Twentieth-Century American Poetry

by Conrad Aiken (Editor)

different edition from the 1963 Random House [Modern Library] edition

410 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1944

About the author

Known American writer Conrad Potter Aiken won a Pulitzer Prize of 1930 for Selected Poems .

Most of work of this short story critic and novelist reflects his intense interest in psychoanalysis and the development of identity. As editor of Selected Poems of Emily Elizabeth Dickinson in 1924, he largely responsibly established her posthumous literary reputation. From the 1920s, Aiken divided his life between England and the United States and played a significant role in introducing American poets to the British audience.

He fathered gifted writers Joan Aiken and Jane Aiken Hodge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conrad_...

Reviews

[J. Alfred · Rating 4 out of 5]

Conrad Aiken is one of those guys I feel like I should know more about. What I know about him is that he's the one who knew Eliot and Pound personally and gave them goofy names in a book I should have read by now. He's also quite good as an apologist for American Modernist Poetry generally, as he is in the introduction to this book, and very good as a selector of poems (though his selections of his own poems are perhaps overly subtle, we might say, as I can't remember them at all).
This book is a good venerable gem to have on your shelves and will keep you feeling frisky about first-half twentieth century American poetry every time you glance at it.
Things that interest me: people primarily known as critics, creative works of. See elsewhere: Lionel Trilling, Susan Gilbert. See in this work: Kenneth Burke, RP Blackmur, Louise Bogan.

Other people to realize we should prize more than we currently do: Elizabeth Bishop, Hart Crane. Probably others.

[Daniel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Outside the standard bearers (Wallace Stevens Dickenson, Frost, Elilot, Cummings, and William Carlos Williams) there are few good poems.

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Look, I really liked this collection for what it is, which is 20th Century American WHITE poetry. I find it dishonest to label a book like this as American Poetry and then leave out every person of color writing poetry during the same time period. I mean, many of these poets personally knew Langston Hughes. It's clearly a choice not to include him.
(Also, there is one poet in here who isn't even American, but was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship by the editor.)
The book has been rebound, and a few of the early pages were out of order and/or missing. The pages themselves are the soft, cloth-like, gentle paper that is pleasing to the fingers and the eye. It is the type of paper that allows for pencil notations and erasure without damage.