A History of Modern Poetry: From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode

This is the first of two volumes presenting the history of English and American poetry in the twentieth century. It covers the formative period during which the Romantic traditions of the past were abandoned or transformed and a major new literature created. The second volume, From the 1920s to the Present, will complete the history. The volumes divide in the mid-twenties because by this time what I have called the high Modernist mode was established and major works in that mode-The Waste Land, Harmanium, Lawrence’s Birds, Beasts, and Flowers, Williams’ Spring and All, Pound’s A Draft of XVI Cantos-had been published; the next generation of poets, including W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, and Hart Crane, was about to step forward. This book is written both for the general public and for students. Many of the poets and movements it takes up have been discussed at far greater length in works devoted to them as a special subject; on some there are hundreds of books and monographs.