SOURCE: “History By Many Hands,” in Kenyon Review, Vol. XVII, Nos. 3-4, Summer-Fall, 1995, pp. 219-24.

In the following extended review of The Columbia History of American Poetry, Spiegelman weighs the volume's weaknesses against its strengths and concludes that it contains disparate perspectives and inconsistencies which detract from the work as a whole.

David Perkins is the most recent in a long, scholarly line to pose the question, as the title of his elegant 1992 book puts it, Is Literary History Possible?, and to answer with the ambivalent response that, on the one hand, it is not, but that, on the other, we had better keep doing it. The Columbia History of American Poetry conforms to a relatively new model for literary history (which includes three previous volumes from Columbia), neither a narrative, nor an encyclopedia, but a medley. And its very presence on the scene forces us to inquire...