“The most acute rendering of an era’s sensibility is its poetry,” wrote the editors in their preface to the first edition. Thirty years later, this innovative, cover-to-cover revision renders with fresh eyes and meticulous care the remarkable range of styles, subjects, and voices in English-language poetry. The newly titled Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry—now available in two paperback volumes—includes 1,596 poems by 195 poets (half of the poems are new), from Walt Whitman and Thomas Hardy in the late nineteenth century to Anne Carson and Sherman Alexie in the twenty-first.

The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry continues to be the most comprehensive collection of twentieth-century poetry in English. It richly represents the major figures, while also giving full voice to ethnic American poetries, experimental traditions, postcolonial poetry, and the long poem, eclipsing all other anthologies in scope, clarity, and balance.

All Things Considered
NPR's Jacki Lyden talks to Jahan Ramazani, about the new edition of the book and about how he selected the poems that made it into the volume. Click here to hear the interview.