Dictionary of Literary Biography: American Poets Since World War II

Dictionary of Literary Biography 193: American Poets Since World War II (Sixth Series). Detroit:  Gale Research Press, 1998, xxiii, 451 pp. [1]

Dictionary of Literary Biography 169: American Poets Since World War II (Fifth Series). Detroit:  Gale Research Press, 1996, xviii, 404 pp.

Dictionary of Literary Biography 165: American Poets Since World War II (Fourth Series). Detroit:  Gale Research Press, 1996, xviii, 377 pp.

I edited, introduced, and contributed to a three-volume series of the Dictionary of Literary Biography on American Poets Since World War II that contains critically informed and biographically illustrated essays on a total of 78 poets in over 1200 pages. I address four prominent and sometimes antithetical coalitions in contemporary poetry—traditional formalism, Language and performance poetries, the postconfessional lyric, and multicultural poetics. In my critical introduction to the series, I provide an historical overview that treats three generations of postmodern poets:  those born shortly after the turn of the century and whose work appears under the shadow of high modernist achievements; a postwar generation of poets who are included among the Black Mountain, Beat, confessional, and New York schools; and a third generation of contemporary poets, born after the second World War, whose practice is resistant to both the politics and the poetics of modernism. Widely held in research and major public libraries, these volumes are available online through Gale Literary Databases.