The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry

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Poetry and other arts have been essential to each other at times in their development, including during the moment of Modernism. Modernists were reimaging the form of art, with Cubism, mobiles, and fresh poetic forms. At O’Hara’s height, during the 1950s, avant-garde poets and painters discovered each other and became friends. Former U.S. Poet Laureate Dove takes a fresh look at the canon of 20th century American poetry in this hefty anthology [...] This book is sure to become an important resource for those interested in poetry, and especially students, for decades to come." It is in the poets born after the mid-1950s and writing in the late part of the century where the absence of literary giants is most keenly felt. Where, in this most educated, MFA-infused generation is the Auden, or the Pound, the Stevens, the Bishop, or the Williams? Where is the Allen Ginsberg or John Berryman, the John Ashbery, the James Wright, or the Anne Sexton? There simply isn’t one. Collectively, their poems are, for the most part, utterly anodyne and forgettable. Informed neither by lives fully lived, nor by minds tapping the deepest parts of the poetic imagination. But this is not the fault of Rita Dove, whatever you may think of her choices.

About my "constant pleading" about Plath and Ginsberg: I'm not sure if "pleading" is the right word, but I know that "constant" isn't: I've mentioned the issue in one, count it, one blog post. Unprecedented in its textual authority, the anthology includes newly researched biographical sketches of each poet, a year-by-year chronology of poets and poetry from 1800 to 1900, and extensive notes. I don't really like to respond to people who don't sign their names, but you've got things so wrong here I feel I ought to say something.The poets who have the most to teach arenot always the poets who exemplify a literary-historical watershed. homage to my hips ; [at last we killed the roaches] ; death of fred clifton ; to my last period / Lucille Clifton

And while one might, from the outside, say that Penguin should have just tossed in more money into the permissions pile, this simply reveals that the scale of the problem isn't known to those suggesting such a thing. Why should Penguin have to shell out (literally) a fee ten times as large for a particular Ginsberg poem than a Langston Hughes? Why would they insist on holding a permissions gun to Penguin's head even after attempts were made to bring them in-line with other fees, including offering a favored-nations fee? And even while their own authors were urging fees to be lowered so that they could be represented in the anthology? My guess is that Penguin was not surprised. The publisher likely tapped Dove precisely because she represented the possibility of a different approach. Though condescending appraisals of Dove’s introduction (written “in a genre not her own”) suggest she was not sufficiently scholarly, it may be instead that she was just scholarly enough. The raft of new challenges confronting the publishing industry‘s profitability (indeed, sustainability) give houses like Penguin strong incentives to register and respond to changes in the book-buying market, where course adoptions are perhaps more important than ever. Penguin may have shrewdly identified the emergence of a nationwide demand for poetry anthologies designed with classrooms of budding creative writers (and non-English majors, broadly) in mind. At last, 20th century poetry itself! Rita Dove's [anthology] is intelligent, generous, surprising, and altogether thrilling to read—literally, a heart-thumping collection. In her editorial hands the 20th century is broad but sharply contoured. Most other poetry anthologies give us schools, corners, clubs, and identities, but this one gives us something beyond representative that gets at the extraordinary accomplishment and range of multi-vocal American poetry in the century. Dove's selection—and this book—will long stand as the definitive anthology of American poetry." Toward the middle of the twentieth century, especially after World War II, the view shifted: Pound’s antiquities had lost their luster, Eliot’s England grown stale, the call of Crane’s Brooklyn Bridge faded to an echo. West of the Hudson lay a brave new world: the hardscrabble Appalachia of James Wright’s southeastern Ohio, Philip Levine’s working-class Detroit, Gwendolyn Brooks’s impoverished bean eaters in Chicago, the transcendental hermits of Robert Bly’s Minnesota winters. I don't see how HC put things "beyond the power" of Penguin. I do see that they made it difficult. Perhaps the forthcoming interview will make that plain.The range of tone and subject matter is immense: here are Melvin B. Tolson’s swirlingly allusive Harlem portraits, Phyllis McGinley’s elegant verse transcriptions of suburbia, May Swenson’s playful meditations on the laws of physics. The diversity of formal approaches includes the extreme linguistic experiments of Eugene Jolas and Abraham Lincoln Gillespie, Rolfe Humphries’s adaptation of traditional Welsh meter, the haiku of Richard Wright, the ballads of Helen Adam and Elder Olson, the epigrams of J.V. Cunningham. A selection of light verse is joined by lyrics from the era’s greatest songwriters, including Robert Johnson, Woody Guthrie, and Ira Gershwin. Several important long poems are presented complete, including Hart Crane’sThe Bridge, Louis Zukofsky’sPoem beginning “The”and Robert Penn Warren’sAudubon: A Vision. Rounding out the volume are such infrequently anthologized figures as Vladimir Nabokov, James Agee, Tennessee Williams, and John Cage. Archambeau: So I made a few typographical errors in my original comment. Yes, "elide." Yes, "This is less an insult as it is a commentary [in regard to the anthology as genre]." Etc. It's funny--sad--that you'd rather grade me on those slips than on the basis of what I was saying. Orion ; Planetarium ; Valediction forbidding mourning ; Twenty-one love poems : XIII ("The rules break like a thermometer--") / Adrienne Rich Poetry anthologies are, in general, the bêtes noires of the literary world. Feared and suffered by many, loved and appreciated by few. Oft criticized, rarely praised, they are the staple of survey literature courses, and the bane of students everywhere. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2022-10-15 18:01:21 Associated-names Dove, Rita Autocrop_version 0.0.14_books-20220331-0.2 Bookplateleaf 0004 Boxid IA40737515 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier