Recorded Poetry and Poetic Reception from Edna Millay to the Circle of Robert Lowell

Through an analysis of a wide range of commercial and amateur recordings, this book describes how and why poetry was recorded in the U.S., from the 1930's through the mid-century performances of poets such as Dylan Thomas and Anne Sexton.

"Furr has produced a clearly written, well researched, and useful extension of our grasp of American poetry between the 1930s and 1970s. His work not only opens for analysis a significant array of audio materials, but provides a series of models for addressing those materials historically, critically, and pedagogically. The book provides an exhilarating demonstration of the ways in which 'poetry' is much more vast and various than critical techniques developed for textual criticism have allowed us to perceive, much less describe. This is an important contribution to the current drive to widen the definitions and purchase of the event we call 'the poem.' " - Adalaide Morris, John C. Gerber Professor of English, The University of Iowa

"This book vastly enriches our understanding of an underappreciated resource: the audio archive of modernist and mid-century poetry. Poetry's persistent appeal to the ear requires one to ponder not only how poets voice their work but how and why we preserve those voicings. Furr's lively study provides answers through, for example, Robert Lowell's canon-forming efforts to build an audio archive at the Library of Congress, the ethnographic field recordings of James Weldon Johnson, and the 'aesthetic of the beautiful throat' in performances by Edna St. Vincent Millay and Anne Sexton. Furr's timely intervention teaches us how to think about the event of recording and the experience of listening - and no other book on the market moves so knowledgeably, fluently, and usefully between recording technology and its implications for poetry as an art of the page, the studio, and the stage." - Lesley Wheeler, Professor of English, Washington and Lee University and author of Voicing American Poetry: Sound and Performance from the 1920s to the Present

DEREK FURR is a Faculty Member in the Literature Department at the Master of Arts in Teaching Program at Bard College, USA.