were the case, then we are in select company indeed. Too often the poets Vendler rationalizes into greatness, labor in opacity for a small cadre of academics. Vendler makes a political and philosophical choice by beginning her anthology with Wallace Stevens, whose calculus is something admirable in poetry, but could only share his position as the the contemporary forbearer of American Poetry.

Vendler's selections are the selections of a critic, and give no sense of the great breadth of Contemporary American Poetry. Her oversights rank on par with Yvor Winter's collosal misunderstanding and critical attack of Hart Crane's The Bridge, an acknowledged revelation in American prosody, as boldly contemporary as anything written.

This book spearheaded a movement within the critical establishment to circle the wagons around poetry. Vendler has an agenda and it is not the enjoyment of literature, but rather to play cultural baronness. One can feel a cold sterile wind blow through the book and it is a wonder that the poets Frank O'Hara or Allen Ginsberg are found here at all.

Proceed not with deference but with skepticism.

According to the preface to The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry (I am looking at the 10th edition), they choose 150 poetry anthologies to index for each edition and then choose 30 of those anthologies as the most important for even small libraries to purchase. This book was chosen as one of those 30--so it must have something going for it!