A Coherent Splendor The American Poetic Renaissance, 19101950 [Paperback]

Focusing on the poets who came into maturity during the First World War, the emergence of American Modernist poetry is traced as a reaction to and outgrowth of the Romantic ideology of the nineteenth century.Focusing on the poets who came into maturity during the First World War, the emergence of American Modernist poetry is traced as a reaction to and outgrowth of the Romantic ideology of the nineteenth century.In this book Professor Gelpi traces the emergence of American Modernist poetry as a reaction to, and outgrowth of, the Romantic ideology of the nineteenth century. He focuses on the remarkable generation of poets who came to maturity in the years of the First World War and whose works constitute the principal body of poetic Modernism in English. This large historical argument is developed through monographic chapters on the poets which include close readings of their major poems. Comprehensive in scope and subtle in its analysis, Gelpi's book promises to be one of the major studies of American poetry for years to come.Introduction: the Janus-face of Romanticism and Modernism; 1. Robert Frost and John Crowe Ransom: Diptych of Ironists, the Woodsman and the Chevalier; 2. Wallace Stevens: World as Mundo, Mundo as world; 3. T. S. Eliot: The lady between the yew trees; 4. Ezra Pound: Between Kung and Eleusis; 5. H. D.: Helen in Bethlehem, Hilda in Egypt; 6. William Carlos Williams: Mother-Son and Paterson; 7. Allen Tate and Hart Crane: Diptych with Demons and Angels Coda; Yvor Winters and Robinson Jeffers: The Janus-face of anti-modernism. The most vigorous, most consistently interesting study we have of twentieth-century American poetry in its relation to its Romantic precursors. Albert Gelpi's book is a powerful revisionist history of Modernism...[His] breadth and range are remarkable. Marjorie Perloff A Coherent Splendor has the makings of a standard; its breadth and reach make it a welcome new addition to the discussion on modernism. The New England l`