The Forms of Youth: Twentieth-Century Poetry and Adolescence

Stephen Burt

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August, 2007
Cloth, 280 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-14142-0
$40.00 / £27.50

"[A] compelling study." — Richard Flynn, H-Youth

"[A] wide-ranging, illuminating study . . . Recommended." — Choice

"A remarkable achievement of of analytical and evaluative literary history that will suspend the expectations and ultimately redirect the attention of those who read it." — Matthew Hofer, Contemporary Literature

"A major achievement by one of the most ardent poet-critics of the moment. Stephen Burt hears poems the way a poet hears poems, but this book is not a collection of scrapings from around the work-bench: it is a wide-ranging, fully modulated argument about the ways in which poetic language has registered the cultural phenomenon of adolescence. Like its subject, the book is big, surprising, and wonderfully inevitable." — James Longenbach, Joseph H. Gilmore Professor of English, University of Rochester

Related Subjects

• Literary Criticism and Theory

About the Author

Stephen Burt teaches in the English Department at Harvard University. From 2000 to 2007 he taught at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is the author of the critical study Randall Jarrell and His Age and the editor of Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden, both published by Columbia University Press, and the author of three books of poems, including Parallel Play. His essays and articles on modern and contemporary poetry have appeared in many journals in America, Britain, and elsewhere, among them American Literary History, Boston Review, London Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Yale Review. A collection of those essays and reviews will be published in 2009.

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