Monogamy elaborates an ideology of romance from extraordinary poems and songs, one by one. Poems and popular songs are still the main medium for preserving the rules of romance. Each chapter is a meditation on one of eight commonplaces about love: that it makes one monogamous, sentimental, vulnerable; that its force is immediate and transformative; or that it is a fickle force, but cannot be bought, and yet endures. Strong poets and lyricists bend these notions, as lovers do too. Great poems and songs come from interstices between celebrated commonplaces, felt desires and second-thoughts. The Book of Love is heterogeneous, complicated. Some love poems reach significant numbers through books and anthologies, and eventually classroom textbooks, and are held in memory by generations of admirers. Many popular songs, however, have reached extremely large audiences, beginning with Broadway musicals, and continuing in the recordings of later jazz vocalists. They are not read, but they are firmly lodged in memory. They are the only poems known by most audiences. Canonical poems are imitated by aspiring poets and versifiers. The actual verse culture is layered with light verse, song lyrics, and Shakespeare’s sonnets. To understand what poems effectively teach—about romance, in particular—one should attend closely to songs too, particularly in the U.S. since 1920.

Canon formation: ." . . the traditional dream of ambitious critics. A canon is commonly seen as what other people, once powerful, have made and what should now be opened up, demystified, or eliminated altogether." So writes editor Robert von Hallberg in his introduction. This collection of essays articulates how canons are constructed and examines the ways in which academic canons influence literary thought and instruction. Presenting a wide range of canonical interpretation, the volume includes essays on such themes as Native American literature and the canon, the ideology of canon formation, the history of American poetry anthologies, undoing the canonical economy, the making of the modernist canon, and canon and power in the Hebrew scriptures.

Horace speaks of poetry delighting and instructing. While Evaluations of US Poetry since 1950, Volume 1 explores the pleasures of poetry--its language, forms, and musicality--volume 2 focuses on the public dimensions. In this volume, Von Hallberg and Faggen have gathered a diverse selection of poets to explore questions such as: How does poetry instruct a society with a highly evolved knowledge industry? Do poems bear a relation to the disciplined idioms of learning? What do poets think of as intellectual work? What is the importance of recognizable subject matter? What can honestly be said by poets concerning this nation so hungry for learning and so fixated on its own power? To these questions, the literary critics collected here find some answers in the poetry of Robert Pinsky, Susan Howe, Robert Hass, Anthony Hecht, Adrienne Rich, Sharon Olds, Ed Dorn, and August Kleinzahler.

Over the last sixty years scholars and critics have focused on literary history and interpretation rather than literary value. When value is addressed, the standards are usually political and identitarian. The essays collected in both volumes of Evaluations of US Poetry since 1950 move away from esoteric literary criticism toward a more evaluative and speculative inquiry that will serve as the basis from which poets will be discussed and taught over the next half-century and beyond. Von Hallberg and Faggen have curated a diverse selection of authors to explore this topic. Volume 1 focuses on voice, language, form, and musicality. Stephen Yenser writes about Elizabeth Bishop, Stephanie Burt about C. D. Wright, Nigel Smith about Paul Simon, and Marjorie Perloff about Charles Bernstein, among others. The essays do not provide an exhaustive survey of recent poetry. Instead, Evaluations of US Poetry since 1950 presents readers with more than thirty different models of literary absorption and advocacy. This is done in explicit hope of reorienting the criticism of poetry.

Charles Olson is often described as one of the most influential American poets of the last quarter century; some would rather describe him as a cult figure, prophet of the Black Mountain poets and their descendants. Both judgments refer to an influence exerted as much through theories as through poems. Here is an examination of Olson's understanding of poetry that is cogent and a pleasure to read. It provides the framework needed for understanding Olson's work. Mr. von Hallberg shows us the Olson of the 1950s, who tried to bring change through teaching, who wanted poetry to communicate knowledge, as well as the more private poet of the 1960s, turning from history to myth. Olson's ambitions for poetry were based on his sense of cultural politics, and the author studies the relation between Olson's politics and his poetics. He traces too Olson's relation to older poets, especially Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. His book will interest anyone reading contemporary American poetry.

Challenging the common perception of poets as standing apart from the mainstream of American culture, Robert von Hallberg gives us a fresh and unpredictable assessment of the poetry that has come directly out of the American experience since 1945.

Who reads contemporary American poetry? More people than were reading new poetry in the 1920s, von Hallberg shows. How do poets respond to the public preoccupations of their readers? Often with fascination. Von Hallberg put the poems of Robert Creetey and John Ashbery together with the postwar outburst of systems analysis. The 1950s tourist poems of John Hollander, Adrienne Rich, W. S. Merwin, and James Merrill are treated as the cultural side of America's postwar rise to global political power There are chapters on the political poems of the 1950s and 1960s, and on Robert Lowell's sympathy forthe imperialism of his liberal contemporaries. Poems of the 1970s on pop culture, especially Edward Dorn's Slinger and some from the suburbs of the 1980s are shown to reflect a curious peace between the literary and the mass cultures.