In this volume Elizabeth Gregory addresses a number of key issues surrounding the formation of the American poetic canon. Taking as her primary examples T. S. Eliot's "Waste""""Land," William Carlos Williams' "Paterson," and selected poems by Marianne Moore, she examines the ways in which modern American writers struggled with questions of literary authority and cultural identity in relation to pre-existing European models.
Gregory focuses on these issues through analysis of the use of quotation in modern and postmodern literature, a practice that was strikingly divergent from the...

Why did quotation come into vogue among modernist American poets when, historically, allusion had been the preferred mode of intertextual reference? Elizabeth Gregory argues that quotation served as a site of these poets' struggle with questions of literary authority and, relatedly, of cultural and gender identity. While different poets quoted very different kinds of texts to very different effects, their shared reliance on quotation suggests their commonality of concerns - concerns that remain of interest in the postmodernist world, where quotation has become the prevalent artistic method....

Over the past three decades, skyrocketing numbers of women have chosen to start their families in their late thirties and early forties. In 2005, ten times as many women had their first child between the ages of 35 and 39 as in 1975, and thirteen times as many had their first between 40 and 44. Women now have the option to define for themselves when they're ready for family, rather than sticking to a schedule set by social convention. As a society, however, we have yet to come to terms with the phenomenon of later motherhood, and women who decide it makes sense for them to delay...

Drawing on fresh perspectives from previously unknown biographical material and new editions and archives of Moore's work, the essays offer particularly interesting insights on Moore's relationships and her late career role as a culture icon.