The Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry

by Helen Vendler

The poetry in this collection demonstrates the full range and power of the contemporary American imagination. The verve, freedom and boldness of American English are combined with the harmonies of modern cadence. Here are distillations of 20th-century thought and reflections of changing social realities, scientific and psychoanalytical insights and the strong voices of feminism and black consciousness. Included are works by: Sylvia Plath; John Berryman; Amy Clampitt; Allen Ginsberg; Rita Dove; Robert Lowell; Wallace Stevens; John Ashbery; Adriennce Rich; Robert Hayden; Theodore Roethke; Langston Hughes; and Louise Gluck.

Genres: Poetry

448 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Helen Vendler is the A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University, where she received her PhD in English and American Literature in 1960. Before joining the Harvard faculty, Vendler taught at Cornell, Swarthmore, Haverford, Smith, and Boston University.



Vendler has written books on Yeats, Herbert, Keats, Stevens, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Heaney, and, most recently, Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (2007), Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill (2010); Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries’ (2010); and The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar: Essays on Poets and Poetry (2015). She also reviews contemporary poetry for the New Republic, London Review of Books, and other journals. She has held fellowships from, among others, the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Woodrow Wilson Center, and National Endowment for the Humanities, and is a member of the American Philosophical Society, American Academy of Arts and Letters, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Swedish Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Modern Language Association, of which she was president in 1980.

Reviews

[Aine MacAodha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved this book with its varied way of writing from these american poets, brilliant.