Alan Williamson: Center and Circumference – The Modernist Long Poem (January 2018)

The Modernist long poem endeavored to include the poet’s entire circumambient world, by methods akin to collage in painting, rather than a single sustained narrative.  Williamson discusses several seminal examples of this “omnivorous” genre, including T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” Robert Hayden’s “Middle Passage,” Hart Crane’s “The Bridge,” and William Carlow Williams’s “Paterson.”