Includes bibliographical references (pages 197-229) and index.

"In The Edge of Modernism, Walter Kalaidjian explores responses in modern American poetry to the twentieth century's history of genocide, the Holocaust, and total war as well as to postwar social antagonisms, the longer legacy of racial oppression, and domestic violence. By asking what it means for traumatic memory to have agency in the American verse tradition, Kalaidjian constructs an original account of how American poets became witnesses, both consciously and unconsciously, to modern extremity. Drawing upon psychoanalytic theory and cultural studies, this sweeping perspective on modern poetics analyzes the ways in which literary form gives testimony to the trauma of twentieth-century history." "Through close readings of well-known and less familiar poets - among them Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Edwin Rolfe, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Peter Balakian, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Anne Sexton, and Anthony Hecht - Kalaidjian discerns the latent "edge" of modern trauma as it cuts through the literary representations, themes, and formal techniques of twentieth-century American poetics."--Jacket.

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