Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry. Volume One: From Fin-de-Sia?cle to Negritude

This invaluable collection, rather than gathering the most fully realized poetry of this century's first four decades, maps poetic possibility, thus demonstrating how poetry was literally remade during this period. A section of ``forerunners'' traces the revolutionizing of poetic intuition from Blake to Lautreamont. Italian and Russian Futurism's typographical experiments, best seen through the ``manifestos'' are faithfully rendered; Dada and Surrealism are correctly treated as separate movements with differing aims. Aime Cesaire's term Negritude defines a section of Black Francophone literature clearly influenced by Surrealism, but centered on its African and Caribbean beginnings. Three long ``galleries,'' collecting poems not necessarily related by nationality or subject matter, are interspersed among the sections of explicit poetic movements. Commentaries, many on individual poets--C.P. Cavafy, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Osip Mandelstam and Pablo Neruda among them--and often in the poets' own words, give context to the unwieldy mass of these poems, many difficult to find in English. The next volume promises to show the use to which today's poets have put this rich legacy. (Nov.)