The Cambridge Companion to American Poets, edited by Mark Richardson, enters a crowded field of reference books focussed on the poetic history of the US. Cambridge has already issued a compendious 1,500-page History of American Poetry (2014), as well as the more specialized History of Nineteenth-Century American Women's Poetry (2016), History of Twentieth-Century American Women's Poetry (2016), and History of Modernist Poetry (2015). To these we could add the Cambridge Companion volumes to Nineteenth-Century American Poetry (2011), American Poetry since 1945 (2013), Modern American Poetry (2014), and Modernist Poetry (2007), and the Cambridge Introduction volume to Twentieth-Century American Poetry (2003). Finally, numerous American poets are the subjects of volumes in Cambridge's Introduction to, Companion to, and In Context series. Given all these resources, it is difficult to see which unmet curricular or pedagogical needs the present volume might fill.

Many of the essays in the Cambridge Companion to American Poets are too introductory to be useful to a specialist, but too specific for someone seeking a general overview of American poetry. All are brief, none longer than twenty pages, and many less than ten if you subtract the endnotes and suggested-sources lists. The collection thus seems intended for discrete, discontinuous reading, rather than a systematic going-through, which is to say that the whole book is less than the sum of its parts. Some chapters offer succinct, cogent introductions to their authors, which might aid an undergraduate student pursuing a project devoted to that poet. However, the collection overall breaks no new ground, and its organization indicates an outdated view of American poetic history.

Let me sketch this schematically: of the thirty-one essays, one discusses two authors from the seventeenth century, one discusses one author from the eighteenth century, and eight discuss authors from the nineteenth century, while the remaining twenty-one essays are about the twentieth century. Twenty-first-century poets barely make it in (the final essay on “Contemporary” poets wastes most of its space explaining how hard it is to categorize contemporary poetry – a fair point, perhaps, but not one that will help anyone wanting to learn something about contemporary poets – and does little more than list a series of names). Poets who enjoyed large readerships, like Robert Service, or James Whitcomb Riley, or Edgar Guest, or Kahlil Gibran, or Shel Silverstein, or Edna St. Vincent Millay, or Dr. Seuss, aren't included. Beneath the old-fashioned bias for elite modernism are some more pernicious biases, unfortunately. Only English-language writers are considered. Except for the colonial poets Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, and Phillis Wheatley, and the twentieth-century poets Claude McKay and Denise Levertov, who get brief considerations in the “New Negro Renaissance” and “Black Mountain School” chapters, the designation “American” means “born in the US.” The poets studied are overwhelmingly white and male. Ten essays are about women, while five – only five! – are devoted to poets of color, all African American. I suppose a reader interested in Native American or Asian American or Latino poets will have to locate the Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature (2005) or the equivalent. Careful readers of American poetry will agree, I hope, that this does not represent what American poetry was or is.

Having said that, an enterprising student will find good things in here. Carla Willard's essay on Phillis Wheatley ventures well beyond Wheatley's most anthologized pieces and in six pages offers the best short introduction to her work I could imagine. Kerry Larson's essay on “The Historical Epic, Women's Poetry, and Early American Verse” is a welcome examination of the cultural politics surrounding the antebellum long poem, and it presents unfamiliar material in a clear and engaging manner. James Smethurst's essay on Gwendolyn Brooks, and Steven Gould Axelrod's on Robert Lowell, are lucid overviews of these poets that also offer strong interpretive arguments about their work. Melanie Waters's essay on Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath provides a nuanced elaboration and critique of the term “confessional poetry.”

But the volume's single-author approach feels out of keeping with current innovations in the study of poetics (see Cambridge's recently published History of Nineteenth-Century American Women's Poetry for an example of how to organize a survey in more interesting ways).Footnote ¹ Biographical criticism, perhaps an inevitable by-product of the single-author framework, is the dominant explanatory mode – for extreme examples, see Kevin J. Hayes on Edgar Allan Poe, or Wendy Martin and Annalisa Zox-Weaver on Adrienne Rich – and the impulse is visible in the many essay titles that are simply the author's name: “Emerson,” “Marianne Moore,” “Langston Hughes,” and so on, as though the proper name provides the only necessary frame of reference. Mark Richardson's introduction promises a narrative about American poetry that will avoid American exceptionalism, and while some individual essays support that worthy aim, the volume as a whole does not.