"American and British Verse in the Twentieth Century: The Poetry that Matters is a critical history of twentieth-century poetry as well as a study of what the author sees as the decline of that poetry during the century's last three decades. Basing his argument in the ideas of English and German Romanticism, and developing further the claims of his Myth, Truth and Literature (1994), Colin Falck provides philosophically grounded discussions of such issues as the need for modern poetry to be a 'poetry of experience, ' the relationship between poetry and philosophy, The triumph of 'talk' as modern poetry's prevailing diction, the effects on poetry of postmodernist self-consciousness, the centrality of despair to the modern lyric, the means by which modern poetry can validly engage with history, the place of nature and myth in the poetic imagination, and the revelatory power of rhythm, meter, and 'the singing line.'" "Falck documents his case by reference to poems and extracts from such poets as Hardy, Yeats, Eliot, and Stevens (and from some of their nineteenth-century precursors) all the way through to such recently acclaimed poets as Jorie Graham and Hugo Williams."--Jacket.