Revolution of the Word : A New Gathering of American Avant Garde Poetry, 1914-1945

Jerome Rothenberg has raised the anthology to an art form. His most recent publication, Poems for the Millennium (University of California Press, 1995) reevaluates Modernism from a global perspective. Shaking the Pumpkin (1972) and America a Prophecy (1973) diversified the canon long before “multi-culturalism.” And his 1974 Revolution of the Word remains an unparalleled collection of American avant-garde writing from between the wars. Nearly 25 years after its first publication, this long out-of-print collection is still xeroxed for college courses because it contains works that are otherwise unavailable (by Else von Freytag-Loringhoven, Abraham Lincoln Gillespie, et al.), and because it places some of the most popular writers of the century--e.e cummings, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein--in their original context: the anarchistic experimentation of early Modernism.