Modern American Poetry

Abstract

My Introduction comments upon eight poets: E.A. Robinson, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, T.S. Eliot, and Hart Crane, who can be regarded as the major modern American poets who were born in the nineteenth century. Except for Moore, they are connected by the influence, sometimes concealed, of Emerson or Whitman, or both. Moore is the subject of the greatest American critic since Emerson, the great theorist of rhetoric, Kenneth Burke, who finds in her a radiant sensitivity, after which the late Huge Kenner, supreme antiquarian Modernist, celebrates Pound’s Mauberley sequence.