Analyzing the poets Melvin B. Tolson, Langston Hughes, and Amiri Baraka, this study charts the Afro-Modernist epic. Within the context of Classical epic traditions, early 20th-century American modernist long poems, and the griot traditions of West Africa, Schultz reveals diasporic consciousness in the representation of African American identities.

Taking as its starting point Delmore Schwartz's self-appointment as both a 'poet of the Hudson River' and 'laureate of the Atlantic, ' this book comprehensively reassesses the poetic achievement of a critically neglected writer. Runchman reads Schwartz's p

Since the modernist period, waste has functioned as a potent symbol of cultural decline and environmental damage, in artworks ranging from T.S. Eliot's 'The Waste Land' to Pixar's Wall-E. In The Poetics of Waste: Queer Excess in Stein, Ashbery, Schuyler, a

Examining poetry by Robert Pinsky, Adrienne Rich, and Amiri Baraka, among others, this book shows that leading US poets since 1979 have performed the role of public intellectuals through their poetic rhetoric. Piotr Gwiazda's argument aims to revitalize th

Engaging key debates in world literature, Global Anglophone Poetry examines how prominent poets renovate the long poetic tradition to engage local, political crises and the sweeping pressures of globalization. Omaar Hena argues that the formal resources o

A bold work of synthetic scholarship, Writing Australian Unsettlement argues that the history of Australian literature contains the rough beginnings of a new literacy. Michael Farrell reads songs, letters and visual poems by Indigenous farmers and stockmen, the unpunctuated journals of early settler women, drover tree-messages and carved clubs, and a meta-commentary on settlement from Moore River (the place escaped from in The Rabbit-Proof Fence) in order to rethink old forms. The book borrows the figure of the assemblage to suggest the active and revisable nature of Australian writing,...

Modernist Legacies provides a comprehensive critical overview of some of the most significant currents in contemporary British poetry. The essays chart a series of currents in British poetry that take off from the modernism of the early twentieth century and remain committed to linguistic innovation, formal experimentation, a deep engagement with media and materiality, and an obligation to grasp contemporary society and to probe the place of poetry within it. Many of the essays focus on the significance of the American context for the way the modernist legacy is transmitted. As well as...

A Poetics of Global Solidarity traces the transformations of the engaged tradition of modern and contemporary American poetry. Clemens Spahr argues that the presence or absence of social and political movements has crucially shaped the imagination of writers who see poetry as a form of cultural practice. The book offers readings of the poetry of the Great Depression, the Harlem Renaissance, post-World War II political poetry, the Beats, and contemporary poetry by writers such as Amiri Baraka and Mark Nowak, as well as song lyrics from IWW songwriter Joe Hill to contemporary rap lyricists and...

This study engages the life of form in contemporary innovative poetries through both an introduction to the latest theories and close readings of leading North American and British innovative poets.

This collection of essays focuses on the remarkable late writings of Robert Duncan. Although praised by reviewers, Duncan's last two books of poetry have yet to receive the critical attention they merit. Written by a cast of emerging and established scholars, these essays bring together a diverse set of approaches to reading Duncan's writing.