American Poetry – Andrew Epstein, The Cambridge Introduction to American Poetry Since 1945, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2023

Since 1945, he examines American poetry, which is notably the most influential poetry culture on a transnational scale, particularly during the Cold War Era.Epstein maps the concepts, formations, and individual work of various poets, dividing his book in three parts, "American Poetry from 1945 to 1970", "American Poetry from 1970 to 2000" and "Into the New Millenium: American Poetry from 2000 to the Present".The most distinguished characteristic of American Poetry from 1945 to 1970 is that it was able to generate two mutually opposing streams: the academic, more conservative stream (often referred to as the mainstream) and the antiacademic, known as The New American Poetry, highlighted in Donald Allen's groundbreaking anthology The New American Poetry 1945Poetry -1960Poetry , published in 1960. .In his book, Epstein explores these two opposing streams and their changes over time.In the first part, Epstein discusses influential poets-critics, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, known as New Critics, who insisted on "well-crafted, allusive, and learned poetry" (p.19), and insisted on their close reading as a "central pedagogical tool in literary studies".He then examines the emergence of New American Poetry in separate chapters focusing on the Black Mountain poets, the Beats, the San Francisco Renaissance, and the New York School.These schools based their poetry practice the in European and American avant-garde of the first part of 20 th century and developed a distinct poetics in which poets discursively articulated their ideas about poetry and explored new ways of writing.