American Contemporary Poetry

The Introduction to Contemporary American Poetry is designed to give readers a brief but thorough introduction to the various movements, schools, and groups of American poets in the twentieth century. It will help readers to understand and analyze modern and contemporary poems.

The first part of the book deals with the transition from the nineteenth-century lyric to the modernist poem, focusing on the work of major modernists such as Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams. In the second half of the book, the focus is on groups such as the poets of the Harlem Renaissance, the New Critics, the Confessionals, and the Beats. In each chapter, discussions of the most important poems are placed in the larger context of literary, cultural, and social history. This volume will be invaluable for students and teachers alike.

Christopher Beach is Adjunct Assistant Professor at Claremont Graduate University. He is the author of several books in the field of American poetry and one book on American cinema. His most recent books are Poetic Culture: Contemporary American Poetry between Community and Institution and Class, Language, and American
Film Comedy. He is also the editor of Artifice and Indeterminacy: an Anthology of New Poetics.