Volume I begins with a generous selection of Native American materials, then spans the years from the establishment of the American colonies to about 1900, a world on the brink of World War I and the modern era. Part One focuses on poetry from the very beginnings through the end of the eighteenth century. The expansion and development of a newly forged nation engendered new kinds of poetry. Part Two includes works from the early nineteenth century through the time of the Civil War. The poems in Part Three reflect the many issues affecting a nation undergoing tumultuous change: the Civil War,...

Bringing together fifty years of exciting modernisms, The New Anthology of American Poetry, Volume 2 includes over 600 poems by sixty-five American poets writing in the period between 1900 and 1950. The most recognized poets of the era, such as William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, H. D., Gertrude Stein, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, Hart Crane, and Langston Hughes are represented, along with many other Harlem Renaissance poets, women poets, immigrant and working-class poets, imagists, and objectivists. It is also the first modernist anthology to include...

Elizabeth Bishop's World War II-Cold War View offers the first comprehensive portrayal of the poet in mid-century America. The elusive story of Bishop's national, cultural, and literary politics during the World War II-Cold War period is finally brought into sharp focus as the book traces her life and writing from the war years spent in Key West through her tenure as the 1949-1950 national poet laureate. Our understanding of Bishop is completely reshaped by this study's unique ability to easily move back and forth between a wide-ranging cultural critique of mid-twentieth-century America and a...

Now available for the first time as a three-volume set, The New Anthology of American Poetry offers the most compelling and wide-ranging selection of poems from the nation's beginnings to the present day. Extensive introductions, notes, and footnotes make the great poems of each period fully accessible.

Each volume invites readers into a diverse world of poetry and culture. Some of the poems are deeply personal, some explore the mystery of otherness, and some concentrate on the enigmas and beauty of poetry itself. The words are rich, contradictory, and challenging. The poets grapple...