The poetry of Walt Whitman is the cornerstone of modern American verse. He was America's first truly great poet and his influence is still evident today. The first edition of Whitman's Leaves of Grass, published in 1855, was a revolutionary manifesto declaring America's independence from European cultural domination. His rhapsodic free verse broke radically with poetic, tradition: it was poetry about America, its democracy, its people, and its hopes....

Praised by poets and critics ranging from A. E. Housman and Thomas Hardy to Edmund Wilson, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s bold, exquisite poems take their place among the enduring verse of the twentieth century
 
Claiming a lyric tradition stretching back to Sappho and Catullus and making it very much her own, Millay won over her contemporaries—and readers ever since—with her passion, erotic candor, formal elegance,...

As critic and teacher, Yvor Winters was one of the most controversial and influential figures of his time. He criticized the likes of Eliot and Henry James, was called by the chair of his English department "a disgrace," and taught such major poets as Robert Pinsky and Philip Levine. As a poet, he created a moving body of work featuring natural and personal subjects and dramatic formal experiments. This volume presents the largest collection of his...

Samuel Menasche has created a poetic mode that is all his own: Compresed, alert to linguistic surprise, capable of disclosing ultimate meanings in the most ordinary phenomena. Emerging out oa a life in shich, the poet's words, "each day was the only day", Menasches work has a mysterious simplicity, a religious intensity, and a lingering emotional force.

Contains a collection of selected poems by American poet Theodore Roethke, including children's poems and writings from his notebooks.

A major and sometimes controversial figure of the Harlem Renaissance, Countee Cullen fused a mastery of the formal lyric with a passionate engagement with themes social, religious, racial, and personal in such books as Color, Copper Sun, and The Black Christ. Certain of his poems-- "Heritage," "Yet Do I Marvel" -- are widely celebrated, but much of Cullen's work remains to be discovered. This volume restores to print a body of work of singular intensity...