I feel like Rita Dove’s introduction to The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century American Poetry was incredibly detailed and helpful, useful background information to the book. I think it’s important for readers to read it before reading the book. And it’s also useful because while reading the book you can go back through and reference it for details. It’s amazing that she was able to summarize all that information into around twenty pages. I find it crazy that she was able to study and analyze all that took place in a hundred years because so much took place. Throughout the era that she studied and wrote about many things took place such as women fighting for equality, the civil rights era, world war one, world war two, and the cold war. Not only was there many social and economic reforms but there were also many creative revolutions and evolutions throughout the time such as the harlem Renaissance. And throughout all this time the art and styles of poetry changed tremendously. So Rita Dove had an abundance of things to learn, write about, and include in her book. She talks in the intro about her struggle with writing the introduction and says “I thought the forward would be the easy part… and I should have written right then, before rereading, discovering, misplacing notes; before tracking down copyright dates, crunching numbers-” So I completely realize how much of a struggle it must’ve been to write this introduction and I admire her work. 

In class when we split up into groups to analyze and do close readings of the different parts of the introduction, something that stood out to me in the section we read was the change in style of how poets were writing over the years. There was a big shift in style. Poets were switching it up because they were “no longer indebted to the old British” way of writing. Also African American influencers were become mainstream, blues and jazz turned into scat and howl became present changing poetry as well. Howl changed the presentation of poetry.

Another part that stood out to me in this introduction was the inclusion of Rita Dove mentioning the amount of poets committing suicide. And I don’t know if it was related to the things that the poets had  been through because like I mentioned earlier there was a lot that went on throughout that era but I just thought the similarities were interesting. Something else I found interesting was that Rita Dove could not include certain poets in her book because of copyright on their work and at the same time I wonder if that changed the message she’s giving in the book. But I like how she gave an explanation as to why she couldn’t include those people.

I liked how Rita Dove wrote the introduction by making every different section short and sweet but at the same time because she covered so much information it was also confusing and some parts. Something else that confused me is that it wasn’t in chronological order by the years because she was talking about the different moments in history one at a time. But I like how she included quotes to start off each section I feel like because every quote related to the text beneath it, it kind of gave you an insight of what the next section would be about. 

And in conclusion I liked how Rita Dove wrote the entire thing like she was talking to you and how the introduction started and finished like she was personally writing you a letter. I am looking forward to reading the rest of the book.