[In the following review, Altieri offers an unfavorable assessment of The Columbia History of American Poetry,citing omissions and empty homages.]

The first two-thirds of this collection of essays [The Columbia History of America Poetry,] provides a lively, informative, and intellectually stimulating treatment of the major moments in American poetry up to World War II. Some of the work offers engaging and useful traditional literary history—of Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor; of early African-American poetry; of Amy Lowell, Sara Teasdale, Elinor Wylie, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Louise Bogan; of Gertrude Stein, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), and Marianne Moore; of William Carlos Williams; of the twentieth-century long poem; and (superbly) of the Harlem Renaissance. But most of the essays present synoptic appreciations devoted to how we might best read and value canonical American poets. In this vein we find an absolutely major essay on the transcendentalist poets that establishes an anti-Walt Whitman heritage of impersonal and transpersonal imagining that these poets bequeath to the twentieth century. There are also spirited, provocative accounts of the epic in the nineteenth century and of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow that force us to take seriously the question of how poetry manages to engage a public readership, as well as accounts of Ezra Pound and George Oppen as public poets; there are brilliant stylistic analyses of Whitman’s making the body electric within the poem and of Wallace Steven’s lyric strategies, both of which I think should become fundamental in our teaching of these poets. There are interesting overviews of Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Frost, the American W. H. Auden, and the Agrarians and beautifully argued overall evaluations of T. S. Eliot’s continuing appeal in the present and of the fundamental differences between Moore and Elizabeth Bishop. Finally, I must mention essays on Pound and on Hart Crane that are more intellectually ambitious than the others, but also more uneven and more problematic: Pound is seen as substituting “objective for subjective interests, historical for human complexities,” while Crane becomes the heroic subjectivist committed to a Keatsian visionary immanence.

One might complain about quite limited bibliographies (appropriate for appreciations perhaps) and about the coverage: there probably should be essays on what Cheryl Walker calls “the nightingale tradition,” on the alternative modernisms of Bliss Carman, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Carl Sandburg, and Edgar Lee Masters, on “objectivism,” and on Marxist poetry in the thirties. And one must complain about the lack of any powerful account of modernism or, more generally, the lack of critical effort to place American poetry within its cultural contexts. The only generalizations take place in Jay Parini’s vapid introduction: “The struggle of American poetry from the beginning has been this dream of a common language, and … there has always been in our best poets a sense that ‘a whole new poetry is beginning here.’”

The major weakness of this section of the book sharply defines its historicity in a culture eager for moral self-congratulation. When appreciation works, it articulates specific imaginative visions, voices, and lyrical strategies so that we can identify completely with the poet’s engagements and it allows a deep sense of shared enterprise among readers. But when it fails, two other possible critical stances emerge, both all too indicative of our current literary ambitions: critics can labor to conceal the fact that certain poets are too weak for such individualizing to compel attention, or they can openly reveal their need to subsume that individuality under their own generalized imperatives. Here we find the first most pronounced in the essay on Amy Lowell et al. The second dominates the chapter on Emily Dickinson, here become a female version of Pound’s Christ in his “Ballad of the Goodly Frere.” Dickinson becomes a committed champion of women, pursuing a representative (yet personal) voice that can recover love poetry from a tradition disempowering women and that can use God to attack “the very essence of unjust authority, especially male authority.” So we lose the great poet who warred directly on God, not on what he represents of masculinity, and who insisted on the terrifying ways that her own soul found itself drawn to the very solipsistic intensity that she feared.

When the book turns to more contemporary materials, such problems become the rule rather than the exception. There are intelligent historical essays on the Beats and the San Francisco Renaissance, on black arts poetry, on Native American poetry, and on confessional poetry (although this one is perhaps too seduced by the psychoanalytic framework that is part of the historicity of this work). There is also much that is simply missing—all of the Charles Olson tradition, all of the New York school with the exception of John Ashbery (who is linked to L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E writing so that he can all too sharply be distinguished from James Merrill), and all the various political energies driving current work, while pious nature poetry and an essay on “the Visionary Poetics of Philip Levine and Charles Wright” take the place of discussing C. K. Williams, Robert Hass, most of Adrienne Rich, Louise Gluck, etc. The one essay that does propose scope, on the postconfessional lyric (and it does make some interesting points), fails to place the work within general aspects of a therapeutic culture that itself might be questioned, and it ignores autobiographical poets as important as Robert Creeley and June Jordan, as well as the various ethnic efforts at autobiography—Mexican-American and Asian-American poets are not treated anywhere in the volume. Any history would have to make choices, but not every history would make such consistently conservative ones without directly arguing for its values or presenting overviews that at least address the range of imaginative interests ignored here.

In such a narrow context, appreciation becomes indulgent moralizing, largely because the poet contributors simply ignore the contextual and evaluative concerns shaping academic discourse about contemporary work. Thus John Berryman and Theodore Roethke get lumped under a simplified notion of elegy, with Roethke treated as the better poet because of his transforming “the search for understanding and acceptance into a psychic and spiritual journey” figured in the mythic “lost son.” There is no questioning whether such traditional spirituality is still feasible in contemporary culture, and no interest in Berryman’s perverse internalizing of elegy as a possible alternative to dead pieties. Similarly, postconfessional lyrics are praised for escaping the confessional entrapment “in the conditional circumstantial world,” since they manage instead to gain access to the transcendent and accept a “proportionate ego” capable of honoring “the competing claims of self, other, world.” Poetry then becomes therapy, rather than the full imaginative living out of what cultural shifts entail. Finally, the concluding essay on Levine and Wright as the exemplary contemporaries manages to turn historical scholarship into the banalities of the New York Times Book Review: “Philip Levine has created a memorializing poetics of human separation and connection. Charles Wright has defined a radiant metaphysics of absence and aspiration, of the longed-for presence of the divine.” This is history writing all too historicizable in its nostalgic conventionality.