A handbook to any subject, let alone one so broad as “Modern and Contemporary American Poetry,” has a number of competing imperatives to which it might respond, and a number of audiences it might have to satisfy. Should it aim itself at students or experts, should it summarize or select, should it aim for balance or for argument? The Oxford Handbooks series adheres to a policy of publishing only new essays written for the series, rather than reprinting classic pieces, and, as such, examples of it, perhaps necessarily, tend to function better as sourcebooks for undergraduate and MA students (and their teachers) than as resources or treasuries for scholars.

In these terms this latest volume in the series has much to recommend it. It covers a lot of ground, both in terms of the critical techniques it deploys and in terms of the areas of (often neglected) writing it discusses – I cannot imagine anyone could read the entire volume without being pointed towards several interesting writers they had never heard of before. It is consistently approachable but never excessively simplistic. Those who require a textbook with a linear style for teaching purposes, who are unconvinced by cultural-studies approaches to literature, or who are more interested in academic than in popular poetry, however, may prefer other alternatives.

The central assumption made by its editor, Cary Nelson, is that “the narrow academic canon” of modern American poetry, which emphasized Pound and Eliot, “offered an inadequate account of a much richer and more diverse literary history” (4). Accordingly his selection of essays “seeks simultaneously to recognize major voices and to bring many other poets into our conversations” (4). Nelson therefore “disavows any pretense at comprehensiveness” (7). Instead he demonstrates a pragmatic tendency to prefer topics that have not previously received very wide discussion. Asian American poetry is given detailed treatment, but Latino American poetry is not covered in such depth; disability poetics receive excellent and welcome coverage but queer, lesbian and gay poetry is only mentioned in passing; and so on. Above all, heavy coverage is given to the poetry of socialist, “workers'” or class-based movements. Whilst there is much to be said in favour of this emphasis, it does mean that the collection is more suited to being used on advanced undergraduate and MA courses than on “introductions to American literature” where students may require a clearer narrative to orient them in the field of study and an introduction to even (or especially) the most widely discussed areas of study.

Whilst the range of topics discussed is wide, however, the book as a whole does take a distinctive critical and political position. In the first essay after the introduction Rachel Blau DuPlessis forcefully and stylishly sets out the case for a cultural-studies approach to literature. Her treatment is notable for insisting on the importance of analysis of literary style to any understanding of a book's cultural import, claiming that, through a method she calls “social philology or socio-poesis,” it is possible to respect “the verbal complexities, formal particularities, and aesthetic intricacies of the poetic text while analyzing the ideologies and social meanings that are condensed in and propelled by these linguistic and rhetorical choices” (66). This insistence on the inextricability of the ideological and the aesthetic is admirable, and generally followed through in the essays that follow, but does somewhat leave out those readers, and teachers, who prefer the opposite order of critical priorities to that DuPlessis gives.

With this cultural-studies slant come a number of shared preferences. The contributors tend to view innovation, subversion and political radicalism as positives in their own right. Melissa Girard, for instance, makes a strong case that Edna St. Vincent Millay, Louise Bogan and their circle are undervalued by prevalent descriptions of them as “sentimental.” However, it is notable that she chooses to do so by highlighting those aspects of their work which are innovative or subversive, and not those, arguably equally valuable, which depend upon their allegiance to tradition. Conversely, a repeated bugbear is mid-century “New Criticism.” No one has a good word to say about the critical writings of Allen Tate or John Crowe Ransom, though several contributors define themselves in opposition to them, and the poetry of the “Fugitives” is not discussed at any point. Although the inclusions in the handbook cover a wide range, then, there is evident motivation to at least some exclusions. It might be fair to say that the book as a whole will be most useful to those interested in popular forms of poetry, in any of the senses of that word, and least useful to those whose focus is on more consciously academic writing.

With these caveats, this book can be recommended to both teachers and students of American studies and modern literature. It maintains a good balance between articles that provide useful surveys of wide and often neglected areas of American literature and articles that provide valuable examples of close analysis and theoretical discussion. Of particular note is one essay that fits into neither of these camps – Mike Chasar's excellent discussion of the circulation of poems clipped from newspapers or other popular sources and either carried around, stored with identity documents or pasted into scrapbooks. In its discussion of the way “nonliterary” audiences made use of poetry in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, it provides a useful and fascinating counterpoint to, and context for, the other essays, which tend to view matters more from the perspective of the writer, or of the immediate community which they can be taken as representing and expressing.