A Concise Companion to Twentieth-Century American Poetry

This book offers a fresh and comprehensive reading of modern American poetry in several important ways. It takes in the whole of the twentieth century instead of dividing into decades like the twenties and thirties or into periods labelled Modernism and Postmodernism. Moreover, instead of focusing on individual poets, the successive chapters relate an often overlapping range of poets to the crucial and defining cultural issues within which the poetry took form and direction and to which the poetry spoke. Stephen Fredman has assembled an extraordinary group of critics to write the chapters. There is nothing else like this rich and trenchant book in the field of modern poetry.

Albert Gelpi, Stanford University

If I had to recommend a single book on the culture of twentieth-American poetry to students or colleagues, I would choose Stephen Fredman's Concise Companion. Fredman wisely decided to treat the entire century as a whole rather than adopting the usual Modernist/Postmodernist division or treating decades and poets separately. From the opening "Wars I Have Seen" to the final treatment of philosophy and theory in U.S. poetry, Fredman's contributors carefully examine the intersecting worlds of our poetry-- the New York art world, the impact of various diasporas, and the curious intersections with politics, gender, and religion. Yet the poetry itself always comes first, and no reader can fail to profit from these clearly written, concise, and truly expert chapters.

Marjorie Perloff, Stanford University