"I can't think of any piece of recent literary criticism that more astutely and usefully combines text and context, close readings of selected poems (and acute, telling remarks about many, many others) with salient readings of American culture...At times, as I read passages where Lentricchia really lets himself go...pushes his subject beyond where you'd expect him to push it at these times, I thought of R.P. Blackmur....This is major criticism of high imaginative power, about as inclusive as one could hope for." C. William Pritchard, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, author of Lives of the Modern Poets
"Lentricchia's erudite and vigorous prose results in a thought-provoking examination of modernism." B. Quinn, Choice