Anthology Modern American Poetry Nelson
Anthology of Modern American Poetry holds more than 750 poems by 161 American poets, including a heap of who have not been anthologized before. Spanning a amount of time from Walt Whitman to Sherman Alexie, this collection is the initial to review the twentieth century comprehensively. It presents not only the canonical poetry of the last hundred years but also a great deal of poems by women, minority, and progressive writers only rediscovered in the past two decades.
Uniquely comprehensive, Anthology of Modern American Poetry represents Robert Frost with 23 poems, Wallace Stevens with 22, and Marianne Moore with 14, including her most ambitious long poems. William Carlos Williams is represented not only by his exquisite short lyrics, but also with an experimental combining of poetry and prose. With 29 poems, Langston Hughes is given full treatment for the primary time in any comprehensive anthology. Substantial selections by contemporary poets like John Ashbery, Sylvia Plath, Frank O’Hara, Philip Levine, Lucille Clifton, Judy Grahn, Adrian Louis, Yusef Komunyakaa, Martín Espada, and Sherman Alexie are also included.
Anthology of Modern American Poetry is the initial anthology to give full treatment to American long poems and poem sequences. T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Gertrude Stein’s “Patriarchal Poetry,” William Carlos Williams’s The Descent of Winter, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree,” Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Book of the Dead,” Melvin Tolson’s Libretto for the Republic of Liberia, Theodore Roethke’s “North American Sequence,” Gwendolyn Brooks’s “Gay Chaps at the Bar,” Kenneth Rexroth’s “The Love Poems of Marichiko,” both Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and his “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” and both Adrienne Rich’s “Shooting Script” and her “Twenty-One Love Poems” are all included in their entirety.
Anthology of Modern American Poetry offers the most elaborated annotations available in an anthology of this type. Many works gain from peculiarly commissioned exploration that provides students with such aid as the identification of the inventive references in Melvin Tolson’s poetry, translation of all alien language passages, and illumination of obscure references. This is likewise the only American poetry anthology to present chosen poems in the beautifully illustrated form in which they original appeared. In addition, an accompanying internet site featuring readings of poems and historical background is available at http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps.
Ideal for courses in progressed American poetry, progressed American literature, innovative or contemporary poetry, originative writing-poetry, and American studies, Anthology of Modern American Poetry introduces students to the last 100 years of our poetic inheritance in a in a unique manner rich and provocative format.
Review”A arousing and attention holding anthology, full of surprising selections and old favorites. The layout and printing are exceptional, inviting to the eye.”–Charles L. O’Neill, St. Thomas Aquinas College
“A fine, eclectic group of poems. A superb selection for the classroom–at last!”–David Clippinger, Pennsylvania State University
About the AuthorCary Nelson is at University of Illinois at Urbana. Emory Elliott is at University of California. Emory Elliott is at University of California. Linda Kerber is at University of Iowa. Walton Litz is at Princeton University. Terence Martin is at Indiana University.
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Most helpful client reviews
23 of 25 humans found the following review helpful.
 Questionable editing
By Vinnie Oliveri
Anthologies are tough things to edit, I’m sure. After all, any anthology of creative writing of recognized artisti value printed by, say, Oxford, or Norton especially, has the kind of power necessary to grant it is contents canonical status in literary study. Furthermore, the Norton anthologies tend to have prompt canonical status themselves.
Perhaps this is why Nelson takes so some prospects with this anthology, some for better, and numerous for worse. I did not want to stick him with a 2 star rating, so I gave him a 3, but whereas I commonly consider a 3-star rating as a kind of “yes, I liked it while I was reading it,” this time I give it because I’m attempting to intermediate the times he made magnificent selections with the times he seems to miss the mark.
The most questionable of Nelson’s decisions? Easy. His decision to publish Japanese haiku from World War 2. No, that’s not the questionable part. But he edits them all together to form one long poem. He takes haiku from a good deal of dissimilar writers and turns it into a Harmonium-era Stevens poem. This move defies all sense.
However, it likewise illustrates what is great in Nelson’s anthology: inclusiveness. He goes to great lengths to include writers you might not find in other anthologies; and if you would find them, prospects are you will find more poems by these poets in Nelson’s anthology, or at least dissimilar poems. It bests the Norton Anthology in the Harlem Renaissance department, that’s for sure. I’d never heard of Angelina Welde Grimke, for instance, who’s just an amazing poetical who was writing Plath well before Plath.
It is without doubt irksome that this inclusiveness is now and again at the expense of the “major” poets in the American canon: poets like Stevens get ridiculously short treatment, and half of the time, their most important or recognizeable poems are left out entirely. While I be grateful for that Nelson wants to open up the canon a little bit (okay, a lot, and there’s not one thing defective with that), his anthology feels a little not complete in a field in which the Norton still casts the tallest shadow. Meaning that, while no anthology may stand alone and requires supplementation, Nelson’s requires much more supplementation merely because his exclusions fly in the face of what is, for better or worse, required reading by current canonical standards.
So, if you plan to use this anthology in a class, you will probably need to supplement numerous of the writers with photocopies. But probabilities are you were going to do that anyway.
2 of 2 humans found the following review helpful.
 Reassessing the canon
By Paul A. Baker
Editor Cary Nelson grappled with a heap of questions when compiling this anthology. He was determined to include a great deal of of our ‘fierce but forgotten political poets.’ But beyond that he decisive to urge a major reassessment of the canon, including giving major coverage to Langston Hughes, for example. And to provide significant space for long poems and sequences and poems in regards to race relations. Many of the poets were gay and a lot of were socialists, or blacklisted. Many are Latino and Native American and African American. This is no lily white, square anthology.
The printed book is accompanied by an online diary and multimedia site, called MAPS. http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/
Cary Nelson teaches progressed poetry and literary theory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
 Nelson’s Modern American Poetry
By J. McDougall
This is an essential anthology because it questions assumptions in regards to taste as being usual and unchanging. Nelson invites the reader to try to use a historical imagination as well as to step outside of conventional biases, because over time poetry (even American poetry) has served dissimilar intents for dissimilar communities as lively explosions of language and not plainly as academic pretensions. While numerous poetry may seem just plain bad, Nelson’s anthology shows us the number of ways that poetry was alive and stimulating for the duration of the twentieth century. And even today poetry is not dead, exactly…it just smells funny.
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