Gerald O’Donovan left the priesthood due to strained relations with his conservative and philistine bishop. In his novel about the fortunes of the provincial middle class Curtin sisters, he indicts late Victorian Catholic values, warped by the privileging of religious vocations over marriage.

One could quibble over omissions, but the individual chapters in The Cambridge History of American Poetry are without exception, superb introductions, overviews and surveys of important moments and figures, contexts and movements in the nation’s poetry from the pre-colonial period to the late 1990s.