Outstanding Academic Title, Choice

"By embracing the guiding principle of 'traditions and revolutions,' the editors of this marvelous anthology have produced a rich, exciting text that surprises, engages, and challenges readers like no other such book has done. Its thoughtful inclusiveness, lucid introductions, and helpful notes make it supremely teachable. This work establishes a new benchmark for poetry anthologies."-Emory Elliott, editor, The Columbia Literary History of the United States

Bringing together fifty years of exciting modernisms, The New Anthology of American Poetry includes over 600 poems by sixty-five American poets writing in the period between 1900 and 1950. The most recognized poets of the era, such as William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, H. D., Gertrude Stein, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, Hart Crane, and Langston Hughes are represented, along with many other Harlem Renaissance poets, women poets, immigrant and working-class poets, imagists, and objectivists. It is also the first modernist anthology to include poems and songs from popular culture.

The issues addressed in the selections are as varied as the styles and groups. Some poems emphasize formal matters, while others highlight psychological or linguistic concerns. Yet others focus on social issues, such as race, gender, sexuality, nationality, and economic disparity.

Complementing the rich diversity of poetry, poets, and styles, the editors provide helpful introductions, bibliographies, biographies, up-to-date footnotes and endnotes, and critical selections on the art of writing. This anthology not only provides a unique window into the breadth and diversity of modern poetry, it also offers a fresh and informative vehicle for teaching this rich, confusing, and stimulating period.

• Demonstrates how a succession of canons of American poetry has evolved.
• Gives more attention to women poets and to artists from African American, Asian American, Latino, and Native American cultures than in any previous anthology.
• Offers concise introductions to periods and styles, highly informative endnotes to poems, brief bibliographies of key primary and secondary texts, and critical selections on the art of poetry by the poets themselves.

Steven Gould Axelrod is a professor of English at the University of California at Riverside. He is the author of Robert Lowell: Life and Art and Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words and the co-editor of books on Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams. Camille Roman is an associate professor of English, American studies, and Women's studies at Washington State University. She has published a dozen books on women and language, American music, and Elizabeth Bishop as well as essays on Robert Frost, Billie Holiday, Edna Millay, Amy Lowell, and Louise Bogan. She is a president-elect of the Robert Frost Society. Thomas Travisano is a professor of English at Hartwick College. He is the author of Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development and Midcentury Quartet: Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, Berryman and the Making of a Postmodern Aesthetic and the co-editor of Gendered Modernisms: American Women Poets and Their Readers.