Modernist Women Poets
An Anthology
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
The 20th century was a time of great change, particularly in the arts, but seldom explored were the female poets of that time. Robert Hass and Paul Ebenkamp have put together a comprehensive anthology of poetry featuring the poems of Gertrude Stein, Lola Ridge, Amy Lowell, Elsa Von Freytag–Loringhoven, Adelaide Crapsey, Angelina Weld Grimke, Anne Spencer, Mina Loy, Hazel Hall, Hilda Doolittle, Marianne Moore, Djuna Barnes, and Hildegarde Flanner. With an introduction from Hass and Ebenkamp, as well as detailed annotation through out to guide the reader, this wonderful collection of poems will bring together the great female writers of the modernist period as well as deconstruct the language and writing that surfaced during that period.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Reintroducing the early 20th century through the poetry of 16 women some famous, some nearly unknown coeditors Hass (a former U.S. Poet Laureate) and Ebenkamp have produced that rare, valuable thing: a volume that could be at once a resource for educators, and a fine entr e for the general reader. Composed between the 1910s and the 1940s, modernist poetry rejected older forms for stranger, harsher shapes; its free verse, prose blocks, or intricate stanzas attuned to new technology, or to free love, or to big cities, or to modern war. The great women of modernism Gertrude Stein, H. D., Marianne Moore are hardly news, but they are rarely encountered together in such concentration. Big excerpts from Stein let her shine, both as an absurdist and as a poet of sexy intimacy. H.D. appears not only as Imagist, or miniaturist, but as the author of an expansive masque and a visionary poem ("The Walls Do Not Fall") about WWII. Moore, Mina Loy, and Laura Riding get appropriate recognition, and even sophisticates can still make discoveries here, among them Lola Ridge and Hazel Hall. Hass's substantial afterword doubles as a terrific introduction to modernism in general; the poet C. D. Wright contributes a briefer foreword, and well-chosen prose concludes the whole.
