The first collection of poems by the winner of the 1996 Walt Whitman Award of The Academy of American poets.

Ten original essays by advanced scholars and well-published poets address the middle generation of American poets, including the familiar---Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, and John Berryman---and various important contemporaries: Delmore Schwartz, Theodore Roethke, Robert Hayden, and Lorine Niedecker. This was a famously troubled cohort of writers, for reasons both personal and cultural, and collectively their poems give us powerful, moving insights into American social life in the transforming decades of the 1940s through the 1960s.In addition to having worked during the broad middle of the last century, these poets constitute the center of twentieth-century American poetry in the larger sense, refuting invidious connotations of “middle” as coming after the great moderns and being superseded by a proliferating postmodern experimentation. This middle generation mediates the so-called American century and its prodigious body of poetry, even as it complicates historical and aesthetic categorizations.Taking diverse formal and thematic angles on these poets---biographical-historical, deconstructionist, and more formalist accounts---this book re-examines their between-ness and ambivalence: their various positionings and repositionings in aesthetic, political, and personal matters. The essays study the interplay between these writers and such shifting formations as religious discourse, consumerism, militarism and war, the ideology of America as “nature's nation,” and U.S. race relations and ethnic conflicts. Reading the Middle Generation Anew also shows the legacy of the middle generation, the ways in which their lives and writings continue to be a shaping force in American poetry. This fresh and invigorating collection will be of great interest to literary scholars and poets.

It is only in the last generation that lovers of art have recognized the special qualities of the 14th century Sienese school of painting, and have found its graceful, conventional drawing and its pleasing decorative effects not inferior to the realism and fidelity to nature praised in other periods. The general admiration accorded to the subtle, lyrical and aristo· cratic expression of abstract and spiritual conceptions which is the essence of Sienese painting, gives us some hope for the future develop ment of taste in Europe and for its artistic tendencies. F. Mason Perkins was the first to understand the aesthetic signific ance, not only of the principal artists of this school, but also of its minor members. His numerous articles on the "Little Masters" have been of great assistance to me in my attempt to write as complete a history as was possible of Sienese painting in the I4th century. I am only too glad to take this opportunity of paying homage to his profound knowledge and enthusiastic activity in this field of study. Other names that deserve mention here are those of Mr. Langton Douglas, the annotator of Crowe and Cavalcaselle and author of many important studies including a IIHistory of Siena"; and of Dr. G. De Nicola, Director of the National Museum, Florence, for among the many subjects with which he is conversant is the history of the Sienese school of painting, on which he has written articles of great value.