Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three: The University of California Book of Romantic & Postromantic Poetry

Poems for the Millennium #3

by Jerome Rothenberg (Editor), Jeffrey C. Robinson (Editor)

The previous two volumes of this acclaimed anthology set forth a globally decentered revision of twentieth-century poetry from the perspective of its many avant-gardes. Now editors Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffrey C. Robinson bring a radically new interpretation to the poetry of the preceding century, viewing the work of the romantic and post-romantic poets as an international, collective, often utopian enterprise that became the foundation of experimental modernism. Global in its range, volume three gathers selections from the poetry and manifestos of canonical poets, as well as the work of lesser-known but equally radical poets. Defining romanticism as experimental and visionary, Rothenberg and Robinson feature prose poetry, verbal-visual experiments, and sound poetry, along with more familiar forms seen here as if for the first time. The anthology also explores romanticism outside the European orbit and includes ethnopoetic and archaeological works outside the literary mainstream. The range of volume three and its skewing of the traditional canon illuminate the process by which romantics and post- romantics challenged nineteenth-century orthodoxies and propelled poetry to the experiments of a later modernism and avant-gardism.

Genres: Poetry, Anthologies, College

960 pages, Hardcover

First published December 20, 2008

About the author

Jerome Rothenberg is an internationally known American poet, translator and anthologist who is noted for his work in ethnopoetics and poetry performance.

Reviews

[Adrian Alvarez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Volume 3 of Rothenberg and Joris' incredible 5 volume project which seeks to reframe our notions of 20st century poetry as a collaborative and international space where new forms of expressing the human condition arose out of a central preoccupation with experimentation with art and language, rejecting the idea that the experiments were fringe movements. In the first two volumes, the project was to draw a line from pre-WW2 poets all the way through to contemporary writers. In this volume, Rothenberg has decided to go even further back, to the Romantic and Post-Romantic poets. The volume makes a pretty good case for how these poets actively formed the foundations by which all experimental modernist poetry was born.

As usual, the commentary and arrangement of the works in this volume are masterful. The book is as enlightening and inspiring as it is intellectually rigorous. I've been reading these books for nearly 10 years and they have influenced my reading beyond measure. In volume 4, which I look forward to reading, Joris takes the project in a completely different direction. Together with Habib Tengour he presents an anthology of written and oral literatures from a region of North Africa called the Maghreb which spans the modern nation-states of Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Mauritania and makes the case that it this work is thoroughly integrated into our understanding of Western literature. Fascinating!