SOURCE: A review of The Columbia History of American Poetry, in Extrapolation, Vol. 36, No. 2, Summer, 1995, pp. 160-3.

In the following review of The Columbia History of American Poetry, Vos Post comments on the lack of “science” poets and poetry in the volume.

Since the United States of America put human beings on the moon twenty-five years ago, it is no surprise that science is profoundly “In the American Grain,” and this is amply confirmed by a thematic thread running through The Columbia History of American Poetry. This is not to say that science dominates American poetry as much as it dominates the physical landscape of the postindustrial era, but that it returns again and again either as subject, anti-subject reacted against, or epistemological substratum to the poetic process.

What is in this book on this theme is very good, yet there are surprising omissions. The Columbia History of...