Twentieth-Century American Poetry

by Dana Gioia, David Mason, Meg Schoerke

With the end of the 1900s, the time has come for a thorough assessment of one hundred years of poetry - from the widely acclaimed to the subtly influential - and with an eye to the importance and meaning of poetry in America.

Compiled by three poets and poetry scholars - including 2002 American Book Award Winner Dana Gioia - this anthology presents American poetry across the twentieth century from Stephen Crane to Kevin Young. The collected works are arranged according to the major movements in American poetry, offering a valuable teaching resource for American Literature and Poetry courses.

Genres: Poetry, Anthologies

1189 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2003

About the author

Dana Gioia is an internationally acclaimed and award-winning poet. Former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Gioia is a native Californian of Italian and Mexican descent. He received a B.A. and a M.B.A. from Stanford University and an M.A. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. (Gioia is pronounced JOY-uh.)

Gioia has published four full-length collections of poetry, as well as eight chapbooks. His poetry collection, Interrogations at Noon, won the 2002 American Book Award. An influential critic as well, Gioia's 1991 volume Can Poetry Matter?, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award, is credited with helping to revive the role of poetry in American public culture.

Gioia's reviews have appeared in many magazines including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Washington Post Book World, The New York Times Book Review, Slate, and The Hudson Review. Gioia has written two opera libretti and is an active translator of poetry from Latin, Italian, and German.

As Chairman of the NEA, Gioia succeeded in garnering enthusiastic bi-partisan support in the United States Congress for the mission of the Arts Endowment, as well as in strengthening the national consensus in favor of public funding for the arts and arts education. (Business Week Magazine referred to him as "The Man Who Saved the NEA.")

Gioia's creation of a series of NEA National Initiatives combined with a wider distribution of direct grants to reach previously underserved communities making the agency truly national in scope. Through programs such as Shakespeare in American Communities, Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, NEA Jazz Masters, American Masterpieces, and Poetry Out Loud, the Arts Endowment has successfully reached millions of Americans in all corners of the country.

The Big Read became the largest literary program in the history of the federal government. By the end of 2008, 400 communities had held month-long celebrations of great literature. Because of these successes as well as the continued artistic excellence of the NEA's core grant programs, the Arts Endowment, under Chairman Gioia, reestablished itself as a preeminent federal agency and a leader in the arts and arts education.

Renominated in November 2006 for a second term and once again unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Dana Gioia is the ninth Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Gioia left his position as Chairman on January 22, 2009. In 2011 Gioia became the Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California where he teaches each fall semester.

Gioia has been the recipient of ten honorary degrees. He has won numerous awards, including the 2010 Laetare Medal from Notre Dame. He and his wife, Mary, have two sons. He divides his time between Los Angeles and Sonoma County, California

Reviews

[William Schram · Rating 5 out of 5]

American Poets began to experiment with free verse and prosody during the Twentieth Century. An editorial team of scholar poets was brought together to explore this time of both creativity and transition. The book is named Twentieth-Century American Poetry and it has over 180 poets collected together between its pages. Each poet is organized by genre.

The book starts out with a Historical and Critical Overview of each genre or time period. So for example, we have Realism and Naturalism to start out. The book discusses the Gilded Age, Manifest Destiny, the Reconstruction after the Civil War, and the technological advances that marched forth from the labs and factories of our fledgling nation. Meanwhile, Socialism took root in the hearts of people like Jack London, the Gold Scare of 1893 came around the same year as the Chicago World’s Fair. The American Population ballooned to 92 Million people, and a larger portion of the population began living in cities. It is to such a world that writers such as Stephen Crane released their poetry.

The book is chock full of information. Alongside all of the historical context and critical reception, the book contains biographical data on each poet, and then finally shows you their poems. The only thing it is missing to make it a textbook is a series of questions on the poems of the poet themselves. Some poets are represented extremely well and I can understand why. Take Robert Frost for instance. He was the Poet Laureate of the United States back in the early 1960s. This alone makes him worthy of being studied, but his style is so smooth and evocative. There are probably literary terms for such things, but I don’t want to sound like I actually know what I am talking about.

This book is really informative and enjoyable. It extends over the whole of the Twentieth-Century and goes over everything. I still prefer my poems to rhyme. Free verse and other things never really grasped my attention very well. On the other hand, it could be that I equate poetry with something that has to be understood and dissected in order for it to be enjoyed, and that takes away from it for me. It has been a long time since I had to actually analyze a text or literary work. Now I can read things for fun. And I can peruse through the biographies of Robert Frost or William Carlos Williams and find it interesting for its own sake, for the sake of learning itself.

So listed in this book are the following poets taken from the Table of Contents; Stephen Crane, Edwin Markham, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edgar Lee Masters, Edward Arlington Robinson, James Weldon Johnson, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Trumbull Stickney, Robert Frost, Sarah N Cleghorn, Alan Seeger, John Allan Wyeth Jr., Amy Lowell, Gertrude Stein, Yone Noguchi, Adelaide Crapsey, Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, H. D. [Hilda Doolittle], Robinson Jeffers, Marianne Moore, T S Eliot, E E Cummings, Witter Bynner and Arthur Davison Ficke, Angelina Weld Grimke, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Sterling A Brown, Gwendolyn Bennett, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Sara Teasdale, Elinor Wylie, John Crowe Ransom, Conrad Aiken, John Peale Bishop, Archibald MacLeish, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, Louise Bogan, Stephen Vincent Benet, Melvin B Tolson, Hart Crane, Allen Tate, Robert Francis, Richard Eberhart, Robert Penn Warren, Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, J V Cunningham, Josephine Miles, Robert Hayden, John Frederick Nims, Muriel Rukeyser, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Weldon Kees, Dudley Randall, William Stafford, Thomas Merton, Margaret Walker, John Ciardi, Thomas McGrath, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Lowell, William Jay Smith, May Swenson, Laura Riding, Kenneth Fearing, Lorine Niedecker, Louis Zukofsky, Kenneth Rexroth, George Oppen, Charles Olson, William Everson [Brother Antoninus], Robert Duncan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Denise Levertov, Samuel Menashe, Jack Spicer, A R Ammons, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Howard Nemerov, Mona Van Duyn, Richard Wilbur, Howard Moss, James Dickey, Anthony Hecht, Richard Hugo, Louis Simpson, Donald Justice, Carolyn Kizer, Maxine Kumin, W D Snodgrass, James Merrill, Donald Hall, Anne Sexton, X J Kennedy, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, Anne Stevenson, Barbara Guest, Edward Field, John Haines, Robert Bly, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, W S Merwin, James Wright, Philip Levine, Mark Strand, Charles Wright, Charles Simic, James Tate, Miller Williams, Etheridge Knight, Rhina Espaillat, Linda Pastan, Amiri Baraka/ LeRoi Jones, Audre Lorde, N Scott Momaday, Fred Chappell, Lucille Clifton, C K Williams, Bernice Zamora, Ishmael Reed, Jared Carter, Stephen Dunn, Ted Kooser, Robert Pinsky, Billy Collins, Robert Hass, Lyn Hejinian, Charles Martin, Sharon Olds, Louise Gluck, Michael Palmer, Mary Kinzie, Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, B H Fairchild, Kay Ryan, Adrian C Louis, Marilyn Nelson, Ron Silliman, Ai, Yusuf Komunyakaa, Amy Uyematsu, David Lehman, R S Gwynn, Heather McHugh, Timothy Steele, Wendy Rose, Carolyn Forche, Dana Gioia, William Logan, Jorie Graham, Joy Harjo, Andrew Hudgins, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Rita Dove, Alice Fulton, Mark Jarman, Naomi Shihab Nye, Mark Doty, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Kim Addonizio, Francisco X Alarcon, David Mason, and several others.

There isn’t anything else to say about this book.

[Alex Mattie · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poets in here are great but Dana Gioia and his other editors are so annoying in their introductions and contexts. They would say stuff that was not at all relevant. It's a bit dumb.

[steffie weffie · Rating 3 out of 5]

fuck you dana gioia ‼️‼️‼️

[Roslyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This (along with its companion book of essays on poetics) was the text we used in my poetry class in college. It was one of my favorite courses. I love this anthology-- It's a broad toe-dip into many poets' works.

[Vincent Woodruff · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my favorite anthology of poetry ever created. Not simply the poems and poets chosen but the layout and extra content as well enhance the works of the poets.