Peak Period.

Much of the credit for the identification of the 1910s as a period of literary renaissance must be given to its poets, who revolutionized literature — and whose works had close ties to those of the visual artists of the period. Chicago and New York contributed equally to the flood of new poets and new styles. At least eight periodicals devoted exclusively to poetry were founded during the decade. More-general literary and arts periodicals of the day, such as The Smart Set, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic Monthly, The Little Review, and The Seven Arts, featured poetry prominently, as did the nation's bookstores. Regionalism. Like several of their counterparts in prose, the greatest poets of the day chose specific regions of the country as their subjects. The poems in Edwin Arlington Robinson's The Town Down the River (1910) describe the residents of a...