Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century
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- $89.99
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- $89.99
Publisher Description
The Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century contains over 400 entries that treat a broad range of individual poets and poems, along with many articles devoted to topics, schools, or periods of American verse in the century. Entries fall into three main categories: poet entries, which provide biographical and cultural contexts for the author's career; entries on individual works, which offer closer explication of the most resonant poems in the 20th-century canon; and topical entries, which offer analyses of a given period of literary production, school, thematically constructed category, or other verse tradition that historically has been in dialogue with the poetry of the United States.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"True poetry has always striven for, and has in the last twenty years come to perfect, a nobility of expression that is of vital importance for our democratic esthetic, moral, and political culture." So writes John Hollander in the notably cheerful introduction to his selection of The Best American Poetry 1998. Highlights of the nobly constructed anthology include an excerpt from John Bricuth's forthcoming Just Let Me Say This About That, Thylias Moss's "The Right Empowerment of Light," John Koethe's "The Secret Amplitude" and Jacqueline Osherow's "La Leggenda della Vera Croce." As always in this David Lehman edited series, each poet contributes a short note on his or her anthologized poem. (Scribner, $14 352p ; $30 cloth 81453-6; Aug.) For a glimpse of the former state of the art, look no further than this fall's Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century. Edited by Eric L. Haralson (with Hollander as an advisory editor), the 115 entries in this biographical encyclopedia cover every poet included by Hollander in The Library of America's acclaimed American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century. Contributors to the encyclopedia include Angus Fletcher (on James Russell Lowell), Daniel Hoffman (on Poe and Stephen Crane) and Barbara Packer (on Joseph Rodman Drake). (Fitzroy Dearborn, $95 536p ; Sept.)
