The story of modern American poetry to World War II is the story of successive generations of writers increasingly gaining familiarity in and security with the American idiom, states the forward to this third and final series on American poets writing during a period of unprecedented national growth and development. It is instructive, then, to group poets…as these volumes of the Dictionary of Literary Biography do, it continues …The complexity of the pressures on the writer, of the patterns of literary history of which he is a part, are then emphasized.Included with this volume are a survey of poetry anthologies and a list of suggested books for further reading.

48 entries include: William Stanley Braithwaite, Willa Cather, Stephen Crane, Robert Frost, George Cabot Lodge, Edgar Lee Masters, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Carl Sandburg, Anne Spencer, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams.