American Poetry after Modernism

Albert Gelpi is Professor Emeritus of American Literature at Stanford University, California. His previous books include Emily Dickinson: The Mind of the Poet (1971), The Tenth Muse (Cambridge, 1991), and A Coherent Splendor (Cambridge, 1988). Gelpi has also edited the work of, and written criticism on, a wide range of poets, including Wallace Stevens, Robinson Jeffers, Adrienne Rich, Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, and William Everson. The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov (2003), co-edited with Robert Bertholf, won an award from the MLA as the best scholarly edition of a literary correspondence. Gelpi continues to teach in the Stanford Continuing Studies Program.

1. Twentieth-century poetics: an overview; 2. The language of crisis: Robert Lowell and John Berryman; 3. The language of flux: Elizabeth Bishop and John Ashbery; 4. The language of incarnation: Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Everson; 5. The language of witness: Adrienne Rich; 6. The language of vision: Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan; 7. The language of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E: Robert Creeley, Michael Palmer, Lyn Hejinian, Robert Grenier, Susan Howe, and Fanny Howe.