The Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry

About this book

Join Professor Helen Vendler in her course lecture on the Yeats poem "Among School Children". View her insightful and passionate analysis along with a condensed reading and student comments on the course. The poetry collected in this volume reveals the range and power of the contemporary American imagination. The verve freedom and boldness of American English are combined with the new harmonies of modern cadence. Here are distillations of twentieth-century perception feeling and thought and reflections of changing social realities scientific and psychoanalytic insights and the strong voices of feminism and black consciousness. This is a book for those who value fresh and original poetry and for readers worldwide who are curious about contemporary American experience. Helen Vendler relies on her own taste and judgment in singling out excellent poems beginning with the late modernist flowering of Wallace Stevens and continuing to the present. Her wide-ranging Introduction places recent American poetry in its aesthetic and social contexts. The anthology provides an extensive offering of the work of major poets and introduces many writers who are only now beginning to make their reputation. Thirty-five poets are included with a representative selection from the earlier to later work of each and a significant number of long poems. Brief biographies of the poets are appended.