This reference treats a broad range of individual poets and poems, along with many articles devoted to discrete topics, schools, or periods of American verse in the 20th century. Entries are divided into: poet entries - providing biographical and cultural contexts for the author's career, with critical evaluation of the most salient poems or volumes of verse in her/his development; entries on individual works - offering closer explication of the most resonant poems in the 20th-century canon; and topical entries - offering analyses of a given period of literary production such as the Harlem Renaissance, a formal rubric (Free Verse), a school or a distinctive mode of expression (Black Mountain School, Confessional Poetry), a more thematically constructed category (Gay and Lesbian Poetry), and other verse traditions that historically have been in dialogue with the poetry of the United States (Canadian Poetry, Caribbean Poetry).

Provides essays on the careers, works and backgrounds of the 150 poets and over 1000 poems that are included in the Library of America anthology (1-57958-034-3). It also provides entries on specialized categories of 19th-century verse, such as hymns, folk ballads, spirituals, Civil War songs and Native American poetry. The entries, besides presenting essential factual information, amount to in-depth critical essays. A bibliography at the end of each entry directs readers to other key works by and about the poet. The encyclopaedia is keyed to the contents of the Library of America anthology.

"Concise and well-written essays." - Choice

"A valuable tool for students interested in 20th-century American poetry.' - Booklist/RBB

This volume contains over 400 entries that treat a broad range of individual poets and poems, along with many articles devoted to topics, schools, or periods of American verse in the twentieth century. Entries fall into three main categories:

• poet entries, which provide biographical and cultural contexts for the author's career;
• entries on individual works, which offer closer explication of the most resonant poems in the 20th-century canon;
• topical entries, looking at eras, school, themes, and verse traditions of the USA.

With contributions from over 100 scholars, the Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Nineteenth Centry provides essays on the careers, works, and backgrounds of more than 100 nineteenth-century poets. It also provides entries on specialized categories of twentieth-century verse such as hymns, folk ballads, spirituals, Civil War songs, and Native American poetry. Besides presenting essential factual information, each entry amounts to an in-depth critical essay, and includes a bibliography that directs readers to other works by and about a particular poet.

Ten original essays by advanced scholars and well-published poets address the middle generation of American poets, including the familiar - Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, and John Berryman - and various important contemporaries: Delmore Schwartz, Theodore Roethke, Robert Hayden, and Lorine Niedecker. This was a famously troubled cohort of writers, for reasons both personal and cultural, and collectively their poems give us powerful, moving insights into American social life in the transforming decades of the 1940s through the 1960s. In addition to having worked during the broad middle of the last century, these poets constitute the center of twentieth-century American poetry in the larger sense, refuting invidious connotations of ""middle"" as coming after the great moderns and being superseded by a proliferating postmodern experimentation. This middle generation mediates the so-called American century and its prodigious body of poetry, even as it complicates historical and aesthetic categorizations. Taking diverse formal and thematic angles on these poets - deconstructionist, biographical-historical, and more formalist accounts - this book re-examines their between-ness and ambivalence: their various positionings and repositionings in aesthetic, political, and personal matters. The essays study the interplay between these writers and such shifting formations as religious discourse, consumerism, militarism and war, the ideology of America as ""nature's nation,"" and U.S. race relations and ethnic conflicts. ""Reading the Middle Generation Anew"" also shows the legacy of the middle generation, the ways in which their lives and writings continue to be a shaping force in American poetry. This fresh and invigorating collection will be of great interest to literary scholars and poets.