Many a critic, determined to speak with clarity and certitude upon the dauntingly ambiguous subject of modern poetry in English—or upon modernism in general, for that matter—has found himself invoking ...

Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021. Elisa (Lisa) New is a professor of English at Harvard, with specialities ...

Austin, Mary. The American Rhythm. 1923. New and enlarged ed., Houghton Mifflin, 1930. Bell, Michael. “Myths and Texts.” A History of Modernist Poetry, edited by ...

Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue. In her 2003 Paris Review interview, Jorie Graham evokes a radiant image from her childhood in Rome: a “huge marble ...

PERSON, PLACE AND THING—Karl Jay Shapiro—Reynal & Hitchcock ($2). BLOOD FOR A STRANGER—Randall Jarrell—Harcourt, Brace ($2). Modernist poetry constitutes, in its entirety, a piecemeal bible of human ...

Never one to miss out on National Poetry Month, I’m currently pages deep into several new collections that I’d like to recommend before this cruelest of months comes to an end. First up is a reissue ...

In the month of April, we celebrated poetry. National Poetry Month was first established in April 1996 by the Academy of American Poets. Beautiful and moving poetry continues to be created each year, ...

TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online ...

THREE vices of contemporary poetry (all with certain strong exceptions in his favor) appear in D. H. Lawrence’sLast Poems (Viking Press, $3.00): the dissolution of metric, the mawkish saturation of ...