Anthology of Modern American Poetry

Book Overview

Anthology of Modern American Poetry contains more than 750 poems by 161 American poets, including many who have not been anthologized before. Spanning a period from Walt Whitman to Sherman Alexie, this collection is the first to review the twentieth century comprehensively. It presents not only the canonical poetry of the last hundred years but also numerous poems by women, minority, and progressive writers only rediscovered in the past two decades...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195122712
• ISBN13: 9780195122718
• Release Date: January 2000
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 1296 Pages
• Weight: 1.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.9" x 9.2" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

Reassessing the canon

Editor Cary Nelson grappled with many questions when compiling this anthology. He was determined to include some of our 'fierce but forgotten political poets.' But beyond that he decided to urge a major reassessment of the canon, including giving major coverage to Langston Hughes, for example. And to provide significant space for long poems and sequences and poems about race relations. Many of the poets were gay and many were socialists, or blacklisted. Many are Latino and Native American and African American. This is no lily white, square anthology. The printed book is accompanied by an online journal and multimedia site, called MAPS. http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/ Cary Nelson teaches modern poetry and literary theory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Nelson's Modern American Poetry

This is an important anthology because it questions assumptions about taste as being standard and unchanging. Nelson invites the reader to try to use a historical imagination as well as to step outside of traditional biases, because over time poetry (even American poetry) has served different purposes for different communities as lively explosions of language and not simply as academic pretensions. While some poetry may seem just plain bad, Nelson's anthology shows us the number of ways that poetry was alive and exciting during the twentieth century. And even today poetry is not dead, exactly...it just smells funny.