Mr. Perkins has shouldered his burden with daring and carried it with poise...We must be grateful to him 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

Perkins has marshaled an enormous amount of material from the 1890s period to the death of Yeats in 1939...These were vivacious and exciting decades and Mr. Perkins tells their story well.
   --New York Times

Perkins deals admirably with those who, in the present canon, are deemed major figures, but he also summons up many poets and modes of poetry now slipping into the "background." He thus restores to us a lost sense of ambiance, an awareness of how various and complex certain periods of poetry were to themselves, before they were simplified.
   --Richard Wilbur

A most extraordinary work, unquestionably the most understanding presentation of how modern poetry shaped itself...There is nothing like it, nothing which is both so affable and yet so penetrating, critical and creative.
   --Louis Untermeyer

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

Read More by David Perkins:

• A History of Modern Poetry, Volume II, Modernism and After
• Theoretical Issues in Literary History
• Teaching Literature: What Is Needed Now
• Wordsworth and the Poetry of Sincerity