U Ideas of General Interest — February 2001University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Contact: Andrea Lynn, Humanities/Social Science Editor (217) 333 -2177; [email protected]
ENGLISHInternet site is first exhaustive Web resource for modern U.S. poetry
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Even if you’re a castaway, you’re not lost – intellectually speaking. You now have MAPS – a new aid for surveying and navigating the world of modern American poetry.
So says MAPS creator, Cary Nelson, a professor of English at the University of Illinois and editor of the "Anthology of Modern American Poetry" (Oxford University Press, 2000). MAPS – short for Modern American Poetry Site (on the World Wide Web) – is a new massive and comprehensive learning environment for the study of modern poetry.
"If you’re in Antarctica or the Himalayas, and you have our anthology or a volume of poetry and an Internet link, you can read relevant passages from hundreds of books or essays and, to a considerable degree, master this field," said Nelson, noting that most small colleges are figuratively remote because of their dearth of books, "so our site meets a real need."
With about 10,000 pages online, MAPS "is one of the largest sites devoted to a literary period." It contains excerpts from analyses of poems, biographical information, illustrations – such as paintings, drawings, comics and photographs – plus manuscripts, drafts of poems, bibliographies, historical background, statements on poetics, interviews, mini-essays on important issues pertinent to the poet, book reviews, archival resources and study questions. Thus, everything you need, except for the poems, which are strictly copyrighted and can’t go online, is on the site, including the whole intellectual history of commentary, as are hundreds of links to historical and cultural backgrounds.
The nature of each site depends on "what makes sense" for an author or group of authors, Nelson said. The sites for Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams, for example, are largely devoted to readings of their poems, whereas the Kay Boyle, Angel Island and Japanese American Concentration Camp sites are devoted to historical background. The Harry Crosby site draws heavily on the expatriate-poet’s rich archive at Southern Illinois University.
Nelson has huge expectations for the huge site: He feels that it "can revolutionize the study of modern poetry. Readers all over the world can now learn about American poetry in depth."
Richard Powers, the acclaimed novelist and Nelson’s colleague, who helped give the English department an online presence, calls the site "absolutely extraordinary in its depth and breadth, and a one-of-a-kind resource for teaching modern American poetry." Nelson and designer Matthew Hurt, now a lecturer in the department, audited Powers’ Web design seminar in preparation for constructing MAPS.
"What makes MAPS unique," Powers said, "is its emphasis on collaborative process: This is not a single, didactic edifice that hides its agenda behind a veil of authority. It is a living, breathing conversation between hundreds of poets, scholars and readers, constantly growing and presented in an eminently clear and usable way. It provides a single clearinghouse for some of the best criticism on the best poets of our time." The MAPS address is http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/.
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