Poetry: Criticism and Biographical Info

This encyclopedia includes more than 900 alphabetically arranged entries, contributed by approximately 350 scholars. Written for students and general readers, the set covers poetry from the colonial era to the present, devoting special attention to contemporary poets and their works. Multicultural in scope, the encyclopedia covers poets, genres, critics, poetic terms, and movements. Its entries range from Caribbean to Confessional Poetry, from Dada to Eco-poetics, from Gay and Lesbian Poetry to Literary Magazines, New Formalism, and more.

Covers modern poets active from 1910 to the present day. An extensive guide to the lives of influential poets writing in English, in Britain and around the world, this companion helps to illuminate the influences,inspirations, and movements that have shaped the lives and works of our best-loved poets.

Twenty-five original essays on a wide array of topics: the influence of jazz on the Beats and beyond; European and surrealist influences on style; poetics of the disenfranchised; religion and the national epic; antiwar and dissent poetry; the AIDS epidemic; digital innovations; transnationalism; hip hop; and more. Alongside these topics, major interpretive perspectives such as Marxist, psychoanalytic, disability, queer, and ecocritcal are incorporated. Throughout, the names that have shaped American poetry in the period--Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Sterling Brown, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Posey, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Rae Armantrout, Larry Eigner, and others--serve as touchstones along the tour of the poetic landscape.