viiMy 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 Mauberleysequence.
Alan Trachtenberg balances redemption and evil in Hart Crane’s
majestic myth of The Bridge, after which Thomas Whitaker praises an early
group of the poems of W.C. Williams.
Wallace Stevens, our strongest poet since Whitman and Dickinson, is
read as an ironic pastoralist by Helen Vendler, while Robert Langbaum
examines The Waste Landas a blend of dramatic monologues.
Richard Poirier, Frost’s canonical critic, contrasts his poet with
Stevens, preferring Frost for his realistic vision of limitations, after which
James E. Miller, Jr. contemplates the epic of W.C. Williams, Paterson.
The later poems of Stevens are regarded as those of his “whole being”
by his best critic, Eleanor Cook, while the poet Edward Hirsch gives an
overview of our poetry of the 1920s: Eliot, Millay, Cummings, Pound,
Ransom, Williams, Moore, Stevens, Hart Crane, and a group including
Bogan, Adams, Wylie, and Teasdale.
The most gifted of all American poets, ever, was Hart Crane, but his
suicide at thirty-two deprived us of what should have been his major phases.