Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three

"It would be impossible to overstate the wonders of this masterpiece of radical humanism. Expansive erudition, fundamental sensitivity, passionate intelligence, concern, adventurousness, and love inform this volume's structure and its substance. Rothenberg and Robinson have dedicated this project to an intensification and expansion of the vital and vivacious contexts of the ongoing project of human thought. They present us not with the fixity of a canon but with the unfixity of our world. The brooding of Romanticism will continue to burst around us. This wide-ranging, decentering, global panoply is a work of genius—the editors' and ours."—Lyn Hejinian, author of The Language of Inquiry

"Compendious, capacious, global in scope, this third volume of Poems for the Millennium—as the editors put it, a 'prequel' to the two existing volumes—is a treasure; its commentaries offer a severe delight."—Esther Schor, author of Emma Lazarus

"This volume of Poems for the Millennium is every bit as challenging, unsettling, and surprising as its predecessors. It provokes us to take a fresh look at the achievements of nineteenth-century poets and of modernists often assumed to have defined themselves mainly by refusing and rejecting what came before. We have much to learn from this book about the diversity of ways in which poetry has found forms for responding to the world of which it is a part."—William Keach, author of Arbitrary Power: Romanticism, Language, Politics

“The romantic vision is one of extension and renewal—of poetry's signifying capacity in the immediate, human realm and that of the spirit. This provocative third volume of Poems for the Millennium is itself an instance of that romantic vision, definitively reframing and expanding our understanding of the movement.”—Michael Palmer, author of Company of Moths

"Modernism rejected romanticism in the way that one political party rejects another—not because it is so different but because it wishes to win the same audience. This book demonstrates that the crucial thing that happened in modernism was that a door opened onto still another aspect of the immense cultural experiment that romanticism was—or, as Rothenberg and Robinson might insist, that romanticisms were (are).To know the work so carefully, lovingly, and brilliantly assembled in this book is to know ourselves in a new and newly conscious way."—Jack Foley, author of The Dancer and the Dance: A Book of Distinctions