Tendencies in Modern American Poetry

As the prominent Imagist poet Amy Lowell observes in the preface to her 1917 work, the "new movement" then transforming American poetry was "evidence of the rise of a native school," certainly an exciting development in American literary history. Despite their stylistic differences, early twentieth-century poets like Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, and John Gould Fletcher all represented fresh new directions in American poetry and a break from the outlook of the Victorian era. In Tendencies in Modern American Poetry, Lowell examines the lives and works of some key figures in the new movement, providing an especially illuminating biography and analysis of the work of Robert Frost.