How Did Poetry Survive?

''When did American poems become modern, and how? Such questions are more than a hundred years old. Sometimes the answers proffered involve single heroes, such as Walt Whitman or Ezra Pound, and sometimes - as in How Did Poetry Survive? - they react to those heroic stories by showing what larger clusters of poets and editors did, and where, and asking why... Well-researched.'' Stephen Burt, Times Literary Supplement, August 3rd 2012 ''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