Can we rediscover the wildness in Mark Twain's humor? Can we understand how that wildness helped make him a national legend and a key figure in the expression of an American self? Bruce Michelson writes about Twain as a body of literature, as a public personality, and as a myth. He shows that many of Twain's most ambitious and memorable works, from the very beginning to the end of his career, express a drive for absolute liberation from every social, psychological, and artistic limit.

The outrageous and anarchic sides of Twain play a vital role in his art. But these traits are undervalued even by his admirers, who often favor clean shapes and steady affirmations in Twain's writing - not the dangerous comic outbreak, or the deep yearning to free the self from every definition and confinement.

Reviewing works from a wide range of Twain's writings, Michelson brings to light those wild dimensions, their literary consequences, and their cultural importance.

Poet laureate of the United States, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, chancellor of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, recipient of the Bollingen Prize, the Prix de Rome, and many other major honors, Richard Wilbur has been a central figure in American literature since World War II. Yet commentary about his poetry has been sparse. In this book, Bruce Michelson brings to Wilbur's achievement the close critical attention it deserves.

The first extended study of Wilbur's work in twenty-five years, Wilbur's Poetry explores the light poems, the darker mediations, the brilliant translations of Moliere and Racine, as well as the risks Wilbur has taken as an artist. There are chapters on Wilbur's unique use of language and his response to a vast poetic heritage, on form and closure and their thematic implications, and of Wilbur's place as a poet in a complex and "scattering" time.