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1 Introduction
Mary McAleer Balkun, Jeffrey Gray, and Paul Jaussen
In his 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot observed that the creation of a new work of art necessarily changes those that preceded it: “The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them” (1920, para. 4). In the case of poetry, new work changes the way we look at Emily Dickinson’s fascicles or modernist images, for example, or indeed what we decide to call “American” poetry. Like works of art, critical paradigms can refine methods, broaden contexts, and reorganize the field of poetics, transforming what scholars value or understand about poems. The New Criticism, for instance, raised the profile of the lyric poem in the early twentieth century,