Forces in Modern and Postmodern Poetry examines the works of classic authors in the modern and postmodern literary tradition, including Stéphane Mallarmé, Wallace Stevens, Samuel Beckett, Gertrude Stein, Charles Olson, Paul Celan, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, and John Ashbery, all from a comparative perspective. The concepts, modern and postmodern, are not used to provide definitive answers but to raise questions concerning the status of representation, issues of the self, and the use of imagery and musical invention. The wide range of the study is matched by the richly detailed analysis of specific poetic texts from an author noted for the scope and acuity of his attention to modern poetry in all its varied forms.

The Author: Albert Cook (1925-1998) was Ford Foundation Professor Emeritus and Professor of Comparative Literature, English and Classics at Brown University. He was the author of more than twenty books of criticism, including The Classic Line, Prisms, Myth and Language, and The Reach of Poetry. He published more than twelve volumes of poetry and was highly regarded as a translator for his versions of Oedipus Rex and The Odyssey. Professor Cook taught at Berkeley, Western Reserve, and the University of Buffalo, as well as Brown, profoundly influencing several generations of literary scholars. The Editor: Peter Baker is Professor of English at Towson University in Maryland, where he teaches modern literature and literary theory.