Focusing in particular on pairings of writers within the larger grouping of poets, this book suggests how literary partnerships became pivotal to American poets in the wake of Donald Allen's 'New American Poetry' anthology.

This book examines Donald M. Allen’s crucially influential poetry anthology The New American Poetry, 1945–1960 from the perspectives of American Cold War nationalism and literary transnationalism, considering how the anthology expresses and challenges Cold War norms, claiming post-war Anglophone poetic innovation for the United States and reflecting the conservative American society of the 1950s. Examining the crossroads of politics, social life, and literature during the Cold War, this book puts Allen’s anthology into its historical context and reveals how the editor was influenced by the volatile climate of nationalism and politics that pervaded every aspect of American life during the Cold War. Reconsidering the dramatic influence that Allen’s anthology has had on the way we think about and anthologize American poetry, and recontextualizing The New American Poetry as a document of the Cold War, this study not only helps us come to a more accurate understanding of how the anthology came into being, but also encourages new ways of thinking about all of Anglophone poetry, from the twentieth century and today.

The Cambridge Companion to American Poets brings together thirty-one essays on some fifty-four American poets, spanning nearly 400 years, from Anne Bradstreet to contemporary performance poetry. This book also examines such movements in American poetry as modernism, the Harlem (or New Negro) Renaissance, 'confessional' poetry, the Black Mountain School, the New York School, the Beats, and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry. Its reputable host of contributors approach American poetry from perspectives as diverse as the poetry itself. The result is a Companion concise enough to be read with pleasure yet expansive enough to do justice to the many traditions American poets have modified, inaugurated, and made their own.

The dial, The little review, and the dialogics of the modernist "new" -- The new American poetry revisisted again -- New, newer, and the newest American poetries -- Poetry anthologies and the idea of the "mainstream" -- Serial form in George Oppen and Robert Creeley -- Place, space, and "new syntax" in Oppen's Seascape: needle's eye -- Macro, micro, material : Rachel Blau DuPlessis's Drafts and the post-objectivist serial poem -- Drafts and fragments : Rachel Blau DuPlessis's (counter-)Poudian project -- "Drawings with words" : Susan Howe's visual feminist poetics -- Authority, marginality, England, and Ireland in the work of Susan Howe -- Bruce Andrews, writing, and "poetry" -- "What about all this writing?" : Williams and alternative poetics -- Language writing, digital poetics, and transitional materialities.

Broad-ranging and pluralistically investigative, the essays in Thinking with the Poem document Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s authorial interventions as a poet, scholar, and cultural critic steeped in the linguistic and political frames of her time. The writers included in this volume engage root-level questions at the heart of DuPlessis’s praxis as posed by her in a recent essay: “What is a poem, what is a poet, what is an oeuvre, what is the ‘poetic’?” Inventive and noncanonical, these essays offer substantive responses to these and other questions, providing new routes of inquiry into the poetry and poetics of this preeminent figure of new writing.

Analyzing the poets Melvin B. Tolson, Langston Hughes, and Amiri Baraka, this study charts the Afro-Modernist epic. Within the context of Classical epic traditions, early 20th-century American modernist long poems, and the griot traditions of West Africa, Schultz reveals diasporic consciousness in the representation of African American identities.

Bridging feminist and cultural studies, the book shows how British and American women poets often operate as cultural insiders. Individual chapters reassess major figures (H.D., Gwendolyn Brooks, Sylvia Plath), alternative modernist poets (Edith Sitwell, Stevie Smith), and contemporary poets (Ai, Carol Ann Duffy).

A bold work of synthetic scholarship, Writing Australian Unsettlement argues that the history of Australian literature contains the rough beginnings of a new literacy. Michael Farrell reads songs, letters and visual poems by Indigenous farmers and stockmen, the unpunctuated journals of early settler women, drover tree-messages and carved clubs, and a meta-commentary on settlement from Moore River (the place escaped from in The Rabbit-Proof Fence) in order to rethink old forms. The book borrows the figure of the assemblage to suggest the active and revisable nature of Australian writing, arguing against the "settling" effects of its prior editors, anthologists, and historians. Avoiding the advancement of a new canon, Farrell offers instead an unsettled space in which to rethink Australian writing.

This volume situates the work of American poet Charles Olson (1910-1970) at the centre of the early post-war American avant-garde. It shows Olson to have been one of the major advocates and theorists of American modernism in the late 1940s and early 1950s; a poet who responded fully and variously to the political, ethical, and aesthetic urgencies driving innovation across contemporary American art. Reading Olson's work alongside that of contemporaries associated with the New York Schools of painting and music (as well as the exiled Frankfurt School), the book draws on Olson's published and unpublished writings to establish an original account of early post-war American modernism. The development of Olson's work is seen to illustrate two primary drivers of formal innovation in the period: the evolution of a new model of political action pivoting around the radical individual and, relatedly, a powerful new critique of instrumental reason and the Enlightenment tradition. Drawing on extensive archival research and featuring readings of a wide range of artists including, prominently, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, David Smith, Wolfgang Paalen, and John Cage, Charles Olson and American Modernism offers a new reading of a major American poet and an original account of the emergence of post-war American modernism.

Taking as its starting point Delmore Schwartz's self-appointment as both a 'poet of the Hudson River' and 'laureate of the Atlantic,' this book comprehensively reassesses the poetic achievement of a critically neglected writer. Runchman reads Schwartz's poetry in relation to its national and international perspectives.