The Modern Poetic Sequence: The Genius of Modern Poetry

Ezra Pound's Cantos, TS Eliot's Waste Land, WB Yeat's Irish civil-war sequences, and William Carlos Williams's Paterson are some of the most genuinely creative poems of the present age--and all are examples of the modern poetic sequence. In this revolutionary critical study, Rosenthal and Gall establish the poetic sequence as the major genre of 20th-century poetry, claiming it as "the decisive form toward which all the developments of modern poetry have tended. The Modern Poetic Sequence explores 125 years of poetic history and examines the works of some fifty poets--both major and minor--to describe the evolution of this modern poetic form. From Whitman and Dickinson to the Confessional poets Plath and Lowell to the recent writing of Kinsells, Montague, and Hill, this volume encompasses the entire development of the modern sequence and offers provocative insights not only into the boundaries and features of this particular genre, but into the whole of twentieth-century poetry.