Encyclopedia of American Poetry. The Twentieth Century

This new encyclopedia is a companion to Haralson's well-received Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century (LJ 10/1/98). Like its predecessor, this new volume focuses on individual poets, "landmark" poems (e.g., "Howl," "The Waste Land"), and topics such as the "Black Mountain School," "Imagism," and "Light Verse." The almost 200 contributors include professors, Ph.D. candidates, writers, and school teachers. The signed articles provide biographical information and critical discussion of the literary and historical significance of each poet, excellent bibliographies of both works and criticism, and suggestions for further reading in the topics entries. Both a general index and a title index are included. Though in its biographical and critical aspects this work overlaps heavily with the Dictionary of Literary Biography and American Writers, those multivolume sets do not provide encyclopedic coverage of topics and are more expensive than this single, though very large, volume.