Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century

The Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century contains over 400 entries that treat a broad range of individual poets and poems, along with many articles devoted to topics, schools, or periods of American verse in the century. Entries fall into three main categories: poet entries, which provide biographical and cultural contexts for the author's career; entries on individual works, which offer closer explication of the most resonant poems in the 20th-century canon; and topical entries, which offer analyses of a given period of literary production, school, thematically constructed category, or other verse tradition that historically has been in dialogue with the poetry of the United States.

Selected entries: Maya Angelou, Anthologies, Textbooks and Canon Formation, Asian American Poetry, W.H. Auden, Beat Poetry, John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, Confessional Poetry, e.e. Cummings, Dada, T. S. Eliot, Expatriate Poetry, Experimental/Avant Garde Poetry, Robert Frost, Gay and Lesbian Poetry, Harlem Renaissance, Robert Hass, H.D., Hispanic American Poetry, Langston Hughes, Imagism, Galway Kinnell, Vachel Lindsey, Literary theory and poetry, Midwestern Poetry Renaissance, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Modernism, Vladimir Nabokov, Native American Poetry, New Criticism, New York School, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Performance Poetry, Prizes, John Crowe Ransom, Religion and Poetry, Adrienne Rich, W.D. Snodgrass, Jean Toomer, War and Anti-War Poetry, Louis Zukofsky