This anthology takes as its focus a specific subtype of literary production, the poetic sequence. By the late 19th century, poets writing in English were working primarily within the lyric mode, as opposed to the dramatic or epic. Indeed, early in the 20th century, the Imagist movement declared an even greater need for concision in writing. As Amy Lowell put it in her 1915 preface to Some Imagist Poets, “most of us believe that concentration is the very essence of poetry.”

And yet, to constrain oneself to brief lyric verses proved difficult. Just a few years later, Lowell herself came up with the idea of “polyphonic prose” as the underlying principle in Can Grande’s Castle, her collection which consisted of just four long poems. Modernist poets were invested in writing poetry capable of tackling the challenges of their historical moment. The works which they produced have been identified by several different names, including long poems, because of their length and epic ambitions; lyric sequences, because they tend to be assembled out of various smaller lyrics and at times follow the more image and associational logic and leaps associated with the lyric; and serial poems, which borrow techniques from art and music, and tend to resist narrative strictures while being “discontinuous, elliptical, and open to recombination and extension” (Princeton, 1296).

The differences being parsed here are rather granular, and this anthology of poems has attempted to take an open and capacious view of what might be included. A length of at least 100 lines seemed appropriate as a cut-off, though the poetic sequence’s sense of heft comes not just from lines but from its ambition and scope. I sought, too, to include pieces that embody the spirit of what M.L. Rosenthal and Sally M. Gall called “the modern poetic sequence” in their 1983 monograph The Modern Poetic Sequence: The Genius of Modern Poetry:

The modern sequence, then, is a grouping of mainly lyric poems and passages, rarely uniform in pattern, which tend to interact as an organic whole. It usually includes narrative and dramatic elements, and ratiocinative ones as well, but its structure is finally lyrical. Intimate, fragmented, self-analytical, open, emotionally volatile, the sequence meets the needs of modern sensibility even when the poet aspires to tragic or epic scope. (Rosenthal and Gall, 9)

These qualities may manifest themselves in a sequence that wears the trappings of a more conventional “long poem,” as we see in Mina Loy’s “Parturition.” Though a glance at the page promises a free-verse poem in a single unit, as it were, the experience of reading it resembles that of reading what Rosenthall and Gall describe as a poetic sequence. Loy’s later work, “Songs to Joannes,” visually calls the “serial form” to mind. I would argue, however, that it functions as an organic, lyric whole, and that it is driven by an intimate, lyric “I.”

Any anthology defines itself as much by what it doesn’t include as that which it does. Convinced that a guiding focus, or singularity of vision, is one of the core traits in these rather unruly, ambitious projects, I chose not to include groupings of individual poems that could stand alone. Edna St. Vincent Millay has several sonnet sequences, including “Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree” and “Epitaph for the Race of Man,” that I considered adding. In the end, however, while the sonnet sequence is not completely distinct from that of the long poetic sequence, each unit in a sonnet sequence can stand alone. The interdependency of the lyric subparts in a poetic sequence disallows this; it is as impossible to extract a “section” in a poetic sequence and expect it to work as it would be to extract one stanza from a sonnet.

The Poetic Sequence is an open anthology and will be developed in conjunction with students in my undergraduate and graduate seminars at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Ultimately, it is these sorts of conversations which allow readers and scholars to revise and refine their own understanding of a subject, and I am eager to see how the contents of the anthology shift in the coming semesters. This introduction marks a starting point in the conversation; the anthology itself will reflect our deepening engagement with the texts. I look forward to witnessing the anthology’s evolution.