University of Illinois Press How Did Poetry Survive?: The Making of Modern American Verse

How Did Poetry Survive? traces the emergence of modern American poetry at the turn of the nineteenth century. With a particular focus on four "little magazines" - Poetry, The Masses, Others, and The Seven Arts - John Timberman Newcomb shows how each advanced ambitious agendas combining urban subjects, stylistic experimentation, and progressive social ideals. All four were profoundly affected by World War I, and the poetry on their pages responded to the war and its causes with clarity and strength. While subsequent literary history has favoured the poets whose work made them distinct - individuals singled out usually on the basis of a novel technique - Newcomb provides a denser, richer view of the history that hundreds of poets made. Review "A pathbreaking study. No other book treats the 'new verse' of the 1910s and early 1920s with such care and with such a sense of contextual detail. Our sense of what modern poetry can achieve--and how poetry helped shape a modernist sensibility will be subtly but surely changed by what Newcomb offers here." --Edward Brunner, author of Cold War Poetry "A bold and meticulously researched revision of the history of modern American poetry. Newcomb's brilliant close readings illuminate the social and political dimensions of modern poetry and poetics." --Suzanne W. Churchill, co-editor of Little Magazines & Modernism: New Approaches About the Author John Timberman Newcomb is a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the author of Would Poetry Disappear? American Verse and the Crisis of Modernity.