Historically condemned for their commercial exploitation of poesy, and threat to authorial autonomy, the literary anthology was nevertheless one of the signal forms of literary modernism, in the US and beyond. It was at once a salient means for circulating and preserving verse and a genre in its own right. Although the little magazine has been the more attractive genre of study – both for the form’s closer proximity to collaborative literary production and for their amenability to digital scholarly methods – the anthology often had a symbiotic relationship to little magazines in the modernist period, and has endured as a form for aesthetic and political self-identification, speculative interpellation, preservation, and reclamation, as well as being a mode of reaching audiences beyond the “field of restricted production.” This chapter traces the US career of the anthology from Des Imagistes to An “Objectivists” Anthology, emphasizing the genre’s key importance for Black American writing.

The Iraqi modernist poet Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb’s political positions underwent a monumental shift after he witnessed Mossadegh’s ouster first-hand while on the run from the Iraqi police in Iran. Chapter 4 traces the effects this political shift had on Sayyāb’s view of his own poetry and the worlds he imagined within it. Sayyāb was a card-carrying Communist prior to the coup against Mossadegh, but afterwards he began to support a nationalist politics informed by Western Liberalism. The changes his poetry underwent thus offer an indispensable point of comparison with Shāmlū’s committed project. After experiencing the events of 1953 in Iran, Sayyāb returned to a volatile period in Iraq’s history as a bloody 1958 revolution overthrew the pro-British Iraqi monarchy and instituted a radical military dictatorship in its stead. During the ensuing years, Sayyāb published several modernist poems, which have been hailed by critics as crucial contributions to the development of modernist forms and themes in Arabic. In this chapter, I explore Sayyāb’s development of modernist themes alongside his retention of premodern Arabic prosodic form in his 1954 long poem “Weapons and Children.”

Abraham Cowley’s 1656 Poems is one of the landmark volumes of the seventeenth century. Less studied than Milton’s 1645 Poems, it was markedly more influential: both the Pindarique Odes and the Davideis inaugurated or revived major literary trends. Anyone reading widely in fashionable verse, especially religious and devotional lyric of the later seventeenth and early eighteenth century is struck by the vogue for increasingly loose Pindarics, a trend attributed directly to Cowley; and the Davideis is often cited as a precursor for Paradise Lost. This chapter argues that while the influence of the 1656 volume is undeniable, its formal originality has been overstated by critics who have taken Cowley’s self-conscious remarks on this topic at face-value, and have not considered the extent to which the volume successfully imported into English verse a range of formal features already well established in contemporary Latin poetry. By placing Cowley’s volume back into the bilingual literary context from which it emerged, we can reassess both Cowley’s claims to formal innovation, and how those formal features were understood by his contemporaries.

Elizabeth Bishop observed the central tensions in mid-century American poetics from a distance, which allowed her the space to resolve them in her own work in idiosyncratic and shifting ways. This chapter thus looks to her correspondence as an archive of an ad hoc poetic theory. There we see Bishop developing unique constellations of, first, the formality of accentual-syllabic verse and the flexibility of free verse and, second, a residual commitment to modernist impersonality and an emerging aesthetics of confessional disclosure. The chapter draws primarily on letters between Bishop and both Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton to advance its argument and offers readings of Bishop’s poems “Song for the Rainy Season” and “Poem” as evidence of their author’s unique engagement with mid-century poetics.