American poets, from the Puritans to the present

Pt. 1. Beginnings

I. Puritans and Deists

Puritans Verse

Anne Bradstreet

Edward Taylor

Deists

Joel Barlow

Philip Freneau

II. Five New England poets

The shape of things to come

William Cullen Bryant

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Oliver Wendell Holmes

James Russell Lowell

John Greenleaf Whittier

Pt. 2. Transcendental dawn

III. Sursum Corda

The Poet as Friend and Aider

Ralph Waldo Emerson

IV. Ecstasy in Concord and Salem

Henry David Thoreau

Jones Very

V. Transcendental Despair

Edgar Allan Poe

Pt. 3. The Transcendent Self

VI. Singing for Soul and Body

Walt Whitman VII. Proun Ephemeral

Emily Dickinson

Pt. 4. Doubts, Dilutions, Strategies

VIII. Some Lesser Figures

Holland

Herman Melville

Sidney Lanier

Stephen Crane

William Vaughn Moody

Frederick Goddard Tuckerman

Trumbull Stickney

IX. The Idealist in Extremis

Edwin Arlington Robinson

X. The Strategic Retreat

Robert Frost

Pt. 5. The Revolutionary of Modernism: Image

XI. Science and Poetry: Imagism

XII. Some Imagists

Amy Lowell

John Gould Fletcher

H. D.

Marianne Moore

XIII. In The American Grain

William Carlos Williams

Pt. 6. The Revolutions of Modernism: Idea

XIV. Ideogram, or the Method of Science

Ezra Pound

XV. Myth and Memory

Thomas Stearns Eliot

XVI. The Idea of Order: Fictive Music

Wallace Stevens

XVII. Sic Transit Gloria: Six Famous Poets

Vachel Lindsay

Edgar Lee Masters

Carl Sandburg

Sara Teasdale

Elinor Wylie

Edna St. Vincent Millay

XVIII. Melodies of Chaos

Robinson Jeffers

Conrad Aiken

Archibald MacLeish

XIX. The Transcendental and Extraordinary

Hart Crane

E.E. Cummings

XX. Irony and Orthodoxy

Agrarian Protest

John Crowe Ransom

Allen Tate

Robert Penn Warren

Pt. 7. After Modernism

XXI. Transitions

Signs of the End of Modernism

New "BSchools" of the Sixties and Seventies

Four Transitional Poets

Theodore Roethke

Robert Lowell

John Berryman

Richard Wilbur

Four Post-Modernists

Robert Duncan

Howard Nemerov

James Dickey

Denise Levertov

XXII. "For the Time Being"

"Mortal Acts, Mortal Words"

Galway Kinnell

James Merrill

James Wright

W. S. Merwin

The Two Worlds: Robert Bly

"As We Know": John Ashbery

"The Condition of True Naming": The Poet as Visionary

"Persistences": A. R. Ammons

"Staying Alive in a Clear-cut Forest": David Wagoner

Poetry in a Fearful Time

Postscript.