What do American poets mean when they talk about freedom? How can form help us understand questions about what shapes we want to give our poetic lives, and how much power we have to choose those shapes? For that matter, what do we even mean by we? In this collection of essays, Peter Campion gathers his thoughts on these questions and more to form an evolutionary history of the past century of American poetry.

            Through close readings of the great modernists, midcentury objectivists, late twentieth-century poets, his contemporaries, and more, Campion unearths an American poetic landscape that is subtler and more varied than most critics have allowed. He discovers commonalities among poets considered opposites, dramatizes how form and history are mutually entailing, and explores how the conventions of poetry, its inheritance, and its inventions sprang from the tensions of ordinary life. At its core, this is a book about poetic making, one that reveals how the best poets not only receive but understand and adapt what comes before them, reinterpreting the history of their art to create work that is, indeed, radical as reality.
 

Peter Campion is associate professor of English and a member of the graduate faculty in the creative writing program at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of three collections of poems, Other People, The Lions, and El Dorado.
 

— Bonnie Costello, author of The Plural of Us: Poetry and Community in Auden and Others

— Katie Peterson, author of A Piece of Good News and editor of Robert Lowell’s New Selected Poems

— Maureen N. McLane, author of Some Say