Preface
REALISM AND NATURALISM
HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL OVERVIEW
Stephen Crane (1871-1900)
Black riders came from the sea
In the desert
I stood upon a high place
I saw a man pursuing the horizon
I met a seer
On the horizon the peaks assembled
I walked in a desert
A man feared that he might find an assassin
Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind
The wayfarer
A man said to the universe
My cross!
A man adrift on a slim spar
Edwin Markham (1852-1940)
The Man with the Hoe
Outwitted
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935)
An Obstacle
Whatever Is
Edgar Lee Masters (1868-1950)
from Spoon River Anthology
The Hill
Anne Rutledge
Editor Whedon
Knowlt Hoheimer
Lucinda Matlock
Petit, the Poet
Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935)
The Clerks
George Crabbe
The House on the Hill
Luke Havergal
Richard Cory
Reuben Bright
How Annandale Went Out
Miniver Cheevy
Another Dark Lady
Bewick Finzer
Eros Turannos
The Mill
Mr. Flood's Party
New England
The Sheaves
James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938)
O Black and Unknown Bards
The Creation
Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906)
We Wear the Mask
Sympathy
The Debt
The Poet
To a Captious Critic
Trumbull Stickney (1874-1904)
Mnemosyne
Near Helikon
Sir, say no more
Robert Frost (1874-1963)
Mowing
My November Guest
Storm Fear
The Tuft of Flowers
After Apple-Picking
The Death of the Hired Man
Home Burial
Mending Wall
The Wood-Pile
Birches
"Out, Out—"
The Oven Bird
The Road Not Taken
Fire and Ice
The Need of Being Versed in Country Things
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
To Earthward
The Witch of Cošs
Acquainted With the Night
Once by the Pacific
Desert Places
Design
Neither Out Far Nor in Deep
Provide Provide
Come In
The Gift Outright
The Silken Tent
Directive
Sara Cleghorn (1876-1959)
The Golf Links
The Survival of the Fittest
Alan Seeger (1888-1916)
I Have a Rendezvous with Death
John Allan Wyeth Jr. (1894-1980)
The Train from Brest
Corbie to Sailly-Le-Sec
War in Heaven
EARLY MODERNISM: FROM IMAGISM TO HIGH MODERNISM
HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL OVERVIEW
Amy Lowell (1874-1925)
Patterns
A Decade
A Lover
The Pond
1 Opal
Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)
from Tender Buttons
A Blue Coat
A Piano
A Purse
A Mounted Umbrella
A Time to Eat
A Fire
A Handkerchief
Red Roses
Yone Noguchi (1875-1947)
I Hear You Call, Pine Tree
from Japanese Hokkus
Adelaide Crapsey (1878-1914)
November Night
Triad
The Warning
Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)
Chicago
Fog
Limited
Window
Cool Tombs
Grass
Cahoots
Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931)
General William Booth Enters into Heaven
Factory Windows Are Always Broken
The Voyage
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
The Snow Man
Nuances of a Theme by Williams
A High-Toned Old Christian Woman
The Emperor of Ice-Cream
Tea at the Palaz of Hoon
Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock
Sunday Morning
Bantams in Pine-Woods
Anecdote of the Jar
To the One of Fictive Music
Peter Quince at the Clavier
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
To the Roaring Wind
The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad
Evening Without Angels
The Idea of Order at Key West
A Postcard from the Volcano
from Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction
The Course of a Particular
Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour
Of Modern Poetry
The Plain Sense of Things
Of Mere Being
William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)
Aux Imagistes
Danse Russe
Dedication for a Plot of Ground
El Hombre
Tract
Portrait of a Lady
The Great Figure
Queen-Anne's-Lace
To Waken An Old Lady
The Widow's Lament in Springtime
Spring and All
The Right of Way
To Elsie
The Red Wheelbarrow
The Last Words of My English Grandmother
This is Just to Say
Flowers by the Sea
The Yachts
The Dance
The Descent
from Asphodel, That Greeny Flower
Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
Sestina: Altaforte
Portrait D'une Femme
The Return
Alba
Coda
The Coming of War: Acton
The Garden
The Garret
Papyrus
In a Station of the Metro
The Jewel Stairs' Grievance
Lament of the Frontier Guard
The Rest
The River-Merchant's Wife: a Letter
Salutation
A Pact
from Homage to Sextus Propertius
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
from The Cantos
Canto I ("And then went down to the ship")
Canto XLV ("With Usura")
Canto LXXXI (Libretto: "Yet / Ere the season died a-cold")
H. D. (1886-1961)
Oread
Garden
Pear Tree
The Pool
Sea Rose
Sea Violet
Storm
Eurydice
At Baia
Helen
from The Walls Do Not Fall
I ("An incident here and there")
II ("Evil was active in the land")
from The Flowering of the Rod
6 ("So I would rather drown, remembering")
Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962)
To the Stone-Cutters
Boats in a Fog
Shine, Perishing Republic
Fawn's Foster-Mother
Hurt Hawks
Hands
Shane O'Neill's Cairn
New Mexican Mountain
November Surf
Ave Caesar
Love the Wild Swan
Rock and Hawk
The Purse-Seine
Carmel Point
Marianne Moore (1887-1972)
The Fish
Poetry
Poetry (Revised Version)
Those Various Scalpels
To a Steam Roller
Marriage
An Egyptian Pulled Glass Bottle in the Shape of a Fish
A Graveyard
New York
The Steeple-Jack
What Are Years?
In Distrust of Merits
The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing
T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Preludes
The Boston Evening Transcript
Hysteria
La Figlia che Piange
Sweeney Among the Nightingales
The Waste Land
The Hollow Men
Journey of the Magi
Ash-Wednesday
from Four Quartets
Burnt Norton
e. e. cummings (1894-1962)
in Just-
Buffalo Bill 's
the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls
next to of course god america i
i sing of Olaf glad and big
somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
may i feel said he
r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r
you shall above all things be glad and young
anyone lived in a pretty how town
my father moved through dooms of love
pity this busy monster,manunkind
o purple finch
Witter Bynner (1881-1968) and Arthur Davison Ficke (1883-1945)
The Spectra Hoax
Opus 181 (Anne Knish)
Opus 104 (Emanuel Morgan)
Opus 40 (Emanuel Morgan)
Opus 15 (Emanuel Morgan)
THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE
HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL OVERVIEW
Angelina Weld Grimké (1880-1958)
The Black Finger
Tenebris
A Mona Lisa
Fragment
Claude McKay (1889-1948)
If We Must Die
The Lynching
America
My Mother
The White City
Outcast
Jean Toomer (1894-1967)
Seventh Street
November Cotton Flower
Georgia Dusk
Reapers
Sterling A. Brown (1901-1989)
Memphis Blues
Mose
Slim Greer
Slim in Atlanta
Gwendolyn Bennett (1902-1981)
Hatred
To a Dark Girl
Langston Hughes (1902-1967)
The Negro Speaks of Rivers
I, Too
Negro
Cross
The Weary Blues
Dream Variations
Song for a Dark Girl
Mother to Son
Park Bench
50—50
Ku Klux
Morning After
Madam's Past History
Madam and the Census Man
Island
Harlem [Dream Deferred]
Theme for English B
Homecoming
Dinner Guest: Me
Countee Cullen (1903-1946)
For a Lady I Know
For Paul Laurence Dunbar
Heritage
Incident
Yet Do I Marvel
From the Dark Tower
To Certain Critics
MODERNIST ALTERNATIVES: ROMANTICS AND NEO-CLASSICISTS
HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL OVERVIEW
Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)
Over the Roofs
There Will Come Soft Rains
Since There Is No Escape
Water Lilies
In a Darkening Garden
Elinor Wylie (1885-1928)
The Eagle and the Mole
Wild Peaches
From the Wall
Let No Charitable Hope
Prophecy
John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974)
Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter
Winter Remembered
Blue Girls
Dead Boy
Piazza Piece
Conrad Aiken (1889-1978)
from Senlin: A Biography
Morning Song of Senlin
from Priapus and the Pool
"When trout swim down Great Ormond Street"
John Peale Bishop (1892-1944)
Perspectives are Precipices
My Grandfather Kept Peacocks
Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982)
Ars Poetica
The End of the World
The Silent Slain
You, Andrew Marvell
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)
Time Does Not Bring Relief: You All Have Lied
First Fig
Second Fig
I Shall Forget You Presently, My Dear
Recuerdo
Passer Mortuus Est
What Lips My Lips Have Kissed
Love Is Not All
Hearing Your Words, and Not a Word Among Them
Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)
Comment
One Perfect Rose
Résumé
Unfortunate Coincidence
Sanctuary
Louise Bogan (1897-1970)
The Alchemist
The Crows
Medusa
Memory
Women
Knowledge
Cassandra
Henceforth, from the Mind
The Sleeping Fury
Spirit's Song
Song for the Last Act
The Dream
Night
Stephen Vincent Benét (1898-1943)
American Names
1936
Melvin B. Tolson (1898-1966)
from A Gallery of Harlem Portraits
Sootie Joe
An Ex-Judge at the Bar
Dark Symphony
Hart Crane (1899-1932)
Praise for an Urn
Garden Abstract
At Melville's Tomb
Black Tambourine
Chaplinesque
My Grandmother's Love Letters
Voyages
The Wine Menagerie
from The Bridge
To Brooklyn Bridge
Royal Palm
The Broken Tower
Allen Tate (1899-1979)
Ode to the Confederate Dead
The Subway
Robert Francis (1901-1987)
Hallelujah: A Sestina
Catch
Yes, What?
Richard Eberhart (b. 1904)
The Fury of Aerial Bombardment
Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989)
Bearded Oaks
Evening Hawk
What Voice at Moth-Hour
MID-CENTURY POETS
HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL OVERVIEW
Theodore Roethke (1908-1963)
Cuttings
Cuttings (later version)
Root Cellar
Dolor
My Papa's Waltz
Elegy for Jane
The Waking
I Knew a Woman
In a Dark Time
from North American Sequence:
The Longing
Journey to the Interior
The Far Field
Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)
The Fish
The Map
At the Fishhouses
The Armadillo
Filling Station
Questions of Travel
Visits to St. Elizabeths
In the Waiting Room
The Moose
One Art
J. V. Cunningham (1911-1985)
For My Contemporaries
In the Thirtieth Year
To My Wife
To What Strangers, What Welcome
Epigrams
Josephine Miles (1911-1985)
Reason
Riddle
Conception
Album
Robert Hayden (1913-1980)
The Ballad of Sue Ellen Westerfield
Frederick Douglass
Middle Passage
Night, Death, Mississippi
Those Winter Sundays
The Whipping
A Plague of Starlings
John Frederick Nims (1913-1999)
Dedication: Love Poem
Epigrams
Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980)
Effort at Speech Between Two People
To Be a Jew in the Twentieth Century
Double Dialogue
The Poem as Mask
Poem
John Berryman (1914-1972)
Desires of Men and Women
from The Dream Songs
Huffy Henry hid the day (1)
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so (14)
I am the little man who smokes & smokes (22)
There sat down, once, a thing on Henry's heart (29)
The marker slants, flowerless, day's almost done (384)
Randall Jarrell (1914-1965)
Losses
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
90 North
The Woman at the Washington Zoo
Next Day
Weldon Kees (1914-1955)
For My Daughter
Crime Club
River Song
Robinson
Aspects of Robinson
1926
Round
Dudley Randall (1914-2000)
Ballad of Birmingham
Booker T. and W. E. B.
A Different Image
William Stafford (1914-1993)
The Farm on the Great Plains
Traveling through the Dark
Ask Me
At the Un-National Monument along the Canadian Border
Our Kind
Thomas Merton (1915-1968)
For my Brother: Reported Missing in Action, 1943
The Reader
Margaret Walker (1915-1998)
For Malcolm X
John Ciardi (1916-1986)
Most Like an Arch This Marriage
Firsts
Thomas McGrath (1916-1990)
Ars Poetica: or: Who Lives in the Ivory Tower?
Jig Tune: Not for Love
The Buffalo Coat
Remembering the Children of Auschwitz
Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)
The Mother
Sadie and Maud
Southeast Corner
But Can See Better There, and Laughing There
The Rites for Cousin Vit
The Bean Eaters
We Real Cool
The Blackstone Rangers
The Coora Flower
Robert Lowell (1917-1977)
Concord
The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket
Memories of West Street and Lepke
Skunk Hour
For the Union Dead
Waking Early Sunday Morning
History
Epilogue
William Jay Smith (b. 1918)
A Note on the Vanity Dresser
Galileo Galilei
American Primitive
May Swenson (1919-1989)
Question
Four-Word Lines
Strawberrying
OPEN FORM: OBJECTIVISTS, BEATS, BLACK MOUNTAIN POETS
HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL OVERVIEW
Laura Riding (1901-1991)
Helen's Burning
The Map of Places
The World and I
Kenneth Fearing (1902-1961)
Dirge
1938
Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970)
The Element Mother
Sorrow moves in wide waves
Poet's work
I knew a clean man
Autumn Sequence
Autumn
Last night the trash barrel
The boy tossed the news
Popcorn-can cover
Truth
Lights, lifts
O late fall
He lived—childhood summers
Louis Zukofsky (1904-1978)
Non Ti Fidar
A Song for the Year's End
Starglow
Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982)
A Very Early Morning Exercise
Andree Rexroth
Vitamins and Roughage
The Signature of All Things
George Oppen (1908-1984)
from Discrete Series:
The knowledge not of sorrow, you were
Leviathan
The Bicycles and the Apex
The Building of the Skyscraper
Psalm
from Of Being Numerous
Strange that the youngest people I know
Charles Olson (1910-1970)
Maximus, to himself
La Chute
William Everson / Brother Antoninus (1912-1944)
These Are the Ravens
Advent
The Making of the Cross
Robert Duncan (1919-1988)
The Temple of the Animals
Poetry, a Natural Thing
This Place Rumored to Have Been Sodom
Roots and Branches
The Torso (Passages 18)
Lawrence Ferlinghetti (b. 1919)
In Goya's Greatest Scenes
Denise Levertov (1923-1997)
" . . . Else a great Prince in prison lies"
The Ache of Marriage
Hypocrite Women
O Taste and See
Our Bodies
Prisoners
Samuel Menashe (b. 1925)
O Many Named Beloved
The Shrine Whose Shape I Am
Self Employed
At a Standstill
Curriculum Vitae
Jack Spicer (1925-1965)
Conspiracy
A Book of Music
A. R. Ammons (1926-2001)
Gravelly Run
The Constant
The City Limits
Cut the Grass
Viable
Robert Creeley (b. 1926)
I Know a Man
Heroes
Oh No
For Love
The Rain
"I Keep to Myself Such Measures . . ."
Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)
America
Howl
A Supermarket in California
Gary Snyder (b. 1930)
Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout
Riprap
Water
Why Log Truck Drivers Rise Earlier Than Students of Zen
Axe Handles
POST-WAR FORMALISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS: FROM FORMALISM TO FEMINISM AND THE CONFESSIONAL MODE
HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL OVERVIEW
Howard Nemerov (1920-1991)
A Primer of the Daily Round
The Blue Swallows
The Western Approaches
Because You Asked about the Line between Prose and Poetry
The Makers
The War in the Air
Mona Van Duyn (b. 1921)
Earth Tremors Felt in Missouri
Causes
Richard Wilbur (b. 1921)
The Beautiful Changes
The Pardon
Love Calls Us to Things of This World
Cottage Street, 1953
Piccola Commedia
To the Etruscan Poets
The Writer
Hamlen Brook
The Ride
Howard Moss (1922-1987)
The Pruned Tree
Tourists
James Dickey (1923-1997)
The Performance
The Heaven of Animals
The Lifeguard
The Sheep Child
Anthony Hecht (b. 1923)
Adam
The Dover Bitch
A Hill
The Book of Yolek
The Mysteries of Caesar
Sarabande on Attaining the Age of Seventy-seven
Richard Hugo (1923-1982)
Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg
Driving Montana
Louis Simpson (b. 1923)
Early in the Morning
The Man Who Married Magdalene
To the Western World
American Poetry
My Father in the Night Commanding No
The Unwritten Poem
A Clearing
Donald Justice (b. 1925)
Counting the Mad
n Bertram's Garden
On the Death of Friends in Childhood
But That Is Another Story
Men at Forty
Variations on a Text by Vallejo
Psalm and Lament
Carolyn Kizer (b. 1925)
from Pro Femina:
I. From Sappho to myself, consider the fate of women
II. I take as my theme "The Independent Woman"
III. I will speak about women of letters, for I'm in the racket
Bitch
Maxine Kumin (b. 1925)
At the End of the Affair
How It Is
The Retrieval System
Noted in The New York Times
W. D. Snodgrass (b. 1926)
April Inventory
Leaving the Motel
Disposal
James Merrill (1926-1995)
The Broken Home
The Mad Scene
Last Words
Casual Wear
Donald Hall (b. 1928)
My Son My Executioner
Names of Horses
Ox Cart Man
Anne Sexton (1928-1974)
Her Kind
The Abortion
The Truth the Dead Know
Wanting to Die
X. J. Kennedy (b. 1929)
In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus One Day
Little Elegy
Loose Woman
The Waterbury Cross
Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
Aunt Jennifer's Tigers
The Diamond Cutters
Living in Sin
Peeling Onions
Diving into the Wreck
From a Survivor
Rape
Power
from An Atlas of the Difficult World
Dedications
Tattered Kaddish
Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)
The Colossus
Metaphors
Blackberrying
Mirror
Daddy
Morning Song
Lady Lazarus
Edge
Anne Stevenson (b. 1933)
The Victory
Generations
The Marriage
Making Poetry
Alas
AMERICAN INTERNATIONALISM: SURREALISM, DEEP IMAGE, AND NEW YORK SCHOOL
HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL OVERVIEW
Barbara Guest (b. 1920)
Green Revolutions
Poem
Edward Field (b. 1924)
Curse of the Cat Woman
Roaches
John Haines (b. 1924)
Winter News
The Flight
Night
The Ghost Towns
Robert Bly (b. 1926)
Waking from Sleep
The Busy Man Speaks
Counting Small-Boned Bodies
Johnson's Cabinet Watched by Ants
Romans Angry About the Inner World
Frank O'Hara (1926-1966)
Today
Poem ("The eager note on my door said 'call me'")
To the Harbormaster
The Day Lady Died
Autobiographia Literaria
Homosexuality
Why I Am Not a Painter
John Ashbery (b. 1927)
Some Trees
My Erotic Double
Paradoxes and Oxymorons
At North Farm
Just Walking Around
W. S. Merwin (b. 1927)
Air
The Animals
For a Coming Extinction
For the Anniversary of My Death
The Last One
Some Last Questions
Rain Travel
James Wright (1927-1980)
Complaint
Saint Judas
Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio
A Blessing
Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota
Twilights
The Life
Philip Levine (b. 1928)
On the Edge
Animals are Passing from Our Lives
To a Child Trapped in a Barber Shop
They Feed They Lion
You Can Have it
Mark Strand (b. 1934)
Keeping Things Whole
Eating Poetry
Charles Wright (b. 1935)
The New Poem
Clear Night
Stone Canyon Nocturne
California Dreaming
Charles Simic (b. 1938)
Fear
My Shoes
Fork
Eyes Fastened with Pins
Classic Ballroom Dances
James Tate (b. 1942)
The Lost Pilot
Teaching the Ape to Write Poems
The Chaste Stranger
RETURN TO REALISM: REGIONALISM AND CULTURAL IDENTITY
HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL OVERVIEW
Miller Williams (b. 1930)
On a Photograph of my Mother at Seventeen
Ruby Tells All
Etheridge Knight (1931-1991)
Haiku
Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane
The Idea of Ancestry
The Warden Said to Me the Other Day
A Poem for Myself
Rhina Espaillat (b. 1932)
Agua
Bilingual / Bilingüe
1 Bra
Linda Pastan (b. 1932)
Journey's End
Ethics
1932-
Amiri Baraka (b. 1934)
Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note
Legacy
Black Bourgeoisie
Audre Lorde (1934-1992)
Coal
Father Son and Holy Ghost
October
N. Scott Momaday (b. 1934)
Simile
Carriers of the Dream Wheel
The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee
The Eagle-Feather Fan
Headwaters
Fred Chappell (b. 1936)
Narcissus and Echo
Epigrams
Lucille Clifton (b. 1936)
Good Times
Homage to my hips
to my last period
C. K. Williams (b. 1936)
Hood
From My Window
Elms
Bernice Zamora (b. 1938)
Penitents
Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra
Oakland Blues
Jared Carter (b. 1939)
Work, for the Night Is Coming
The Gleaning
Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)
Beautiful Women
Decorum
Ted Kooser (b. 1939)
Abandoned Farmhouse
The Blind Always Come as Such a Surprise
Tom Ball's Barn
Spring Plowing
Carrie
CONTEMPORARY VOICES
HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL OVERVIEW
Robert Pinsky (b. 1940)
Shirt
2000
Billy Collins (b. 1941)
Embrace
Lowell, Mass.
The Dead
Robert Hass (b. 1941)
Black Mountain, Los Altos
Heroic Simile
Meditation at Lagunitas
Lyn Hejinian (b. 1942)
from My Life
from Redo, 1-5
Nostalgia is the elixir drained
Charles Martin (b. 1942)
Taken Up
E. S. L.
Metaphor of Grass in California
Sharon Olds (b. 1942)
The Language of the Brag
The One Girl at the Boys' Party
Rites of Passage
Sex Without Love
Louise Glück (b. 1943)
The School Children
The Gift
Elms
Mock Orange
The Gold Lily
Circe's Power
Michael Palmer (b. 1943)
All those words we once used . . .
Of this cloth doll which
Autobiography
Mary Kinzie (b. 1944)
The Tattooer
The Same Love
Shirley Geok-Lin Lim (b. 1944)
To Li Po
My Father's Sadness
Learning to love America
B. H. Fairchild (b. 1945)
The Death of a Small Town
A Starli