-- New York Times Book Review

These 31 essays... interrogate, dismantle, and ultimately reassemble the history of poetry in the United States. An essential volume that shows how poetry intersects with our lives and vice versa. Library Journal

Jay Parini is Axinn Professor of English at Middlebury College. A former Guggenheim Fellow and visiting fellow at Christ Church College, Oxford, Parini has published four volumes of poetry, five novels (including The Last Station and Benjamin's Crossing), a critical study of Theodore Roethke, and biographies of John Steinbeck and Robert Frost. The latter won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Award for the best work of nonfiction in 1999. He has also edited numerous volumes, including The Norton Anthology of American Autobiography and The Columbia Anthology of American Poetry.

Introduction, Jay Parini. Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor, Francis Murphy. Early African American Poetry, Carolivia Herron. The Epic in the Nineteenth Century, John McWilliams. Longfellow in the Aftermath of Modernism, Dana Gioia. The Transcendentalist Poets, Lawrence Buell. Emily Dickinson, Cynthia Griffin Wolff. Walt Whitman, Donald Pease. Edgar Allan Poe, Jeffrey Meyers. Lowell, Teasedale, Wylie, Millay, and Bogan, Jeanne Larsen. Women Poets and the Emergence of Modernism, Margaret Dickie. Robert Frost and the Poetry of Survival, Jay Parini. Ezra Pound's Imagist Aesthetics: Lustra to Mauberley, J.T. Barbarese. T.S. Eliot, William Pritchard. Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, Jeredith Merrin. Wallace Stevens, Helen Vendler. William Carlos Williams, Christopher MacGowan. Hart Crane's Difficult Passage, T Barbarese. The Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance, Arnold Rampersad. Warren, with Ransom and Tate, Patricia Wallace. American Auden, Claude J. Summers. The Twentieth-Century Long Poem, Lynn Keller. Public Music, W.S. Di Piero. Beat Poetry and the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance, Ann Charters. John Berryman, Theodore Roethke and the Elegy, Lea Baechler. What Was Confessional Poetry?, Diane Wood Middlebrook. The Postconfessional Lyric, Gregory Orr. The Black Arts Poets, William W Cook. Nature's Refrain in American Poetry, John Elder. Native American Poetry, Lucy Maddox. James Merrill and John Ashbery, John Shoptaw. The Visionary Poetics of Philip Levine and Charles Wright, Edward Hirsch.