ENGL1323 Composition and Literature II: Literature Databases

Major movements of the century are represented, including the Black Mountain school of Charles Olson and Robert Duncan, the Deep Image poetry of Robert Bly and James Wright, underground literature by the Beat poets, the influential feminist works of Adrienne Rich, and the works by the confessional poets. Selected major African American writers such as Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes and Imamu Amiri Baraka are included; however, much more comprehensive coverage is given in the complementary Chadwyck-Healey collection Twentieth-Century African American Poetry.

Many contemporary writers of the 1980s and 1990s are also included, such as Sharon Olds, Louise Glück, Joy Harjo and Thomas Lynch. In addition, Twentieth-Century American Poetry also features two highly distinguished poetry series – the Yale Series of Young Poets and the University of Pittsburgh's Pitt Poetry Series. Full details of works included in the collection are given in the bibliography (found within the product).

The collection reflects the multiple concerns and techniques of a century's writing. From modernist experiment to post-modern playfulness, from Georgian convention to free-verse confession, and from Edwardian poetry of empire to post-imperial diversity, the collection embraces vital contrasts and continuities. The extraordinary diversity of the century's early decades are given full representation: Edwardian and Georgian writers such Robert Bridges, A.E. Housman, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, Charlotte Mew and John Masefield can be searched alongside the revolutionary modernist writings of W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, John Rodker, D.H. Lawrence, Hugh MacDiarmid and Basil Bunting and the war poetry of Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, David Jones, Robert Graves and Laurence Binyon.

Major writers of the 1930s such as Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, Stevie Smith and C. Day-Lewis, and 'Movement' poets like D.J. Enright, Kingsley Amis and John Wain, feature alongside their less well-known contemporaries, such as Ruth Pitter, Anne Ridler and Phoebe Hesketh, or the Surrealists Charles Madge and David Gascoyne. In addition, the collection includes a major body of contemporary writing, from established figures such as Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Les Murray, Carol Ann Duffy, Fred D'Aguiar and Fleur Adcock to a younger generation of emerging writers. There is a particularly strong strand of Irish writing, from Yeats, James Joyce and Padraic Colum to P.J. Kavanagh, Derek Mahon, Eavan Boland, Medbh McGuckian and Sinéad Morrissey.