San Antonio College Library

"In her first collection of essays, Molly McQuade performs the role of the ideal reader - passionately interested in ideas and irrepressibly ambivalent. She considers poetry from its composition or translation to its publication, critical reception, and consumption. Her close readings of poems by Emily Dickinson and John Ashbery, among others, offer new insights for those readers blinded by familiarity. She reflects on the consequences of literary...

An historical study of American postwar poetry discusses specific trends and styles and the work of major poets, including Lowell, Ginsberg, and Levertov.

When this book was first published in 1969, Richard Howard set himself the overwhelming task of a critical examination in detail of forty-one American poets as widely different as James Merrill and Gary Snyder, some celebrated and some obscure, who had at that time published at least two volumes of work establishing a characteristic identity. He thought of these poets as representing and dramatizing the achievement of American poetry since 1950, following...

To know the poetry of our time, to look through its lenses and filters, is to see our lives illuminated. In these eloquent essays on recent American, British, and Irish poetry, Helen Vendler shows us contemporary life and culture captured in lyric form by some of our most celebrated poets. An incomparable reader of poetry, Vendler explains its power; it is, she says, the voice of the soul rather than the socially marked self speaking directly to us...

In this book, James Longenbach develops a fresh approach to major American poetry after modernism. Rethinking the influential "breakthrough" narrative, the oft-told story of post-modern poets throwing off their modernist shackles in the 1950s, Longenbach offers a more nuanced perspective. Reading a diverse range of poets - John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, Amy Clampitt, Jorie Graham, Richard Howard, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Robert Pinsky, and...