Book excerpt: IVolume 8, concerned with works of poetry and criticism written between 1940 and the present, brings together two different sets of materials and narrative forms: the aesthetic and the institutional. Discarding the traditional synoptic overview of major figures, von Hallberg, Graff, and Carton settle in favor of a history from the inside--a history of interstices and relations, equal to the task of considering the contexts of art, power, and criticism in which it is set.