Art of Twentieth-Century American Poetry

Charles Altieri is Stageberg Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. His previous publications include The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects (2003), Subjective Agency: A Theory of First-person Expressivity and its Social Implications (Blackwell, 1994), Postmodernism Now (1999), and Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry (1990).

“Altieri’s powerful readings [are] excellent analyses of poems by Oppen and Bishop, as well as by a host of others, [that] offer insights both into the details of the texts and the wider intellectual issues at stake, while the book’s differing vocations come together powerfully when it analyses the self-projections of ‘Prufrock.’” (Year's Work in English Studies, November 2008) "Altieri is thoroughly captivating, especially when his precise, synthetic, and innovative interpretations focus on beloved poets such as T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop and John Ashbery."(The Wallace Stevens Journal)

• Preface and Acknowledgments viList of Abbreviations x1 Introduction: The Art of Twentieth-Century American Poetry: An Overview 12 The New Realism in Modernist Poetry: Pound and Williams 113 The Doctrine of Impersonality and Modernism’s War on Rhetoric: Eliot, Loy, and Moore 524 How Modernist Poetics Failed and Efforts at Renewal: Williams, Oppen, and Hughes 975 The Return to Rhetoric in Modernist Poetry: Stevens and Auden 1266 Modernist Dilemmas and Early Post-Modernist Responses 157Notes 215Works Cited 229Further Reading 234Index 243