This poet with a strong personal voice in the Lowell tradition now writes about America since the 1960s, not in anger directly, but from anger recollected in tranquillity. Extraordinary richness and complexity.

The student becomes the professor....or is it the other way around? Anyhow I didnt like this book and I didnt care for the arrogance of he who penned it......

Longenbach's work as an analyst of poetics certainly makes his work as an analytic poet seem rough even for his first work. Stone Cottage remains his best work...This was painful at times as compared to his non-fiction analysis work of the past. This author has done admirable work analyzing the work of others...read stone cottage for an example.

James Longenbach is not a poet-critic as one may assume due to his highly praised volumes of critical work, most recently, "Modern Poetry After Modernism." This is The Poet who, in his very first books shows the work of a sublime magnificance and a miracle of truth, feeling, thought and understaning embodied in language. This is a poet who knows the language and is able to flow within the form, changing it. His work does not attempt to make a 'splash' or a 'revolution,' it attempts to extend the possibilities of human speech. In this brilliant first book, Longenbach is our supreme heir to Elizabeth Bishop. A great achievement!

Longenbach's approach to "modern poetry after modernism" (I put it in quotes because of the disservice he does to his topic) represents one of the most conservative, unimaginative, and predictable accounts of modern poetry after modernism. He focuses on the usual suspects, ignores our more radical poets (though Ashbery is/was radical, he's become a tired topic for critics), and invites some of the poets he writes about to blurb his poetry book. If this smells like careerism, the book's lack of substance will corroborate the odor.