The New Anthology of American Poetry: Volume Ii Modernisms: 1900-1950 [Paperback]

Steven Gould Axelrod (Editor), Camille Roman (Editor)

Book Description

Series: New Anthology of American Poetry | Publication Date: March 21, 2005

Bringing together fifty years of exciting modernisms, The New Anthology of American Poetry includes over 600 poems by sixty-five American poets writing in the period between 1900 and 1950. The most recognized poets of the era, such as William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, H. D., Gertrude Stein, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, Hart Crane, and Langston Hughes are represented, along with many other Harlem Renaissance poets, women poets, immigrant and working-class poets, imagists, and objectivists. It is also the first modernist anthology to include poems and songs from popular culture.

The issues addressed in the selections are as varied as the styles and groups. Some poems emphasize formal matters, while others highlight psychological or linguistic concerns. Yet others focus on social issues, such as race, gender, sexuality, nationality, and economic disparity.

Complementing the rich diversity of poetry, poets, and styles, the editors provide helpful introductions, bibliographies, biographies, up-to-date footnotes and endnotes, and critical selections on the art of writing. This anthology not only provides a unique window into the breadth and diversity of modern poetry, it also offers a fresh and informative vehicle for teaching this rich, confusing, and stimulating period.

The New Anthology of American Poetry
* Demonstrates how a succession of canons of American poetry has evolved.
* Gives more attention to women poets and to artists from African American, Asian American, Latino, and Native American cultures than in any previous anthology.
* Offers concise introductions to periods and styles, highly informative endnotes to poems, brief bibliographies of key primary and secondary texts, and critical selections on the art of poetry by the poets themselves.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Steven Gould Axelrod is a professor of English at the University of California at Riverside. He is the author of Robert Lowell: Life and Art and Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words and the co-editor of books on Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams. Camille Roman is an associate professor of English, American studies, and Women's studies at Washington State University. She has published a dozen books on women and language, American music, and Elizabeth Bishop as well as essays on Robert Frost, Billie Holiday, Edna Millay, Amy Lowell, and Louise Bogan. She is a president-elect of the Robert Frost Society. Thomas Travisano is a professor of English at Hartwick College. He is the author of Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development and Midcentury Quartet: Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, Berryman and the Making of a Postmodern Aesthetic and the co-editor of Gendered Modernisms: American Women Poets and Their Readers.

Product Details

• Paperback: 856 pages
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press (March 21, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0813531640
• ISBN-13: 978-0813531649
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.4 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #398,916 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I write about poetry and the poetic imagination in the United States. I also teach poetry as a Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside.

In my writing and teaching, I try to bring poetry alive. I hope to restore it to a central place in U. S. culture. I hope to foster in my readers and students a love of the text and a fascination with the poem as an intellectual and emotional complex as well as a sensuous structure--something felt in the blood and along the heart, something that can shake up your world.

My first book, Robert Lowell: Life and Art (1978), charted Lowell's career as a poet who continuously remade himself and who identified himself completely with his words. I returned to Lowell in such edited books as Robert Lowell: Essays on the Poetry (1986) and The Critical Response to Robert Lowell (1999).

Another of my books, Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words (1990), was a biography of Plath's imagination. It traced the poet's conflicts with her father and with male poetic traditions; her complicated sense of herself as her mother's daughter and as a woman poet; and her divided sense of self and her ambivalent emotions toward her husband, the poet Ted Hughes. The book provides close readings of Plath's poetry, fiction, and life from feminist, biographical, intertextual, and theoretical perspectives.

A third project as been The New Anthology of American Poetry, co-edited with Camille Roman of Washington State University and Thomas Travisano of Hartwick College. This three-volume teaching anthology provides copious commentary on each poet and poem, amounting to a literary history as well as a collection of poems.

Volume 1 (2003) moves from the beginnings to 1900, including such admired poets as Anne Bradstreet, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Paul Laurence Dunbar as well as lesser-known poets and poems by Native Americans, African American slaves, and Latina/o and Asian immigrants.

Volume 2 (2005) continues the story from 1900 to 1950, focusing on such poets as Gertrude Stein, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, H. D., Marianne Moore, Angelina Weld Grimke, Charles Reznikoff, Hart Crane and Langston Hughes as well as many lesser-known poets and such cultural materials as popular song lyrics and immigrant poems.

Volume 3 (forthcoming) will carry the story up to the present moment, including writers ranging from Elizabeth Bishop and Gwendolyn Brooks through Allen Ginsberg and Sylvia Plath to Bob Dylan and Rae Armantrout.

I've spent my life in poetry, moved and mystified by the forms words can take and the way those forms can make the reader or reciter more self-aware and more aware of others. I invite you to join the intense conversation I have been having about poetry in my books.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Over 600 poems by sixty- five American poets from the era of 1900 to 1950, October 12, 2005

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Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The New Anthology of American Poetry: Volume Ii Modernisms: 1900-1950 (Paperback)

The collaborative editorial effort of Steven Gould Axelrod, Camille Roman, and Thomas Travisano, The New Anthology Of American Poetry: Volume Two, Modernisms 1900-1950 compiles over 600 poems by sixty- five American poets from the era of 1900 to 1950, including T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, and many more. Offering a diversity of styles, and themes, this second volume of The New Anthology Of American Poetry also presents introductions, bibliographies, biographies, up-to-date footnotes and endnotes, and more to assist the reader in both understanding poetry and find more works by a given author. Very highly recommended both as an introduction to early twentieth-century American poetry and as a broad smorgasbord to experience and learn from a panoply of magnificent classic works.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The New Anthlogy of American Poetry, June 1, 2005

By 

Kathleen Spivack "writer, teacher" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The New Anthology of American Poetry: Volume Ii Modernisms: 1900-1950 (Paperback)

Edited by Steven Gould Axelrod, Thomas Travisano, and Camille Roman, this anthology is a joy. It will make you want to read--and re-read. The editors, not limited by any one canon, worked together to present the range of American poetry of the period. The anthology lays out the richness of the "modernist" American literary heritage with care and love. There are generous selections from a range of the "modernist" writers in addition to surprising selections from immigrant and native american poetry and from popular song. The introductions and notes are thoughtful and deeply intelligent. This anthology promises to be a classic.

7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Broader Perspective, Calmer Knees, May 10, 2005

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David M. Strain (Arkansas, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The New Anthology of American Poetry: Volume Ii Modernisms: 1900-1950 (Paperback)

The previous review by Mr. Freedman is misleading, I believe. I myself am quite a conservative scholar and have little time for what some call "political correctness." (I would note in passing that I never heard anyone on the Left use this silly phrase seriously until a number of useful idiots from the Reagan era took up the mantra in an effort to let bigots feel comfortable fighting back.)

Regardless, I adopted this text for my Modern American Poetry course this fall not because it features the sorts of poetry Mr. Freedman describes. (I have no intention of assigning any of it.) Rather, I adopted it because it gives a much fuller representation of modern American poetry than most of the Norton knockoffs now on the market. For instance, *The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry* doesn't offer a single line by Trumbull Stickney, one of the "Harvard poets" of the genteel tradition, who was greatly admired by the likes of Conrad Aiken. This anthology prints five poems. Moreover, several other "white penis people," in Robert Hughes's phrase, appear here after having been summarily banished from ostensibly conservative anthologies. (Here, "conservative" appears to mean "too damned lazy to read much.")

Yes, this anthology has a political agenda. However, to pretend that others don't is to insult the intelligence of readers. From my perspective (a good liberal who believes, nevertheless, in Milton, Dryden, Pope), this is a genuinely democratic anthology. True, it includes poems by Native Americans, immigrants, and migrant workers. However, it also includes "The Old Rugged Cross," "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?", "You're A Grand Old Flag," "Alexander's Ragtime Band," "I'm Just Wild About Harry," and "Goodnight, Irene." The anthologists' agenda, simply put, is to open the canon back up and paint a more genuinely representative portrait of American verse in the modernist era.

In sum, if Mr. Freedman fears the "The Idea of Order at Key West" can't stand the competition, all I can say is that his faith in Wallace Stevens is far weaker than mine.