Robert Lowell and many who followed in his personal, reflective style, such as John Berryman, W.S. Merwin and Adrienne Rich, have been seen as breaking with the influence of T.S. Eliot and the New Critics. But Jim Longenbach argues in this book, that this "breakthrough" narrative no longer makes good sense, due to our changing conceptions of what constitutes modernism and its "new critical" values, and the now-ubiquitous use of the term "post-modern". Longenbach's work offers a wide-ranging account of the past 40 years of American poetry and allows for fuller appreciation of women poets. This book is intended for students and scholars in modern poetry and literary criticism.