In The Greater Body, William Young explores the work of key midcentury American poets and fiction writers of a romantic bent. Beginning with the American work of influential Englishman D.H. Lawrence, Young proceeds through both close reading and contextual registers to identify a romantic, atavistic strain that runs counter to the predominant approach of both an earlier modernism and later postmodernism. The chapters address the work of Lawrence, Paul Bowles, Robert Lowell, John Ashbery, William Stafford, Raymond Carver, and Tim O'Brien, among others.