SOURCE: A review of The Columbia History of American Poetry, in American Literature, Vol. 66, No. 4, December, 1994, pp. 832-3.

In the following review, Folsom offers an unfavorable assessment of The Columbia History of American Poetry, noting that “the overall result is an uninformed and internally contradictory history.”

This volume [The Columbia History of American Poetry] has the look and heft of a history of American poetry, but it does not read like one. It reads more like The Columbia Big Book of Essays on American Poetry. Like the Columbia Literary History of the United States (1988), this project betrays suspicions about the possibility of any kind of authoritative “history” while it sets out to construct one anyhow. For all the brilliance of many of the individual “chapters,” the overall result is an unformed and internally contradictory history, focusing on a random assortment of poets. In his introduction, Jay Parini, who...