...Lee Bartlett Duke University Press 2002 18 Poetry: The 1940s to the Present Lee Bartlett i Poets’ Prose Two of the year’s more significant books are not critical per se, but posthumously published prose by two poets: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (Anchor...

... of its time. It included only four women among nearly four dozen men, and its closest brushes with minority perspectives came via Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, LeRoi Jones, and Jack Spicer. In the 50-plus years since, newer generations of American poets have emerged from even more diverse sets...

....) Likewise, no readily dis- cernible critical trend or fashion can be said to be general all over the field. An occasional essay seeks to advance understanding through the deployment of a linguistics-based theory, and readers of some poets will welcome new reference works...

... exceeds that on any other poet of the period; this chapter might have turned into a special number entirely on Bishop. Though I have accorded her more space than anyone else, I have been more ruthlessly selective—or, if you will, even more arbitrary—in my coverage of Bishop scholarship than I have...

... is in the habit of indiscriminately going to conferences on contemporary American poetry will know how from one gathering of the faithful to the next the good news varies beyond any possible construction of a synoptic version. And there is so much of it. To make matters worse, poets like to tell...

... scholarly output from 2005, the study most likely to stimu- late animated conversation among poets and poetry critics, and a share of heated controversy too, may be Ashton’s From Modernism to Postmod- ernism. Here, in a series of chapters on Gertrude Stein, Laura (Riding) Jackson, and William...

... on biogra- phy, historical context, and textual criticism, including two full-length works on Dickinson and gardening. i  Walt Whitman a. Books  Leading the long list of new books is To Walt Whitman, America (No. Car.) by Kenneth M. Price. The title comes from the poet’s own time, when...

...M. Jimmie Killingsworth Duke University Press 2005 4 Whitman and Dickinson M. Jimmie Killingsworth Relatively few new books appeared this year on the two leading poets of 19th-century America. Even so, significant contributions made their way into print, including the second...

... in Contem- porary American Poetry identifies a heterodox religious strain in experi- mental poetry and poetics. That six of the seven poets discussed are males—albeit three of them dead white males—gives some reassurance that male poets still are part of the experimental brigade. Up for grabs...

...Anita Plath Helle © 2000 Duke University Press 2000 18 Poetry: The 1940s to the Present Anita Plath Helle Cultural studies of poetry and poetics are burgeoning. When the White House orchestrated a gathering of American poets laureate Rita Dove, Robert Hass, and Robert Pinsky for a celebration...

... calls the two poets “the finest among their generation, a generation that came to maturity around the beginning of the Second World War.” Oppen is also well served by Thinking Poetics: Essays on George Oppen. Then there is Charles Olson, a member of the same generation whom some revere...

... Oostdijk’s Among the Nightmare Fighters: American Poets of World War II punctures the “Good War” myth and uncovers the war’s troubling presence in the work of many middle-generation poets. A recent pleasant surprise was the launching of a new series of the Hopkins Review, which this year featured...

...Jim Cocola © 2015 Duke University Press 2015 18  Poetry: The 1950s to the Present Jim Cocola A half century ago, when this annual debuted, it included a chapter titled “Poetry: 1930 to the Present” by Oliver Evans. Devoted to schol- arship on poets including Wallace Stevens...

... the story of Whitman’s correspondence with Sholes, a contemporary admirer of the poet’s work in the hospitals and his accounts of the Civil War. Another ardent defender of the poet was the sales agent E. C. Walker of Norway, Iowa, whose promotion of Leaves of Grass comes to light in Ed Folsom’s...

...Timothy Materer © 2000 Duke University Press 2000 17 Poetry: 1900 to the 1940s Timothy Materer Over the period from 1993 through 1997 the publication of critical books on the major American poets has been remarkably steady. The two most critically popular poets, William Carlos Williams...

... the Dickinson section. i Walt Whitman a. Contextual Work Walt Whitman in Context, ed. Joanna Levin and Edward Whitley (Cambridge), presents 38 essays, organized into four sections and supported by a substantial list of further reading, situating the poet in the many contexts through which he charted his life...

... endeavor to draw attention to alternative ex- pressions of modernity. Others call into question the notion that post- modernism is a distinct successor to modernism, disclosing the presence of postmodern attitudes or politics in the work of several poets. A handful of critics examine the appropriation...

... the centen- nial of Langston Hughes’s birth with a cluster of essays and a group of his poems translated from Uzbek back into English. A substantial new biog- raphy of Hart Crane makes its appearance. Several critics explore the responses of poets to the political and cultural climate of America...

..., instead of glumly staring at a mound of photocopied articles and a passel of new schol- arly books still to be read and, some of them, held forth on before my annual deadline. There are unforeseeable benefits, though, of reading as doggedly as I must. Sometimes a poet with whom I am slightly...

...Frank J. Kearful Duke University Press 2009 18  Poetry: The 1940s to the Present Frank J. Kearful Do we have any reason to trust a poet more than a used car salesman, or a president who looks us squarely in the camera eye and tells us that he did not have sexual relations...