The extent to which American poetry reinvented itself after World War II is a testament to the changing social, political and economic landscape of twentieth-century American life. Registering an important shift in the way scholars contextualize modern and contemporary American literature, this Companion explores how American poetry has documented and, at times, helped propel the literary and cultural revolutions of the past sixty-five years. This Companion sheds new light on the Beat, Black Arts and other movements while examining institutions that govern poetic practice in the United States today. The text also introduces seminal figures like Sylvia Plath, John Ashbery and Gwendolyn Brooks while situating them alongside phenomena such as the 'academic poet' and popular forms such as spoken word and rap, revealing the breadth of their shared history. Students, scholars and readers will find this Companion an indispensable guide to post-war and late twentieth-century American poetry.

Now I am back in London, the town of cubist teas, and find it more delightful and beautiful than ever (L1, 100) I enjoyed the article on the Vortex (please tell me who Kandinsky is) (L1, 94) As is evident from my epigraphs, it would not be easy to use T. S. Eliot's various remarks on painters as an incisive measure of how the visual functions in his poetry. Nor will it help much if we want to supplement what David Trotter calls ‘parallel histories’ between literature and various aspects of visual art. We get a better picture of his relation to the visual arts if we concentrate on the pains and difficulties that Eliot's work displays when it renders visual experience. Such comparisons allow us to trace analogies between his own discomfort before images that seem to be vying for his attention and modernist visual artists' own alienation from claims that description or representation provided the most stable means of characterising knowledge and so clarifying values. Eliot's own actual relation to the visual arts seems, then, an outgrowth of his wariness before all visual experience, because that experience seemed so insistently bound to objective surfaces that it could not display the density of relations that, for Eliot, constituted a livable reality. It is clear from Eliot's letters that what most interested him in the visual arts were images of St Sebastian.

This statement does not challenge Jonathan Culler’s argument that lyric is not dramatic monologue but primarily »an event in the lyric present, a time of enunciation« (Culler 2014, 68; cf. Culler 2015). But it poses an alternative view of lyricLyricism also emphasizes, more than do studies of lyric as a genre, that poetry has a distinctive relationship to musicality. The essay develops two extended examples – in the form of a contrast between two poems in the first Imagist anthology

I used to enjoy my own glibness in saying that one important goal of Eliot’s was the demonstration that one could speak Christian sentences worthy of attention in an utterly secularized world. Now I see that there was considerable point to my observation. I am working on a book about modernist poets’ resistance to the ways in which Imagism moved from sensuality to epiphany without much sense of the register of feelings made present by the making. From this perspective, Eliot’s modes of defending how Christianity poses a contrast to the natural order take on considerably more power because we can see how much they share with a modernist constructivist aesthetics, sharply opposed to the idealized immediacy that Impressionism shared with Imagism. After a brief setting of the stage, by dwelling on Eliot’s earlier poetry, I propose to study “Ash Wednesday” and then . My focus will be on how these texts elaborate the role of authorial construction in order to emphasize values and human powers that cannot be made present if one concentrates only on narrative or description. Instead, Eliot dramatizes an imaginative life coming to full affective presence by inviting the audience to participate in how the constructed verbal object in fact calls attention to its capacities to develop intricate aspects of self-consciousness.Murder in the CathedralFour Quartets