THE WORLD’S BODY—John Crowe Ransom—Scribner ($2.75). There is no primer of modern poetry. Readers who are intimidated by its obscurity soon find that most prose explanations tend to become almost as ...

Modern poetry is markedly different from classic poetry. It relies less on meter and rhyme, and focuses more on biographical events and the everyday experiences of people. So why isn’t poetry more ...

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 ...

THERE has been a real need for a definitive collection of modern poetry of the period since the World War, exemplifying recent work of established poets, the increase of associative imagery, the shift ...

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 ...

Regular readers of the New York Times Book Review may recognize David Orr as that publication’s poetry critic — assuming they ever look at poetry criticism in the first place. Orr’s clear, ...

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 ...

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 ...