A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry

Front Cover
Neil Roberts
John Wiley & Sons, Feb 14, 2003 - Literary Criticism - 648 pages
In the twentieth century more people spoke English and more people wrote poetry than in the whole of previous history, and this Companion strives to make sense of this crowded poetical era. The original contributions by leading international scholars and practising poets were written as the contributors adjusted to the idea that the possibilities of twentieth-century poetry were exhausted and finite. However, the volume also looks forward to the poetry and readings that the new century will bring.

The Companion embraces the extraordinary development of poetry over the century in twenty English-speaking countries; a century which began with a bipolar transatlantic connection in modernism and ended with the decentred heterogeneity of post-colonialism. Representation of the 'canonical' and the 'marginal' is therefore balanced, including the full integration of women poets and feminist approaches and the in-depth treatment of post-colonial poets from various national traditions. Discussion of context, intertextualities and formal approaches illustrates the increasing self-consciousness and self-reflexivity of the period, whilst a 'Readings' section offers new readings of key selected texts. The volume as a whole offers critical and contextual coverage of the full range of English-language poetry in the last century.

From inside the book

Contents

Modernism and the Transatlantic Connection
7
Modernist Poetry and its Precursors
21
The Nonmodernist Modern
37
Poetry and Politics 51 འཙ
51
Poetry and War
64
Poetry and Literary Theory
89
Poetry and Gender
101
Imagism
127
Canadian Poetry
304
Scottish Poetry
318
Irish Poetry to 1966
343
Poems of 191213
359
The Waste Land
381
Spring and All
403
Observations
427
Poems
448

Poetry and the New Criticism
153
Black Mountain and Projective Verse
168
The Beats
183
Confessionalism
197
Language Poetry
220
West Indian Poetry
235
African Poetry
249
Poetry of the Indian Subcontinent
264
Australian Poetry
281
The Pisan Cantos
469
The Burning Perch
491
Crow
513
SelfPortrait in a Convex Mirror
536
Contemporary American Poetry
559
Contemporary Irish Poetry
585
Index
610
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

References to this book

About the author (2003)

Neil Roberts is Professor of English Literature at Sheffield University. He has been a visiting professor at the University of New Mexico and also Chuo University in Japan. His publications on a wide range of contemporary poets, as well as on George Meredith and D.H Lawrence and Bakhtin, include Narrative and Voice in Postwar Poetry (1999).

Bibliographic information