A comprehensive study of American poetry from colonial times to the present day, which features a wealth of views and reviews by contemporary American literary critics. The poets discussed range from Longfellow and Poe to Ginsberg and Plath.

Introduction, Jay Parini. Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor, Francis Murphy. Early African American Poetry, Carolivia Herron. The Epic in the Nineteenth Century, John McWilliams. Longfellow in the Aftermath of Modernism, Dana Gioia. The Transcendentalist Poets, Lawrence Buell. Emily Dickinson, Cynthia Griffin Wolff. Walt Whitman, Donald Pease. Edgar Allan Poe, Jeffrey Meyers. Lowell, Teasedale, Wylie, Millay, and Bogan, Jeanne Larsen. Women Poets and the Emergence of Modernism, Margaret Dickie. Robert Frost and the Poetry of Survival, Jay Parini. Ezra Pound's Imagist Aesthetics: Lustra to Mauberley, J.T. Barbarese. T.S. Eliot, William Pritchard. Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, Jeredith Merrin. Wallace Stevens, Helen Vendler. William Carlos Williams, Christopher MacGowan. Hart Crane's Difficult Passage, T Barbarese. The Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance, Arnold Rampersad. Warren, with Ransom and Tate, Patricia Wallace. American Auden, Claude J. Summers. The Twentieth-Century Long Poem, Lynn Keller. Public Music, W.S. Di Piero. Beat Poetry and the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance, Ann Charters. John Berryman, Theodore Roethke and the Elegy, Lea Baechler. What Was Confessional Poetry?, Diane Wood Middlebrook. The Postconfessional Lyric, Gregory Orr. The Black Arts Poets, William W Cook. Nature's Refrain in American Poetry, John Elder. Native American Poetry, Lucy Maddox. James Merrill and John Ashbery, John Shoptaw. The Visionary Poetics of Philip Levine and Charles Wright, Edward Hirsch.