Cambridge Introduction To Twentieth Century American Poetry

Description:
The Cambridge Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Poetry is designed to give readers a brief but thorough introduction to the various movements, schools, and groups of American poets in the twentieth century. It will help readers to understand and analyze modern and contemporary poems. The first part of the book deals with the transition from the nineteenth-century lyric to the modernist poem, focussing on the work of major modernists such as Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and W. C. Williams. In the second half of the book, the focus is on groups such as the poets of the Harlem Renaissance, the New Critics, the Confessionals, and the Beats. In each chapter, discussions of the most important poems are placed in the larger context of literary, cultural, and social history.

Review:
'...Beach's criticism is not only level-headed but astute...The result: a reading lesson that telescopes a major trend in postwar poetry. Even after reading Christopher Beach's The Cambridge Introductin to Twentieth-Century American Poetry we may not know precisely why the deer and the dachshund are one. But we will have received what may be the most clear and comprehensive course in Stevens, Eliot, Moore, et al that is available in book form.' North Dakota Quarterly

Table of Contents:
Introduction; 1. A new century; 2. Modernist expatriates: Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot; 3. Lyric modernism: Wallace Stephens and Hart Crane; 4. Gendered modernism; 5. William Carlos Williams and the modernist American scene; 6. From the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts Movement; 7. The New Criticism and poetic formalism; 8. The Confessional Movement; 9. Lyric as meditation; 10. The New American Poetry and the postmodern avant-garde.

Author Biography:
Christopher Beach is Adjunct Assistant Professor at Claremont Graduate University. He is the author of several books in the field of American poetry and one book on American cinema. His most recent books are Poetic Culture: Contemporary American Poetry and Institution and Class, Language, and American Film Comedy. He is also the editor of Artifice and Indeterminacy: An Anthology of New Poetics.