The Penguin Anthology of 20th-Century American Poetry by Rita Dove

It is fascinating to follow the editorial process, the decisions you have to make as an editor, and its consequences. Even as Helen Vendler’s ‘most significant names’, all ten of them, are all included (if perhaps not always by the texts Vendler would have chosen).

Rita Dove is at pains to include angry outbursts as well as artistically ambitious meditations.”īy asking Rita Dove, rather that say Helen Vendler, to be the editor, we must assume that Elda Rotor, her editor at Penguin Books, wanted and expected Rita Dove to open up the canon beyond ‘the usual suspects’. These writers are included in some cases for their representative themes rather than their style. “Rita Dove … has decided … to shift the balance, introducing more black poets and giving them significant amounts of space, in some cases more space than is given to better-known authors. Eliot, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Hart Crane, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop (and some would include Ezra Pound).” The most significant names and texts are known worldwide: T.S. Under the headline Are These the Poems to Remember? (The New York Review of Books, 24 November 2011), she writes: “Twentieth-century American poetry has been one of the glories of modern literature. Helen Vendler (1933-), a scholar and critic of some repute, is not pleased. Keen-eyed Rita Dove (1952-), former Poet Laureate of the United States and a major American poet of the 20 th century in her own right, with The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry (2011) has edited the first serious attempt at a multicultural anthology of American poetry, including some 35 African American poets* (out of a total of 175), more women poets, and more ‘minority’ poets other than African American than has previously been seen.

Canon debate … is the clash of cultures.” – Toni Morrison in her lecture ‘Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature’, delivered at The University of Michigan, October 7, 1988

The Penguin Anthology of 20th-Century American Poetry by Rita Dove