Berryman combined a passionate, disruptive syntax with an irreverent blend of highbrow and lowbrow dictions—part Shakespeare, part minstrel show, part baby talk. Who could have predicted such a salty, ostentatious and exaggerated comic style—or known that it would come to seem so intensely literary and inevitably American? Imagine Emily Dickinson crossed with Bessie Smith and Groucho Marx. The results, to use one of Berryman's favorite words, are "delicious."

William Carlos Williams is one of the titans of 20th-century poetry... [He] brings us news, lets us see and hear what great poetry is, and how it helps us look after ourselves and others.

Muriel Rukeyser was one of the most engaged and engaging modern American poets... We haven't had many American poets with such a deep moral compass, such a keen historical sensibility and such a committed social consciousness.

[T]he Library of America's welcome Muriel Rukeyser: Selected Poems communicates this important writer's vivacity and integrity.

[H]andsome and abrasive... Fearing's poems depict an utterly faithless Pilgrim's Progress, one evocative of Nathanael West's fiction.

Millay's great poetic skill is amply illustrated in numerous verse forms other than the sonnets for which she is best remembered.

Karl Shapiro wrote the best poems he could, and his best were extraordinarily good; and in prose he never wrote anything he didn't believe, a practice not many poets have been able, or appear even to try, to maintain. He plied his craft with the honor that only complete integrity brings—and next to this, fame, passing or permanent, seems a small and shriveled thing.

Harvey Shapiro's Poets of World War II was arguably the most important book of verse published last year.

This [Poets of World War II] is a remarkable collection that should be widely read. The poems remind us of how brutal, terrifying—and vividly memorable and life-changing—war really is when seen from the perspective of the riflemen, tail gunners, and others who do the actual fighting... Shapiro admirably shows that the American poets of World War II created a body of work equal to that of the storied English poets of World War I.

As for Whitman—collected and selected so often—what, or who, could possibly make another selection seem fresh? Who is definitely Harold Bloom, dean of American literary critics...

[Harvey] Shapiro's collection and the three other inaugural volumes in the American Poets Project remind us of the rich diversity of the voices produced by this country. In "Song of Myself," when Walt Whitman wrote "I contain multitudes," he captured the essence of a nation then inching up on its first centennial. This engaging series provides one more opportunity to listen to America sing its various carols.