American Poetry of the Twentieth Century

Gray offers a coherent account of the development of American poetry from the early years of this century. He examines the historical and cultural forces that have helped shape that poetry, and also sets it within its wider context to understand the qualities that make modern American poetry both specifically 'modern' and 'American.' Gray uses the recent theories concerning the relationship between text and context, and between literature and other dimensions of experience to analyze those qualities that make modern American poetry. He discusses how the traditions of Whitman have shaped American poetry and how various poets have imitated his populism, radicalism, individualism, experimentalism, and mysticism. Gray also treats the significance of the modernist experiment and its imagism and objectivism, the Fugitive Movement, the formalists and confessionals of the post-War period, T.S. Eliot and the Beats. ISBN 0-582-49437-0: $37.75; ISBN 0-582-49444-3 (pbk.): $19.50.