Horace speaks of poetry delighting and instructing. While Evaluations of US Poetry since 1950, Volume 1 explores the pleasures of poetry—its language, forms, and musicality—volume 2 focuses on the public dimensions. In this volume, von Hallberg and Faggen have gathered a diverse selection of poets to explore questions such as: How does poetry instruct a society with a highly evolved knowledge industry? Do poems bear a relation to the disciplined idioms of learning? What do poets think of as intellectual work? What is the importance of recognizable subject matter? What can honestly be said by poets concerning this nation so hungry for learning and so fixated on its own power? To these questions, the literary critics collected here find some answers in the poetry of Robert Pinsky, Susan Howe, Robert Hass, Anthony Hecht, Adrienne Rich, Sharon Olds, Ed Dorn, and August Kleinzahler.
Robert von Hallberg is a professor of literature at Claremont McKenna College. He is the author and editor of several books, including The Maltese Falcon to Body of Lies: Spies, Noirs, and Trust (UNM Press).
Robert Faggen is the Barton Evans and H. Andrea Neves Professor of Literature at Claremont McKenna College. He is the author, editor, and coeditor of several books, including The Cambridge Introduction to Robert Frost.
Evaluations is an important intervention in the study of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American poetry. The book exemplifies the value of evaluative criticism by presenting provocative arguments about the value of specific poets.--Joshua Kotin, author of Utopias of One
