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Summary
Summary
In the years between the beginning of the twentieth century and the end of World War II, American poetry was transformed, producing a body of work whose influence was felt throughout the world. Now for the first time the landmark two-volume Library of America anthology of twentieth-century poetry through the post-War years restores that era in all its astonishing beauty and explosive energy.
This first volume of the set, organized chronologically by the poets' birthdates, takes the reader from Henry Adams (1838-1918) to Dorothy Parker (1893-1967), and in the process reveals the unfolding of a true poetic renaissance. Included are generous selections from some of the century's greatest poets- Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, H.D., Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot. Here they are seen as part of an age that proposed new and often contentious definitions of what American poetry could be and fresh perceptions of a society undergoing rapid and often tumultuous change.
The multifarious aesthetic influences brought to bear-Chinese and Japanese poetry, the African-American sermon, the artistic revolutions of Cubism and Dada, the cadences of jazz, the brash urgencies of vernacular speech-resulted in a poetic culture of dynamic energy and startling contrasts.
The poets of this era transformed not only style but traditional subject matter- there are poems here on a silent movie actress, a lynching, the tenements of New York, the trench warfare of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the landscape of Mars. Here too are folk ballads on events like the assassination of McKinley and the sinking of the Titanic ; popular and humorous verse by Don Marquis and Franklin P. Adams; the famous "Spectra" hoax; song lyrics by Ma Rainey, Joe Hill, and Irving Berlin; and poems by writers as unexpected as Djuna Barnes, Sherwood Anderson, John Reed, and H. P. Lovecraft. Included are some of the century's most important poems, presented in full- Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberley , Eliot's The Waste Land , Steven's Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction .
LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
Author Notes
Robert Hass is one of America's most acclaimed poets, winner of both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. He was poet laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997.
John Hollander (1929-2013) published nearly two dozen books of poetry, including Selected Poetry (1993), Figurehead (1999), and A Draft of Light (2008), as well as five books of criticism. He received the Bollingen Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship, and was Sterling Professor of English at Yale University.
Carolyn Kizer (1925-2014) was the author of more than a dozen works of poetry, prose, and translation. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1985.
Nathaniel Mackey is a poet, novelist, anthologist, literary critic, and editor. He is the Reynolds Price Professor of Creative Writing at Duke University and a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets.
Marjorie Perloff teaches courses and writes on twentieth and twenty-first century poetry and poetics. She is Professor Emerita of English at Stanford University and Florence R. Scott Professor of English Emerita at the University of Southern California.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
These two volumes make up the first half of the largest anthology of 20th-century American poetry ever attempted. Over 200 poets are represented, all born before 1914, and presented in birth-date order. The scale here is unprecedented, and the spectrum broad, inclusive and generous. The effect is breathtaking. The first volume begins with anonymous ballads, establishing a theme of popular song that is sustained throughout both volumes, including blues, folks songs and Broadway tunes. This suggests the music that was in the air at the time much of this work was being written, as well as asserting the value of these songs as poetry in their own right. "I can tell the wind is rising/ leaves trembling on the trees/ umm hmm hmm hmm/ all I need my little sweet woman/ and to keep my company" (Robert Johnson, vol. 2). The emphasis in vol. 1 is on the richness of modernism, with enormous selections of Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, H.D., Marianne Moore and T.S. Eliot. Several of these are long enough to comprise an entire volume of selected poems. (Mina Loy gets more than the usual page or two.) The selections are solidly edited, presenting the most representative and well-known poems across each writer's oeuvre. The second volume includes many more poets, and tends toward shorter selections, though Hart Crane is featured prominently. Multiple and simultaneous layers of American poetics are represented side-by-side in both volumes: lyricism, early confessional poetry, Imagism, light verse, Objectivism, the Harlem Renaissance, hoaxes, the Fugitives, among others. One of the greatest pleasures of these books is discovering (or re-discovering) poets like Abraham Lincoln Gillespie, Lola Ridge, John G. Neihardt or dadaist Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven, energetic and distinct poets who have long since been dropped from most cullings, or were never included in the first place. This anthology, edited by Robert Hass, John Hollander, Carolyn Kizer, Nathaniel Mackey and Marjorie Perloff, will be an invaluable and lasting resource to anyone interested in American poetry. Its inclusive take on the multiplicity of work leaves all the differences intact, all the layers in context. It brilliantly illuminates the shifting substance of American poetry. (Apr.) FYI: Geoffrey O'Brien is editor-in-chief of the Library of America, and the author of The Times Square Story and other nonfiction, as well as of Floating City: Selected Poems 1978-1995. His The Browser's Ecstasy: A Meditation on Reading is due from Counterpoint in June. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
It seems awfully presumptuous to be presenting the essence of twentieth-century American poetry before many think the century is over. That isn't, however, quite what these two fat books are about. Only the work of poets born before 1914 is in them, which makes them seem less vainglorious. But think what glories that cutoff allows. The acknowledged twentieth-century members of the great American poets club--Frost, Stevens, Williams, Pound, Eliot, and Crane--are generously represented. Half as generously present are those whose adherents clamor for their membership: Robinson, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Jeffers, Moore, Cummings, Hughes, Warren, and Bishop. It is a brow raiser and an indication of how the critical wind is blowing to see Louis Zukofsky and Charles Olson each accorded enough pages to put them in the clubhouse lobby, too. As in the magnificent American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century (2v., 1993), more than highbrow stuff is included. The whole shebang opens with five anonymous ballads, including "Casey Jones" and "The Titanic," and some of ethnologist Frances Densmore's versions of Chippewa songs; popular newspaper verse by Don Marquis and Franklin P. Adams; blues by W. C. Handy and Ma Rainey; and songs by Berlin, Porter, Gershwin, Harburg, Hart, Loesser, and others are right where their writers' birth years put them. And it is sheer poetry-loving fun to discover names even the phenomenally well read perhaps won't know, such as Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, and sample their traces. No preface rationalizing choices and proportions appears, but surely no apologies are needed. A wonderful set. Pray for v.3 et seq. --Ray Olson
Choice Review
This handsome, practical two-volume anthology is a typical Library of America text: a simple but visually pleasing page layout; an attractive, readable typeface; thin paper. Unfortunately, the subtitle's claim to cover the 20th century is a serious exaggeration, since the set concludes with selections from Karl Shapiro and May Swenson and includes no poets born after 1913. Both volumes contain excellent addenda to aid the beginning and general reader: biographical notes (containing significant bibliographical information about each writer), textual notes, explanatory notes, and indexes--title and first line (together), and author. The set presents a good sampling of work by the major poets (e.g., Stevens is represented with 36 poems over 61 pages), while also recovering significant writers who were not raked up into the modernist canon during the century itself. A good example of the latter is Emanuel Carnevali, an Italian immigrant who came to the US to avoid conscription during WW I, and who played a role in the literary magazines during the 1920s, publishing in The Little Review, The Modern Review, and Poetry. Recommended especially for beginning and general readers of poetry and for all public libraries. D. Garrison; Spalding University
Library Journal Review
Part of the distinguished Library of America series, this impressive anthology was edited by Robert Hass, John Hollander, Carolyn Kizer, Nathaniel Mackey, and Marjorie Perloff, who arranged the poets chronologically by date of birth. Readers will appreciate the diversity of the poetry, including generous selections of the high moderns (Robert Frost, e.e. cummings, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, and Theodore Roethke). There is also vers de societ (Dorothy Parker, Phyllis McGinley, Ogden Nash, and Virginia Adair). African American writers include Arna Bontemps, Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Richard Wright, and Claude McKay. Even musicians and composers are well represented (Woody Guthrie, Bessie Smith, Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin, and Oscar Hammerstein). The two volumes contain more than 1500 poems by over 200 different poets, with excellent biographical and textual notes and an index of first lines. Essential for all poetry collections.--Daniel L. Guillory, Millikin Univ., Findlay, IL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter One Walter Conrad Arensberg 1878-1954 Arithmetical Progression of the Verb "To Be" On a sheet of paper dropped with the intention of demolishing space by the simple subtraction of a necessary plane draw a line that leaves the present in addition carrying forward to the uncounted columns of the spatial ruin now considered as complete the remainder of the past. The act of disappearing which in the three-dimensional is the fate of the convergent vista is thus under the form of the immediate arrested in a perfect parallel of being in part. Edward Arlington Robinson (1869-1935) The Poor Relation No longer torn by what she knows And sees within the eyes of others, Her doubts are when the daylight goes, Her fears are for the few she bothers. She tells them it is wholly wrong Of her to stay alive so long; And when she smiles her forehead shows A crinkle that had been her mother's. Beneath her beauty, blanched with pain, And wistful yet for being cheated, A child would seem to ask again A question many times repeated; But no rebellion has betrayed Her wonder at what she has paid For memories that have no stain, For triumph born to be defeated. To those who come for what she was-- The few left who know where to find her-- She clings, for they are all she has; And she may smile when they remind her, As heretofore, of what they know Of roses that are still to blow By ways where not so much as grass Remains of what she sees behind, her. They stay a while, and having done What penance or the past requires, They go, and leave her there alone To count her chimneys and her spires. Her lip shakes when they go away, And yet she would not have them stay; She knows as well as anyone That Pity, having played, soon tires. But one friend always reappears, A good ghost, not to be forsaken; Whereat she laughs and has no fears Of what a ghost may reawaken, But welcomes, while she wears and mends The poor relation's odds and ends, Her truant from a tomb of years-- Her power of youth so early taken. Poor laugh, more slender than her song It seems; and there are none to hear it With even the stopped ears of the strong For breaking heart or broken spirit. The friends who clamored for her place, And would have scratched her for her face, Have lost her laughter for so long That none would care enough to fear it. None live who need fear anything From her, whose losses are their pleasure; The plover with a wounded wing Stays not the flight that others measure So there she waits, and while she lives, And death forgets, and faith forgives, Her memories go foraging For bits of childhood song they treasure. And like a giant harp that hums On always, and is always blending The coming of what never comes With what has past and had an ending, The City trembles, throbs, and pounds Outside, and through a thousand sounds The small intolerable drums Of Time are like slow drops descending. Bereft enough to shame a sage And given little to long sighing, With no illusion to assuage The lonely changelessness of dying,-- Unsought, unthought-of, and unheard, She sings and watches like a bird, Safe in a comfortable cage From which there will be no more flying. SARAH N. CLEGHORN (1876-1959) The Golf Links Lie So Near the Mill The golf links lies so near the mill That, almost every day The laboring children can look out And see the men at play. WITTER BYNNER (1881-1968) A Sigh Still must I tamely Talk sense with these others? How long Before I shall be with you again, Magnificently saying nothing. WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS (1883-1963) Thursday I have had my dream--like others-- and it has come to nothing, so that I remain now carelessly with feet planted on the ground and look up at the sky-- feeling my clothes about me, the weight of my body in my shoes, the rim of my hat, air passing in and out at my nose--and decide to dream no more. Copyright © 2000 Literary Classics of the United States, Inc.. All rights reserved.