“Oracular, almost biblical at times, and as deeply embedded in the particulars of nature as the superb later poetry.”—John Ashbery This reissue of A. R. Ammons’s debut, published five decades ago in a rare edition, with its penetrating “Whitmanian chants . . . holds in it the mystery of his gradual development into a major American poet, who will be read by the most discerning until the last syllable of recorded time” (Harold Bloom).

A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 1950 TO THE PRESENT Featuring works from notable authors as varied as Salinger and the Beats to Vonnegut, Capote, Morrison, Rich, Walker, Eggers, and DeLillo, A History of American Literature: 1950 to the Present offers a comprehensive analysis of the wide range of literary works produced in the United States over the last six decades and a fascinating survey of the dramatic changes during America’s transition from the innocence of the fifties to the harsh realities of the first decade of the new millennium. Author Linda Wagner-Martin - a highly acclaimed authority on all facets of modern American literature - covers major works of drama, poetry, fiction, non- fiction, memoirs, and popular genres such as science fiction and detective novels. Viewing works produced during this fertile literary period from a wide-ranging perspective, Wagner-Martin considers literature in relation to such issues as the politics of civil rights, feminism, sexual preferences, and race- and gender-based marketing. She also places a special emphasis on works produced during the twenty-first century, and writings influenced by recent historic events such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Hurricane Katrina, and the global financial crisis. With its careful balance of scholarly precision and accessibility, A History of American Literature: 1950 to the Present provides readers of all levels with rich and revealing insights into the diversity of literary forms and influences that characterize postmodern America. “A monumental distillation of an enormous range of material, Wagner-Martin’s rich book should be required reading for anyone grappling with making sense of the prolific, broad-spectrum, and diverse writing in the US since 1950.” Thadious M. Davis, University of Pennsylvania “Linda Wagner-Martin’s history impressively and judiciously surveys all fields of American writing over the past sixty years, taking full account of significant cultural and historical contexts and the major critical commentaries that have helped shape our understanding of developments in the second half of the last century and the dozen years following the millennium. Balanced, informative, and always highly readable there is much here for general readers, students, and specialists alike.” Christopher MacGowan, the College of William and Mary

“One of the great American poets . . . he sounds like nobody else.”—Helen Vendler “So I said I am Ezra / and the wind whipped my throat / gaming for the sounds of my voice. . . .” So begins one of the most remarkable oeuvres in the history of American poetry. The Complete Poems of A. R. Ammons, Volume I presents the first half of Archie Randolph Ammons’s long career, including the complete texts of his three book-length poems from that period: the verse diary Tape for the Turn of the Year, the Bollingen Prize–winning Sphere: The Form of a Motion, and the daring kaleidoscope of The Snow Poems, which late in life Ammons said of all his long poems was his favorite. Here are many of Ammons’s most widely celebrated lyrics and meditations, including “Corsons Inlet,” “Still,” “Gravelly Run,” and “The City Limits.” Others are more directly inspired by his roots in the rural south, among them “Nelly Myers,” “Silver,” and “Mule Song.” Here too are conversations with mountains (as in “Classic” and “Mountain Talk”) and exchanges with the wind (“The Wide Land” and “Mansion”), materialist explanations of reality (“Mechanism” and “Catalyst”) and prayers (such as the several poems titled “Hymn”). A poet drawn to theorizing about poetry, Ammons offers both sophisticated discussions of the art (as in “Poetics” and “Essay on Poetics”) and disarming assurance: “I believe in fun.” The text of each poem has been established after careful consideration of Ammons’s manuscripts and other prepublication materials. Endnotes detail the poems’ composition and publication histories, and also helpfully annotate references made within the poems. This volume confirms Richard Howard’s judgment: “Here was a great poet, surely one of the largest to speak among us.”

A Times Higher Education Book of the Week One of our foremost commentators on poetry examines the work of a broad range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century English, Irish, and American poets. The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar gathers two decades’ worth of Helen Vendler’s essays, book reviews, and occasional prose—including the 2004 Jefferson Lecture—in a single volume. “It’s one of [Vendler’s] finest books, an impressive summation of a long, distinguished career in which she revisits many of the poets she has venerated over a lifetime and written about previously. Reading it, one can feel her happiness in doing what she loves best. There is scarcely a page in the book where there isn’t a fresh insight about a poet or poetry.” —Charles Simic, New York Review of Books “Vendler has done perhaps more than any other living critic to shape—I might almost say ‘create’—our understanding of poetry in English.” —Joel Brouwer, New York Times Book Review “Poems are artifacts and [Vendler] shows us, often thrillingly, how those poems she considers the best specimens are made...A reader feels that she has thoroughly absorbed her subjects and conveys her understanding with candor, clarity, wit.” —John Greening, Times Literary Supplement

William Carlos Williams is widely acknowledged to be among the most important American poets of the twentieth century. This collection includes sixteen new essays from many of the world's leading authorities on Williams, and is published to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of his death in 1963. The volume contains fresh assessments of the nature and extent of Williams's profound and enduring impact on contemporary American poetic traditions, while providing a platform for appraising the neglected achievement of Williams as a writer of fiction and short stories. In doing so these and other essays highlight the nature and importance of Williams's relationship to working class life in twentieth-century America. Additionally, the volume groups together studies focusing on the enduring legacy of Williams's long poem, Paterson, and essays which revise Williams's perceived neglect of African-American and Native-American culture and history.

An essential volume from “a master maker” (Richard Howard). “If you will sit with me in the light // of speech, I will sit with you. . . .” Readers who accept that invitation will find themselves in extraordinary company. The Complete Poems of A. R. Ammons, Volume II presents the second half of Archie Randolph Ammons’s long career, including the complete texts of his two book-length poems from that period: Garbage, for which he won his second National Book Award, and Glare, which drew special praise from the Academy of American Poets as it bestowed on him its highest honor, the Wallace Stevens Award. In addition, two appendices offer over one hundred and twenty previously uncollected poems dating from the 1950s to the late 1990s. Among this volume’s many highlights are celebrations of the natural world (such as “Hermit Lark” and “Lofty Calling”), poems of remembrance (as in “Chinaberry” and “Keeping Track”), prayers (“Singling & Doubling Together” and “Autonomy”), and compelling meditations on loss and mortality (such as “Easter Morning” and “In View of the Fact”). As in Volume I, the variety of scale is remarkable, ranging from the massiveness of Glare to the haiku-like brevity of “Pebble’s Story.” The text of each poem has been established after careful consideration of Ammons’s manuscripts and other prepublication materials. Endnotes detail the poems’ composition and publication histories, and also helpfully annotate references made within the poems. Celebrated poetry critic Helen Vendler’s introduction both humanizes Ammons and traces the growth of his outsized stature as a major poet, “unquestionably among the best-loved poets of our time” (David Lehman).

The ethnically diverse scope, broad chronological coverage, and mix of biographical, critical, historical, political, and cultural entries make this the most useful and exciting poetry reference of its kind for students today. American poetry springs up out of all walks of life; its poems are "maternal as well as paternal...stuff'd with the stuff that is coarse and stuff'd with the stuff that is fine," as Walt Whitman wrote, adding "Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion." Written for high school and undergraduate students, this two-volume encyclopedia covers U.S. poetry from the Colonial era to the present, offering full treatments of hundreds of key poets of the American canon. What sets this reference apart is that it also discusses events, movements, schools, and poetic approaches, placing poets in their social, historical, political, cultural, and critical contexts and showing how their works mirror the eras in which they were written. Readers will learn about surrealism, ekphrastic poetry, pastoral elegy, the Black Mountain poets, and "language" poetry. There are long and rich entries on modernism and postmodernism as well as entries related to the formal and technical dimensions of American poetry. Particular attention is paid to women poets and poets from various ethnic groups. Poets such as Amiri Baraka, Nathaniel Mackey, Natasha Trethewey, and Tracy Smith are featured. The encyclopedia also contains entries on a wide selection of Latino and Native American poets and substantial coverage of the avant-garde and experimental movements and provides sidebars that illuminate key points.

Twenty-eight contemporary American poets reflect on the poems that have most influenced their own creative vision and offer their best new works in this examination of poetic expression. Each entry includes a new poem from the author, the text of a poem or poems that particularly influenced the development of the new poem, and an essay about that influence. The dialogue created between the new works of the poets and the poems that they love provides insight into the poetic process and speaks to the meaning and endurance of great art.

Schneider presents new and penetrating readings of Ammons's central poems, such as "Corsons Inlet," Sphere, and "Easter Morning.".

This volume gathers new essays on A. R. Ammons's long poems by many of the most influential critics of contemporary American poetry, including Helen Vendler, Marjorie Perloff, and Willard Spiegelman. It will serve for years to come as an important critical text on a vast body of work by one of the most prolific and innovative practitioners of the long poem in post-World War II American poetry. Complexities of Motion, then, is a collection of new critical articles on the entire range of Ammons's longer poems, beginning with Tape for the Turn of the Year (1965) and culminating with Glare (1997).