The Advocates of Poetry
Subtitle: A Reader of American Poet-Critics of the Modernist Era
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
Published: November 1996
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 242
ISBN-13: 9781557284266
Subjects: Poetry & poets: from c 1900 -; Works by individual poets: from c 1900 -; Modernism (Literature); 20th Century American Poetry; English; Poetry; USA; Poetics; General; American poetry; 20th century; History; History and criticism; Theory, etc; United States
Description: Like no other period in American history, the twentieth century has produced a great flourishing of critics who not only wrote poetry, but also published criticism dealing directly with the text and aesthetics of poems. Beginning with John Crowe Ransom's "Wanted: An Ontological Critic" and closing with John Ciardi's "How Does a Poem Mean?", R. S. Gwynn has assembled many of the pivotal essays written by these poet-critics over the last fifty years, some long out of print.

From the pens of a dozen authors, such as Robert Penn Warren, Louise Bogan, Allen Tate, Delmore Schwartz, and Randall Jarrell, the essays were written in an atmosphere of practicality. It was a time when critical readings of poetry elucidated the poem rather than the external ideologies and theories of the critic, when criticism was accessible to the educated, common reader.