This is clearly the most important history of 20th-century poetry to appear. It is difficult to imagine a better book. Perkins's work will surely be the standard history by which all future assessments will have to be judged.
   --Choice

The author moves deftly between text and context, offering both panorama and portrait, and the dimensions of his extremely rich study can only be suggested here...It is amazing to observe the freshness and sensitivity with which Perkins approaches each poet...His opinions are strong and expressed with authority yet modesty...A landmark study.
   --Beth Bjorklund, World Literature Today

[Perkins] is generous, sympathetic, sensitive, inquisitive, and has a goodly streak of common sense. These are the virtues one hopes for in a literary historian...Clearly Perkins has a talent for getting under the skins of different styles and into the heads of people who lived in the recent past.
   --Stuart Klawans, The Nation

The scope of...inclusion is certainly impressive, with attention given to black and woman writers and to a broader range of British writing than might have been expected from an American critic: there can be few readers who will not find ways into new poetic territory from this enthusiastically written book.
   --David Norbrook, London Review of Books

We must be grateful to [Perkins] for this strong first volume of a two-volume study that, when completed, will be the only one of its kind, and should prove itself indispensable.
   --Richard Ellmann, New York Review of Books

David Perkins is John P. Marquand Professor of English Literature, Harvard University.

Read More by David Perkins:

• A History of Modern Poetry, Volume I, From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode
• Theoretical Issues in Literary History
• Teaching Literature: What Is Needed Now
• Wordsworth and the Poetry of Sincerity