Critical Essay | Critical Essay by William Meredith

Critical Essay by William Meredith

SOURCE: "A Good Modern Poet and a Modern Tradition," in Poetry, Vol. LXX, No. 4, July, 1947, pp. 208–11.

In the excerpt below, American educator and Pulitzer Prize—winning poet Meredith favorably reviews As Ten, as Twenty, finding the volume a strong example of modern poetry.

Just where the new land is, or when we entered it and by whom led, the authorities do not yet say, but everybody knows that in the 20th century there is a new colony in English poetry. More than a decade ago C. Day Lewis named as explorers Hopkins, Owen and Eliot, and among the pioneer settlers, Auden and Spender. And as controversial as its dates and heroes are the bearing and distance of the new poetry—whether it is removed from the mother country chiefly by its attitudes, its diction, its imagery, or by what.

The new idiom—the manner taken for the substance—has now reached...
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