A Selection from the Collections

The Poetry Center maintains a small collection of critical works on poetry. Every attempt is made to obtain important works, and to obtain works of criticism by practicing and published poets. There are over 500 works in the collection. Bellow is an annotation for one of them:

Robert Von Hallberg. American Poetry and Culture, 1945-1980. Harvard University Press, 1985.

Scholar/Critic, Robert Van Hallberg has not been prolific, producing only three books in the last decade. His most influential book was American Poetry and Culture, 1945-1980 published in 1985, though Poetry, Politics and Intellectuals was published as part of volume 8 of the Cambridge History of American Literature. Von Hallberg emphasizes the sociology of literature, stressing situation, context and political (small p) arrangements. There are individual chapters on Creeley, Ashbery, Lowell, Merrill and Ed Dorn, as well as “travel” poetry and poetry/politics. The first chapter entitled Audience, Canon” is an excellent and early exegesis of a question which continues to plague us. Commenting on the (then, 1980’s) plaint about a decreasing audience for poetry, Von Hallberg is sanguine, showing common sense: “Despite so much agreement about the absence of an audience for poetry, this is more a contention, or an article of faith, than a report of facts.l”