The New Poetry: An Anthology

In 1917, American poetry stood at a crossroads. The old forms, heavy with Victorian sentiment and inherited elegance, were giving way to something rawer, truer. Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson captured this moment in The New Poetry, an anthology that read like a manifesto. Monroe, who had already discovered Ezra Pound and Carl Sandburg through her legendary Poetry magazine, brought her instincts for the radical to this collection. The poets gathered here, from Wallace Stevens to William Carlos Williams, Vachel Lindsay to Edgar Lee Masters, were not merely experimenting with form. They were insisting that poetry could speak in plain American English, could capture the hum of modern life, could be spare and stark and startling. This is the document of that audacious claim. It remains essential for anyone wanting to understand where American poetry went in the twentieth century and why it left the nineteenth behind.