SOURCE: A review of The Columbia History of American Poetry, in Journal of American History, Vol. 81, No. 3, December, 1994, pp. 1258-9.

In the following review, Altieri offers an unfavorable assessment of The Columbia History of American Poetry, citing omissions and empty homages.

The first two-thirds of this collection of essays [The Columbia History of America Poetry,] provides a lively, informative, and intellectually stimulating treatment of the major moments in American poetry up to World War II. Some of the work offers engaging and useful traditional literary history—of Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor; of early African-American poetry; of Amy Lowell, Sara Teasdale, Elinor Wylie, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Louise Bogan; of Gertrude Stein, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), and Marianne Moore; of William Carlos Williams; of the twentieth-century long poem; and (superbly) of the Harlem Renaissance. But most of the essays present synoptic appreciations devoted to how we might...