In a comment on yesterday’s “Power Quote” post, one of our regular commenters said he couldn’t find much about M.L. Rosenthal’s The Modern Poets: A Critical Introduction on the web. Well, neither could I, actually, which is one of the reasons that my post had links to some Yeats poems he had written about instead of to anything by Rosenthal himself. So by special request, please find below the T.O.C. to the book, plus some info on Rosenthal, for the edification and enjoyment of all. Before we get to that, however, I want to give a shout-out to Paul Violi. I was lucky enough to study with Paul when I was an MFA at The New School. Of all the poets–hell, all the people–I know, he’s easily one of the best- and widest-read, and is always  generous with his vast knowledge when I get a bug up my ass about this or that poetry-related topic and start suddenly shooting him emails. Most recently, that topic has been Ezra Pound. Paul pointed me to Rosenthal specifically for chapter three, “EZRA POUND: THE POET AS HERO.” After–or before–you check out the T.O.C. to this book, I emphatically recommend you click over to Paul’s website and check him out, if you don’t already know his work. 

THE MODERN POETS: A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION 

by M.L. Rosenthal

 

One    POETRY PAST AND PRESENT

1. The Widening of Sensibility

2. Some Workings of Tradition

3. Hopkins, Hardy, and the ‘Religion of Art’

 

Two    YEATS AND THE MODERN MIND

1. The Unconsenting Spirit

2. A Retrospect: The Here and the There

3. Prophetic Yeats

 

Three    EZRA POUND: THE POET AS HERO

1. Authority

2. Mauberley: Alienation of the Citizen-Artist

3. Some Notes on the Cantos

 

Four    T.S. ELIOT AND THE DISPLACED SENSIBILITY

1. ‘Damnation on This Earth’

2. The ‘Objective Correlative’

3. The Waste Land and Four Quartets

 

Five     RIVAL IDIOMS: THE GREAT GENERATION

1. Robinson and Frost

2. Williams and Stevens

3. MacDiarmid and Muir

4. Moore, Cummings, Sandburg, Jeffers

 

Six    NEW HEAVEN AND EARTH

1. D.H. Lawrence

2. Hart Crane

3. Auden and the Thirties

 

Seven    EXQUISITE CHAOS: THOMAS AND OTHERS

1. Dylan Thomas and Recent British Verse

2. Robert Lowell and the Poetry of Confession

3. Poets of the New Academy

4. Outside the Academy

 

ROSENTHAL BIO from the back jacket- M.L. ROSENTHAL is Professor of English at New York University and former Poetry Editor of The Nation. An American Council of Learned Societies Fellow in 1951-1952, he was appointed  Guggenheim Fellow in 1960 and in 1964. Among other books, he has edited selected editions of Yeats and William Carlos Williams, and is co-author, with A.J.M. Smith, of Exploring Poetry. He is the author of A Primer of Ezra Pound as well as of a book of poems, Blue Boy on Skates (1964), which has been highly praised by such critics and poets as Howard Nemerov, Frank Kermode, and David Wright.

 

RELATED

Learn about the M.L. Rosenthal Award, given by the W.B. Yeats Society of New York. Rosenthal was its first winner, in 1995, when it was called the Golden Apple Award. They renamed it for him, after his death in 1996.

Rosenthal’s Times obituary, 7/23/96

Tags: ezra pound, M.L. Rosenthal, Paul Violi, W.B. Yeats