Reviews for Modern American Poetry

The average rating for Modern American Poetry based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-04-21 00:00:00 K A Whittaker Essential text....now they have Untermeyer's Amer AND British.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-07-04 00:00:00 Marilyn Gauges There seem to be about a million editions of this book, some of which are no longer available. I can no longer find on Amazon the Kindle edition I bought (or maybe scored for free) several years ago. This was one of the earliest books I got for my first Kindle. Some of the editions combine Modern American Poetry with Untermeyer's other book, Modern British Poetry; others, like the ones I bought, have them as separate books. The edition I have appears to be a possible facsimile copy of one of the earliest editions. The page layout appears sort of funny, and it's difficult to tell whether this is a result of scanning or faulty data entry. But it's particularly annoying with the poetry as much of it is not broken down into lines the way it seems it should be. This is even more muddled by the fact that the period covered by these poems was one of vast experimentation in poetry during which such forms as free verse and unusual line lengths were common, so you can't tell what is meant to be run-together lines and what is the result of sloppy scanning. I thought I saw either a review or a blurb for this book not long ago that mentioned it contained something like 137 poems. Of course, when I want to find the source of this information, it is no longer accessible. Maybe I imagined it. But 137 poems doesn't seem far off the mark. The later editions, published in later years, have more pages - in some cases a lot more pages - and so, I assume, contain more poems. Given the number of different authors represented, however, 137 poems don't seem like much. My impression overall was that there was rather a lot of biography of these people, especially since so many of them died young, compared to the small amount of their poetry that is included. The format of the book is that it has a rather long introduction followed by short biographies of each of the various authors being spotlighted followed by anywhere from one to five poems for that author. Almost all of the poems are exquisite, including many of the most famous American poems there are - Joyce Kilmer's "Trees," Carl Sandburg's "Fog," Robert Frost's "Mending Wall," and so on. Some of the authors are represented only by excerpts of longer poems. Others are completely missing the longer poems that may be their best work. I found some of the biographies annoying as well. Untermeyer apparently had a dislike of anything that sounded like what other people were writing, or that sounded like what Europeans, especially British authors, would write, and scarcely an author covered here escaped the charge that either their early work was "derivative" or "weak," or that their later work had degenerated from a promising beginning.