'The most acute rendering of an era's sensibility is its poetry,' wrote the editors in their preface to the first edition. Thirty years late, this innovative cover-cover revision renders with fresh eyes and meticulous care the remarkable range of styles, subjects, and voices in English-language poetry. It includes 1,596 poems by 195 poets (half of the poetry new), from Walt Whitman and Thomas Hardy in the late nineteenth century to Anne Carson and Sherman Alexie in the twenty-first.
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry continues to be the most comprehensive collection of twentieth-century poetry in English. It richly represents the major figures--Yeats, Frost, Stevens, Williams, Eliot, Hughes, Auden, Olson, Bishop, Larkin, Ginsberg, Plath, Rich, Heaney, Walcott, among others. It also gives full voice to ethnic American poetries, experimental traditions, postcolonial poetry, and the long poem. Each volume concludes with a Poetics section of influential statements by poets that provide essential contexts for reading the powers. With substanstially new introductions, headnotes, annotations, and bibliographies, this anthology is indispensable for all who love poetry.
