Six American Poets from Emily Dickinson to the Present: An Introduction

Six American Poets from Emily Dickinson to the Present was first published in 1969. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.This volume provides critical introductions to the work of Emily Dickinson, Hart Crane, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Conrad Aiken, Marianne Moore, and E.E. Cummings, six American poets all of whom were born in the nineteenth century and whose various life spans overlap to cover a period of nearly a century and a half, reaching into the present. In his introduction, Allen Tate discusses the significance of this group of poets and their influence on contemporary poetry. He points out that the overlap in their ages gives a somewhat longer perspective to modern American poetry than the rise of modernism around 1912 has led us to look for. "The impressive variety and versatility of contemporary American poetry, including its 'modernist' development," he writes, "has been the achievement of men and women born before 1901."In discussing the six poets introduced in this volume, Mr. Tate offers interesting comments on the place in literary history of a number of other poets including Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Phelps Putnam, Mark Van Doren, John Hall Wheelock, and John Crowe Ransom.The introductions to the six poets are based on the material of six of the pamphlets in the series of University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers: Emily Dickinson by Denis Donoghue, Hart Crane by Monroe K. Spears, Edwin Arlington Robinson by Louis Coxe, Conrad Aiken by Reuel Denney, Marianne Moore by Jean Garrigue, and E.E. Cummings by Eve Triem.