Twentieth Century American Women Poets

Contents: Preface. 1. Adrienne Rich. 2. Amy Lowell. 3. Anne Sexton. 4. Denise Levertov. 5. Dorothy Parker. 6. Edna St. Vincent Millay. 7. Elizabeth Bishop. 8. Gwendolyn Brooks. 9. Louise Gluck. 10. Marianne Moore. 11. Mary Oliver. 12. Rita Dove. 13. Sharon Olds. 14. Sylvia Plath. Bibliography. Index.

American poetry, the poetry of the United States, arose first as efforts b colonists to add their voices to English poetry in the 17 century, well before constitutionally unified thirteen colonies. However in the 19 century, a distinctive American Idiom began to emerge. The early poetry is dominated by the need to preserve the integrity of the Puritan ideas that created the settlement in the first place. As the colonists grew in confidence, the poetry they wrote increasingly reflected their drive towards independence. This shift in subject matter was not reflected in the mode of writing which tended to be conservative, to say the least. This can be seen as a product of the physical remove at which American poets operated from the center of English language poetic developments in London.