When this book was first published in 1969, Richard Howard set himself the overwhelming task of a critical examination in detail of forty-one American poets as widely different as James Merrill and Gary Snyder, some celebrated and some obscure, who had at that time published at least two volumes of work establishing a characteristic identity. He thought of these poets as representing and dramatizing the achievement of American poetry since 1950, following the "established" achievement of Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, Jarrell, Lowell, Roethke and Wilbur. In this new and enlarged edition, one hundred pages longer than the original volume, he has added essays to many of the original chapters, dealing with new work by the poets originally examined but leaving the original text unchanged.