A. Critical and Comparative Studies

48. Rexroth, Kenneth. American Poetry in the Twentieth Century. New York: Herder & Herder, 1971.

In his idiosyncratic history of twentieth-century American poetry Rexroth stresses the importance of influence from Japan and China. Includes knowledgeable discussion of Hartmann (see D12), Hearn (D9), and Noguchi (D15), the writers from whom American writers ‘first learned about the poetry of Japan’, and suggestion that Pound’s work with Chinese poetry and the nô (see especially BK15 and 24) for the first time ‘made Far Eastern literature meaningful in the context of modern [American] society’, even if Pound and Lowell’s conception of the ideogram (see BK32 and BI10) ‘misled many a translator’.