John Timberman Newcomb

Bio

John Timberman Newcomb is professor of English at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He has published three books on American poetry, Wallace Stevens and Literary Canons (1992), Would Poetry Disappear? American Verse and the Crisis of Modernity (2004), and How Did Poetry Survive? The Making of Modern American Verse (2012), along with a variety of essays on such topics as Edna St. Vincent Millay, Archibald MacLeish, Stephen Crane, W. B. Yeats, and skyscraper verse.

Contributions

A Poem and the Times: Teaching “Justice Denied in Massachusetts” in Context

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In modern poetry courses and American literature surveys, I’ve often used Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Justice Denied in Massachusetts” (1927) to begin a unit on protest poetry focused mostly on the 1930s. [1] Among my central goals in such courses are to explore the richly varied forms of social engagement found in modern American verse, and to establish that every poem has some degree of sociopolitical resonance. Thus I try to avoid segregating protest poems as if they belonged to a different...

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poetry pedagogy