Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry

A judicious and comprehensive selection of 77 American, British, and Irish manifestoes by some of modern poetry's finest practitioners. Opening with Pound, Yeats, and Eliot, the book moves through such key figures as Auden, Hughes, Stevie Smith, Dylan Thomas, Hughes, Heaney, Boland, and McGuckian. American poets are richly represented with pieces by Frost, Williams, O'Hara, Jarrell, Lowell, Bishop, Zukofsky, Plath, Creeley, Baraka, and others. Poetic issues are then brought fully up to date with more than thirty specially commissioned statements from such contemporary poets as Motion, Armitage, Maxwell, Carson, and Dunn. Charting the many different poetic stances and movements of these past one-hundred years, this landmark book champions the continuing dialogue of these voices, past and present, exploring the strongest form that words can take: the poem.