American Poetry: The Twentieth Century, Volume One: Henry Adams to Dorothy Parker

by Robert Hass (Editor), John Hollander (Compiler), Carolyn Kizer (Compiler)

This landmark anthology, part of a series that will eventually cover the entire century, gathers nearly 1500 poems by over 200 poets to restore American poetry's most brilliant era in all its beauty, explosive energy, and extraordinary diversity. Included are generous selections of the century's great poets -- Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Langston Hughes; and undervalued poets like Witter Bynner, Mina Loy, Louis Zukofsky, Ogden Nash, Dorothy Parker, Robert Johnson; and a wealth of talented and overlooked poets, experimentalists, formal innovators, popular and humorous versifiers, poets of social protest, and accomplished songwriters.

Genres: Poetry, Anthologies, 20th Century, Classics, American

1000 pages, Hardcover

First published March 20, 2000

About the author

Robert Hass was born in San Francisco and lives in Berkeley, California, where he teaches at the University of California. He served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. A MacArthur Fellow and a two-time winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, he has published poems, literary essays, and translations. He is married to the poet Brenda Hillman.

Reviews

[robin friedman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Twentieth Century American Poetry In The Library of America -- 1

Although still not widely read or appreciated, American poetry underwent a renaissance in the Twentieth Century. At some point, readers will look back at our Twentieth Century poetry as a benchmark of literature and a guide to the thoughts, feelings, and events of our difficult century.
In this, the first of two volumes of Twentieth Century American poetry, the Library of America gives access to a treasure of reading that is moving, elevating, and disturbing. The book consists of readings from 85 poets, arranged chronologically by the poet's birthday. The earliest writer in the volume is Henry Adams (b. 1838) and the concluding writer is Dorothy Parker (b. 1893). Some writers that flourished later in life, such as Wallace Stevens, thus appear in the volume before works of their peers, such as Pound and Elliot, who became famous earlier.

For me, the major poets in the volume are Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, W.C. Williams, Ezra Pound, T.S. Elliot, Marianne Moore. They are represented by generous selections, including Elliot's "The Waste Land", Stevens' "Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction", and several Pound Canto's given in their entirety.

It is the mark of a great literary period that there are many writers almost equally meriting attention together with the great names. Many outstanding writers find their place in this volume, some known, some unknown. To name only a few, I would include E.A. Robinson, James Weldon Johnson, Adelaide Crapsey, Vachel Lindsay, Sara Teasdale, H.D. Robinson Jeffers, John Crowe Ransom, Conrad Aiken, and Samuel Greenberg. It would be easy to go on.

There are different ways to read an anthology such as this LOA volume. One way is to browse reading poems as they catch the reader's eye. Another way is to read favorite poems the reader already knows. I suggest making the effort to read the volume through from cover to cover. Before beginning reading each individual poet, the reader might consult the biographical summary at the end of the volume. These brief biographies illuminate both the poets and their poetry. The notes are sparse, but foreign terms in Pound and Elliot's poetry are translated. In the case of Elliot and Marianne Moore, the volume offers selections from their own notes.

By reading the volume through, one gets a sense of continuity and context. Then, the reader can devote attention to individual poems. Some twentieth century works, such as those by Pound, Elliott, Moore, or Stevens are notoriously difficult. Read the works through if you are coming to them for the first time, and return to them later.

I was familiar with many of the poems in the book before reading the anthology but much was new to me. I learned a great deal. My favorite poet remains Wallace Stevens, partly because he combined the life of a man of affairs, as an attorney and insurance executive, with deep art. This remains an ideal for me. It is true as well for W.C. Williams, although I am less fond of his poetry.

In a poem in this volume, "Libretto" (p. 371) Ezra Pound wrote: "What thou lovest well is thy true heritage". Pound's observation is the best single sentence summation I can think of for the contents of this volume. The Library of America deserves gratitude for its efforts in presenting the best of American writing and thought.

Robin Friedman

[Richard S · Rating 3 out of 5]

So I decided to actually read this word for word cover to cover, 160 pages per day. I felt as a poet I should try to understand the American poets of the past. So here's a longer review, just focused on my thoughts of the individual poets included in the volume.

Edwin Arlington Robinson - Surprisingly good for a poet with such a reputation for being boring - clearly a pre-modernist as things he says he likes to use as many words as possible rather than the fewest, but his thoughts while lazily presented are complex and interesting.

Robert Frost - Disappointing - I've never really been a fan of Frost, I just don't find his work very interesting. His shorter famous poems are very good but the rest kind of puts me to sleep.

Amy Lowell - A huge discovery - I loved her imagist poetry - especially "Lilacs" - some of it a little cringy but some wonderful, even "Zone-y" (Apollinaire).

Gertrude Stein - really terrible. Like 60 pages and nothing even marginally of interest. Why? Did she really influence anyone?

Marsden Hartley - I thought he was just a painter but he was a wonderful poet as well.

Wallace Stevens - I had a lot of trouble here - but everyone does (at least at first) - he's so opaque, I've just never been able (or maybe willing) to penetrate the opacity.

Mina Loy - another huge discovery - love love love her work. It's so much like the stuff written today too (do they even know this)? I want to read everything she wrote.

WCW - Good but kind of disappointing revisiting. I was hoping for more - although not as tiring as Frost seems maybe a little simplistic?

Pound - reading for the millionth time - he seems to have faded over time - never really got through the Cantos - HSM is such a slog - shorter poems okay, but he seems to be more of an influencer than anything.

H.D. - her early imagist work with all the flowers got really tedious but her later work is just amazing. "The Flowering of the Rod" might be the best poem in the whole collection (see below).

Mariane Moore - excellent, very relatable, highly worth reading every poem in the volume. For me she's at that perfect spot for poetry between clarity and obscurity - interesting, understandable, but strikingly original.

T.S. Eliot - not as bad as I had feared - how many times can you read Prufrock and The Wasteland in a lifetime? But lines stood out I'd never noticed before. The high school stuff like "The Hollow Men" is still the high school stuff. A poet of "moodiness" but the words are terrific in themselves. He oddly came across as more of a dramatist than I had imagined before.

The rest I didn't like so much. There was an Edith Wharton poem that I liked. Ransom, Aiken, MacLeish, Jeffers, Lindsay, all super-tedious, like people you'd meet in the Prufrock poem. Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven appealed to the dadaist in me. She would definitely be the one person in the entire collection you would want to invite to your party.

I'm still leaving at 3 stars because the collection does not include Ginsberg or Berryman, but there were definitely some real discoveries. Lowell, Loy, late H.D., and Moore (interestingly all women) were new and quite fabulous. Maybe taking Eliot, Joyce & Pound at Columbia with Wallace Grey, champion of New Criticism, explains my lack of exposure. Pound was a big influencer of all of them, but I honestly enjoyed all four of them more than trying a reslog through HSW, or pulling out Google translator for a Canto.

From "Flowering":

this is the eternal urge,
this is the despair, the desire to equilibrate

the eternal variant;
you understand that insistent calling,

that demand of a given moment,
the will to enjoy, the will to live,

not merely the will to endure,
the will to flight, the will to achievement,

the will to rest after long flight;
but who know the desperate urge

of those others -- actual or perhaps now
mythical birds -- who seek but find no rest

. . . .

remember the golden apple-trees;
O, do not pity them, as you watch them drop one by one,

for they fall exhausted, numb, blind
but in certain ecstasy,

for theirs is the hunger
for Paradise.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anthologies like these often get criticized for being either too Dead White Male oriented or too multiculturaly inclusive (See the criticism for the recent Rita Dove edited Penguin Anthology of 20th Century Poetry.) Library of America avoids that simply by being gigantic. Arranged by order of birthdate volume 1 and it's 900 pages only gets to the birth year of 1893. So everyone is here and well-represented. And it's not diverse just in a cultural sense, everything from Ezra Pound and his circle of inscrutables to the light verse of Dorothy Parker and song lyrics of Cole Porter and Irving Berlin are included. The big names however do receive the most representation. Robert Frost gets nearly 60 pages, Wallace Stevens 70 and Pound 80 pages. You also get just about all the Gertrude Stein a sane person can tolerate. Seriously, Gertrude Stein is the poetic equivalent of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music. Revelations for me included a total rediscovery of Robert Frost, and a certain disappointment in things that I once really liked like TS Elliot. The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, aside from its amazing language, is sort of juvenile. It's the world view of a young adult with little life experience. In another music analogy, it's almost like going back to the Simon & Garfunkel songs you loved as a teenager and realizing how naive they are. And this collection caused me to go back and read Spoon River Anthology in its entirety. I don't know of a better, more inclusive anthology of American poetry. Worth reading cover to cover just for its amazing breadth.

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn’t read every page of this but I read a LOT and I’ve decided it counts, dammit.

[John Porcellino · Rating 4 out of 5]

See American Poetry claw its way into Modernity before your very eyes!

Surprises and new poems/poets to me here include Fenton Johnson, Maxwell Bodenheim, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, and "Hurt Hawks" by Robinson Jeffers, which nearly brought me to tears.

Also, makes me want to go back and reread Spoon River Anthology in its entirety..

[Tiffany · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good poets, good poems.

[Glenda Nelms · Rating 5 out of 5]

Inclusive and comprehensive poetry collection. The biographical notes of each poet is interesting and fascinating.

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first of two volumes on American poetry in the 20th century selected and published by The Library of America and in it I came across dozens of poets with whom I was not only familiar, but whom I had never heard of before! They appear in the order of their birth dates, beginning with people born in the middle of the 19th century.

One of the jewels of this book is a superb section at its end featuring biographical summaries of each of the poets included, many of them fulsome and all interesting. What interesting lives they led, and many of them included hardship, poverty, struggles early and late, failed marriages, delightful companions, fascinating adventures, and far too many suicides! The years they lived through were some of the most interesting and difficult of our nation's history: from the Civil War and the tumultuous post-war years through the Gilded Age through the Progressive Era, through WW I and the Roaring 20s, through the Depression and World War II, and then through the often dazzling but red fear mongering of the 50s and even -- in some cases -- into the later decades of the 20th century.

While I found many poets whose selections I enjoyed -- some of them known to me, many others not -- there were also many whose works just didn't "grab me" (as we used to say 50 years ago). Not surprisingly, really, given the range of the lives lived and the various styles of poetry found here.

Thanks to the Library of America for helping to preserve so many precious words that are our legacy -- and contribution -- to our complex and often disappointing human race.

May we survive long enough to give birth to and cherish many more like poets who, when all cylinders are firing, can give us word-pictures of amazing insight and blinding beauty!

[Tim Genetti · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although I am familiar with the modernists (some poems I know so well I skipped.) I was surprised by the textural background this volume offered. One of my favorite parts was reading John Gould Fletcher's poem blue symphony and seeing how bad it was. Then reading in his biography that he claimed Ezra Pound copied him, a ridiculous statement. This book stressed how differently the the twentieth was divided in America based on what we as a people wanted when it came to poetry.

[Krystie Herndon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Long, full, and rich, a collection I missed, as an English major in my undergrad days, because I preferred Victorian literature at the time. The biographies at the end of the book are also well worth reading!

[Marianne Evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

For the first time, I was stunned at the change in style that occurred at the turn of the last century. I always thought the mid-century baby boomers were the shakers of change. However, those gals and guys really shook things up in those early 1900s.

[Mustafiz Rahman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Need to collect

[Jas “LdyBlackheart”]

Poetry is not my best subject, but my professor makes it really fun

[Michael Steger · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent collection. The editors' decision to include some works by a few seminal songwriters (e.g. W. C. Handy, Ma Rainey) is a good one. The proportional representation of each poet feels about right, with the largest sections being devoted to Frost, Stevens, Pound, Williams, and Eliot. The biographical sketches are excellent, as are the notes, by and large (the notes on Pound's poems occasionally seem arbitrary; apparently, the editors have decided to translate the foreign-language phrases used by Pound, but have decided not to try to explain many of the now foreign-seeming references--to be sure, a thorough annotation of the Pound poems included in this anthology would quickly overrun the space available).

One of the pleasures a of a good historical anthology such as this one is the way it allows one to see the work of one poet vis-a-vis the work of another. For example, I found it rewarding to read the best of Edward Arlington Robinson's work in proximity to some of the best poems of Frost. Similarly, it is quite interesting to go from some of the cantos of Pound right into the work of Marianne Moore--this reminds one how playful (often mischievously, even angrily playful) Pound's poetry can feel and how serious Moore's poems can seem, just beneath the comedic surface. (One also is reminded of how much of Pound's poetry seems suffused with a paranoid fear of usury and money in general--and there can be little doubt that, in Pound's paranoid, half-baked political worldview, his raging against money-lending and "the Syphilis of the State" is all bound up quite tightly with his virulent anti-Semitism.)

There are many poets in this volume to discover and re-discover. I had forgot just how startling Mina Loy's poems can be. I had never paid any attention to Robinson's poems, thinking he was old-fashioned and backward-looking; what a pleasure it was to read his poems in this collection. I had not read Jeffers in a very long time, and it was good to read poems like "Vulture" and "Hurt Hawks" again. (I read a lot of Jeffers in my last two years of high school, and then later 'rejected' his work as being a bit too macho--and I also was turned off a bit when I read of critics finding in Jeffers a kind of "proto-fascism"--which is somewhat absurd on a number of levels, particularly considering that few intelligent readers would reject the work of Yeats because of his dubious political views, and Pound is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential poets of his century. After all, even Wallace Stevens--aesthetic radical that he may have been--was a Republican who apparently liked to provoke inebriated fights… Not exactly the amiable, 'sensitive' man one might expect or hope for.) It was great to read H. D. again, and Amy Lowell. And it was good to discover a poem like Einor Wylie's "Incantation."

This is a great collection to keep near to hand. Yet another reason to be grateful for the existence of the Library of America.

[Jon Corelis · Rating 4 out of 5]

An attempt at a definitive collection

Clearly intended to be the definitive collection of American poetry for our time, the two thousand pages of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century are as official as an American book can be without actually being published by the government. Their publisher is a non-profit organization founded with funding from the U.S. Federal government's National Endowment for the Humanities and the private Ford Foundation with the mission of embodying America's literary heritage in a series of uniform editions. Most unusually, the book lists no editor, though the names of those given as the anthology's 'advisory board' evidence the highest possible endorsement of the American poetry/academic establishment. Despite its enormous size, vols. 1 and 2 actually only include poets born up to 1913, meaning the selections cover poetry of about the first half of the century: a further volume was supposedly forthcoming to cover the rest of the century, but to the best of my knowledge has never appeared. The lack of an explicit editor is matched by the absence of a preface, leaving the 1400 poems refreshingly to speak for themselves about why they are there. The brief explanatory notes secluded at the back of the book are useful though somewhat arbitrary. One of the book's most interesting features are the concise and detailed biographical notes on its more than 200 poets.

[Keith · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Library of America poetry series is very good and this book is no exception. It provides a good sampling of many 20th century American poets. I can't say I read every page of this book (since I'm already familiar with many of these poets), but it did open my eyes to some writers, which should be the point of an anthology.

My only quibble: There is paucity of notes. Am I the only person who didn't know General William Booth was founder of the Salvation Army? (I thought he might be a Civil War general.) A little help would have been appreciated.

Overall, I recommend this book (and this series) for the poetry lover. For the average reader, however, there are probably shorter, more selective anthologies that will better introduce them to American poetry. (less)

[Jim Leckband · Rating 5 out of 5]

What more could you want out of a poetry anthology? Wallace Stevens, Edna St. Vincent Millay, William Carlos Williams, Dorothy Parker and a lot of poets you never heard of but who serve up some gems. If nothing else these unknown poets show what the baseline is that the stars blast through.

While reading it, T.S. Eliot fell in my favor, Robinson Jeffers grew, and Dorothy Parker just makes you smile, even though you could tell she was going through hell. It was the first time I read a lot of Robert Frost and that was a good thing, though I wanted to shake him by the shoulders by the end of his section and send him on a train to Key West and have an ice cream with the Emperor, Wally Stevens.

[David Cherry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Originally I gave this book a 4 star rating because of the frequency that poems I liked came up. Most of the poems were delightful to read. Then I realized that this is an anthology. As an anthology it hits many different poets of various styles, backgrounds, color, and fame. There's even song lyrics in this collection. I could not in good conscious judge this collection simply by how much I liked the poems. As an anthology this is a 5 star book.

[Rolland · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection ranges from Henry Adams to Dorothy Parker, like the title says, but it also includes poets I wouldn't expect, and poets I hadn't read. I'm very impressed with the quality of this collection. Savoring the poetry here took patience; I was tempted to race through it too quickly.

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

I need to read more of this book.