In this book Professor Gelpi traces the emergence of American Modernist poetry as a reaction to, and outgrowth of, the Romantic ideology of the nineteenth century. He focuses on the remarkable generation of poets who came to maturity in the years of the First World War and whose works constitute the principal body of poetic Modernism in English. This large historical argument is developed through monographic chapters on the poets which include close readings of their major poems. Comprehensive in scope and subtle in its analysis, Gelpi's book promises to be one of the major studies of American poetry for years to come.