Unplanned Cities in Modern American Poetry: Lyrical Challenges to Utopianism

"Through an urban ecocritical approach often missing in literary analyses of modern American poetry, Daniela Kukrechtová reveals how five modern American poets - Jean Toomer, William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Frank O'Hara, and Gwendolyn Brooks - challenged prevailing discourses about urbanization. She shows how these writers promoted the radical idea that cities were for people, and their texts both reveal that the extreme dystopian/utopian discourse helped create and maintain disparities between (racialized) affluent and impoverished urban areas, and also imagine and give voice to the people subject to the plans and policies behind the modern American city"--