Poetry of the United States
Encyclopedia
American poetry, the poetry of the United States
, arose first as efforts by colonists to add their voices to English poetry
in the 17th century, well before the constitutional
unification of the thirteen colonies
(although before this, a strong oral tradition
often likened to poetry existed among Native American
societies). Unsurprisingly, most of the early colonists' work relied on contemporary British models of poetic form
, diction
, and theme. However, in the 19th century, a distinctive American idiom began to emerge. By the later part of that century, when Walt Whitman
was winning an enthusiastic audience abroad, poets from the United States had begun to take their place at the forefront of the English-language
avant-garde
.
This position was sustained into the 20th century to the extent that Ezra Pound
and T. S. Eliot
were perhaps the most influential English-language poets in the period during World War I
. By the 1960s, the young poets of the British Poetry Revival
looked to their American contemporaries and predecessors as models for the kind of poetry they wanted to write. Toward the end of the millennium
, consideration of American poetry had diversified, as scholars placed an increased emphasis on poetry by women, African American
s, Hispanic
s, Chicanos
and other cultural groupings. Poetry, and creative writing
in general, also tended to become more professionalized with the growth of creative writing
programs in the English studies
departments of campuses
across the country.
As England's contact with the Americas increased after the 1490s, explorers sometimes included verse with their descriptions of the "New World" up through 1650, the year of Anne Bradstreet
's "The Tenth Muse
," which was written in America, most likely in Ipswich, Massachusetts
or North Andover, Massachusetts
) and printed/distributed in London, England by her brother-in-law, Rev. John Woodbridge. There are 14 such writers whom we might on that basis call American poets (they had actually been to America and to different degrees, wrote poems or verses about the place). Early examples include a 1616 "testimonial poem" on the sterling warlike character of Captain John Smith (in Barbour, ed. "Works") and Rev. William Morrell's 1625 "Nova Anglia" or "New England," which is a rhymed catalog of everything from American weather to glimpses of Native women, framed with a thin poetic "conceit" or "fiction" characterizing the country as a "sad and forlorn" female pining for English domination. Then in May 1627 Thomas Morton of Merrymount---an English West Country outdoorsman, attorney at law, man of letters and colonial adventurer---raised a Maypole to celebrate and foster more success at this fur-trading plantation and nailed up a "Poem" and "Song" (one a densely-literary manifesto on how English and Native people came together there and must keep doing so for a successful America; the other a light "drinking song" also full of deeper American implications). These were published in book form along with other examples of Morton's American poetry in "New English Canaan" (1637); and based on the criteria of "First," "American" and Poetry," they make Morton (and not Anne Bradstreet) America's first poet in English. (See Jack Dempsey, ed., "New English Canaan by Thomas Morton of 'Merrymount'" and his biography "Thomas Morton: The Life & Renaissance of an Early American Poet" Scituate MA: Digital Scanning 2000).
One of the first recorded poets of the British colonies was Anne Bradstreet
(1612–1672), who remains one of the earliest known women poets who wrote in English.
The poems she published during her lifetime address religious and political themes. She also wrote tender evocations of home, family life and of her love for her husband, many of which remained unpublished until the 20th century.
Edward Taylor
(1645–1729) wrote poems expounding Puritan
virtues in a highly wrought metaphysical
style that can be seen as typical of the early colonial period.
This narrow focus on the Puritan ethic was, understandably, the dominant note of most of the poetry written in the colonies during the 17th and early 18th centuries. The earliest "secular" poetry published in New England was by Samuel Danforth
in his "almanacks" for 1647–1649, published at Cambridge; these included "puzzle poems" as well as poems on caterpillars, pigeons, earthquakes, and hurricanes. Of course, being a Puritan minister as well as a poet, Danforth never ventured far from a spiritual message.
Another distinctly American lyric voice of the colonial period was Phillis Wheatley
, a slave
whose book "Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral," was published in 1773. She was one of the best-known poets of her day, at least in the colonies, and her poems were typical of New England
culture at the time, meditating on religious
and classical
ideas.
The 18th century saw an increasing emphasis on America itself as fit subject matter for its poets. This trend is most evident in the works of Philip Freneau (1752–1832), who is also notable for the unusually sympathetic attitude to Native Americans
shown in his writings, sometimes reflective of a skepticism toward Anglo-American culture and civilization. However, as might be expected from what was essentially provincial writing, this late colonial poetry is generally somewhat old-fashioned in form and syntax, deploying the means and methods of Pope
and Gray
in the era of Blake
and Burns
.
On the whole, the development of poetry in the American colonies mirrors the development of the colonies themselves. The early poetry is dominated by the need to preserve the integrity of the Puritan ideals that created the settlement in the first place. As the colonists grew in confidence, the poetry they wrote increasingly reflected their drive towards independence. This shift in subject matter was not reflected in the mode of writing which tended to be conservative, to say the least. This can be seen as a product of the physical remove at which American poets operated from the center of English-language poetic developments in London.
The first significant poet of the independent United States was William Cullen Bryant
(1794–1878), whose great contribution was to write rhapsodic poems on the grandeur of prairie
s and forest
s. Other notable poets to emerge in the early and middle 19th century include Ralph Waldo Emerson
, (1803–1882), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
(1807–1882), John Greenleaf Whittier
(1807–1892), Edgar Allan Poe
(1809–1849), Oliver Wendell Holmes
(1809–1894), Henry David Thoreau
(1817–1862), James Russell Lowell
(1819–1891), and Sidney Lanier
(1842–1881). As might be expected, the works of these writers are united by a common search for a distinctive American voice to distinguish them from their British
counterparts. To this end, they explored the landscape and traditions of their native country as materials for their poetry.
The most significant example of this tendency may be The Song of Hiawatha
by Longfellow. This poem uses Native American tales collected by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, who was superintendent of Indian affairs for Michigan
from 1836 to 1841. Longfellow also imitated the meter
of the Finnish epic poem
Kalevala
, possibly to avoid British models. The resulting poem, while a popular success, did not provide a model for future U.S. poets.
Another factor that distinguished these poets from their British contemporaries was the influence of the transcendentalism
of the poet/philosophers Emerson and Thoreau. Transcendentalism was the distinctly American strain of English Romanticism
that began with William Wordsworth
and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
. Emerson, arguably one of the founders of transcendentalism, had visited England as a young man to meet these two English poets, as well as Thomas Carlyle
. While Romanticism transitioned into Victorianism
in post-reform England, it grew more energetic in America from the 1830s through to the Civil War
.
Edgar Allan Poe
was probably the most recognized American poet outside of America during this period. Diverse authors in France
, Sweden
and Russia
were heavily influenced by his works, and his poem "The Raven
" swept across Europe, translated into many languages. In the twentieth century the American poet William Carlos Williams
said of Poe that he is the only solid ground on which American poetry is anchored.
The final emergence of a truly indigenous English-language poetry in the United States was the work of two poets, Walt Whitman
(1819–1892) and Emily Dickinson
(1830–1886). On the surface, these two poets could not have been less alike. Whitman's long lines, derived from the metric of the King James Version of the Bible
, and his democratic inclusiveness stand in stark contrast with Dickinson's concentrated phrases and short lines and stanza
s, derived from Protestant hymn
als.
What links them is their common connection to Emerson (a passage from whom Whitman printed on the second edition of Leaves of Grass
), and the daring originality of their visions. These two poets can be said to represent the birth of two major American poetic idiom
s—the free metric and direct emotional expression of Whitman, and the gnomic
obscurity and irony
of Dickinson—both of which would profoundly stamp the American poetry of the 20th century.
The development of these idioms, as well as more conservative reactions against them, can be traced through the works of poets such as Edwin Arlington Robinson
(1869–1935), Stephen Crane
(1871–1900), Robert Frost
(1874–1963) and Carl Sandburg
(1878–1967). Frost, in particular, is a commanding figure, who aligned strict poetic meter, particularly blank verse and terser lyrical forms, with a "vurry Amur'k'n" (as Pound put it) idiom. He successfully revitalized a rural tradition with many English antecedents from his beloved Golden Treasury and produced an oeuvre of major importance, rivaling or even excelling in achievement that of the key modernists and making him, within the full sweep of more traditional modern English-language verse, a peer of Hardy
and Yeats
. But from Whitman and Dickson the outlines of a distinctively new organic poetic tradition, less indebted to English formalism than Frost's work, were clear to see, and they would come to full fruition in the 1910's and 20's.
, formed the basis of American input into 20th-century English-language poetic modernism
. Ezra Pound
(1885
–1972
) and T. S. Eliot
(1888
–1965
) were the leading figures at the time, with their rejection of traditional poetic form and meter and of Victorian diction. Both steered American poetry toward greater density, difficulty, and opacity, with an emphasis on techniques such as fragmentation, ellipsis, allusion, juxtaposition, ironic and shifting personae, and mythic parallelism. Pound, in particular, opened up American poetry to diverse influences, including the traditional poetries of China and Japan.
Numerous other poets made important contributions at this revolutionary juncture, including Gertrude Stein
(1874
–1946
), Wallace Stevens
(1879
–1955
), William Carlos Williams
(1883
–1963
), Hilda Doolittle (H.D.)
(1886
–1961
), Marianne Moore
(1887
–1972
), E. E. Cummings
(1894
–1962
), and Hart Crane
(1899
–1932
). The cerebral and skeptical Romantic Stevens helped revive the philosophical lyric, and Williams was to become exemplary for many later poets because he, more than any of his peers, contrived to marry spoken American English
with free verse
rhythm
s. Cummings remains notable for his experiments with typography and evocation of a spontaneous, child-like vision of reality.
Whereas these poets were unambiguously aligned with high modernism
, other poets active in the United States in the first third of the 20th century were not. Among the most important of the latter were those who were associated with what came to be known as the New Criticism
. These included John Crowe Ransom
(1888
–1974
), Allen Tate
(1899
–1979
), and Robert Penn Warren
(1905
–1989
). Other poets of the era, such as Archibald MacLeish
(1892
–1982
), experimented with modernist techniques but were also drawn towards more traditional modes of writing. Still others, such as Robinson Jeffers
(1887
–1962
), adopted Modernist freedom while remaining aloof from Modernist factions and programs.
In addition, there were still other, early 20th Century poets who maintained or were forced to maintain a peripheral relationship to high modernism
, likely due to the racially charged themes of their work. They include Countee Cullen
(1903
–1946
), Alice Dunbar Nelson
(1875
–1935
), Gwendolyn Bennett (1902
–1981
), Langston Hughes
(1902
–1967
), Claude McKay
(1889
–1946=8
), Jean Toomer
(1894
–1967
) and other African American poets of the Harlem Renaissance
.
The modernist torch was carried in the 1930s mainly by the group of poets known as the Objectivists
. These included Louis Zukofsky
(1904
–1978
), Charles Reznikoff
(1894
–1976
), George Oppen
(1908
–1984
), Carl Rakosi
(1903
–2004
) and, later, Lorine Niedecker
(1903
–1970
). Kenneth Rexroth
, who was published in the Objectivist Anthology, was, along with Madeline Gleason
(1909
–1973
), a forerunner of the San Francisco Renaissance
. Many of the Objectivists came from urban communities of new immigrants, and this new vein of experience and language enriched the growing American idiom.
called John Gillespie Magee, Jr.
"the first poet of the war".
World War II
saw the emergence of a new generation of poets, many of whom were influenced by Wallace Stevens
. Richard Eberhart
(1904
–2005
), Karl Shapiro
(1913
–2000
), Randall Jarrell
(1914
–1965
) and James Dickey
(1923
-1997
) all wrote poetry that sprang from experience of active service. Together with Elizabeth Bishop
(1911
–1979
), Theodore Roethke
(1908
–1963
) and Delmore Schwartz
(1913
–1966
), they formed a generation of poets that in contrast to the preceding generation often wrote in traditional verse forms.
After the war, a number of new poets and poetic movements emerged. John Berryman
(1914
–1972
) and Robert Lowell
(1917
–1977
) were the leading lights in what was to become known as the Confessional movement
, which was to have a strong influence on later poets like Sylvia Plath
(1932
–1963
) and Anne Sexton
(1928
–1974
). Though both Berryman and Lowell were closely acquainted with Modernism, they were mainly interested in exploring their own experiences as subject matter and a style that Lowell referred to as "cooked" -- that is, consciously and carefully crafted.
In contrast, the Beat
poets, who included such figures as Jack Kerouac
(1922–1969), Allen Ginsberg
(1926–1997), Gregory Corso
(1930
–2001
), Joanne Kyger
(born 1934
), Gary Snyder
(born 1930
), Diane Di Prima
(born 1934
), Amiri Baraka
(born 1934
) and Lawrence Ferlinghetti
(born 1919
), were distinctly raw. Reflecting, sometimes in an extreme form, the more open, relaxed and searching society of the 1950s and 1960s, the Beats pushed the boundaries of the American idiom in the direction of demotic speech perhaps further than any other group.
Around the same time, the Black Mountain poets
, under the leadership of Charles Olson
(1910
–1970
), were working at Black Mountain College
. These poets were exploring the possibilities of open form but in a much more programmatic way than the Beats. The main poets involved were Robert Creeley
(1926
–2005
), Robert Duncan
(1919
–1988
), Denise Levertov
(1923
–1997
), Ed Dorn
(1929
–1999
), Paul Blackburn (1926
–1971
), Hilda Morley
(1916
–1998
), John Wieners
(1934
–2002
), and Larry Eigner
(1927
–1996
). They based their approach to poetry on Olson's 1950
essay Projective Verse, in which he called for a form based on the line, a line based on human breath and a mode of writing based on perceptions juxtaposed so that one perception leads directly to another.
Other poets often associated with the Black Mountain are Cid Corman
(1924
–2004
) and Theodore Enslin
(born 1925
), though they are perhaps more correctly viewed as direct descendants of the Objectivists. And one-time Black Mountain College resident, composer John Cage
(1912
–1992
), along with Jackson Mac Low
(1922
–2004
), wrote poetry based on chance or aleatory techniques. Inspired by Zen
, Dada
and scientific theories of indeterminacy
, they were to prove to be important influences on the 1970s U.S avant-garde.
The Beats and some of the Black Mountain poets are often considered to have been responsible for the San Francisco Renaissance. However, as previously noted, San Francisco had become a hub of experimental activity from the 1930s thanks to Kenneth Rexroth
and Gleason
. Other poets involved in this scene included Charles Bukowski
(1920
–1994
) and Jack Spicer
(1925
–1965
). These poets sought to combine a contemporary spoken idiom with inventive formal experiment.
Jerome Rothenberg
(born 1931
) is well-known for his work in ethnopoetics
, but he was also the coiner of the term "deep image
," which he used to described the work of poets like Robert Kelly
(born 1935
), Diane Wakoski
(born 1937
) and Clayton Eshleman
(born 1935
). Deep Image poetry was inspired by the symbolist
theory of correspondences, in particular the work of Spanish poet Federico García Lorca
. The term was later taken up and popularized by Robert Bly
. The Deep Image movement was also the most international, accompanied by a flood of new translations from Latin American and European poets such as Pablo Neruda
, César Vallejo
and Tomas Tranströmer
. Some of the poets who became associated with Deep Image are Galway Kinnell
, James Wright
, Mark Strand
and W. S. Merwin
. Both Merwin and California poet Gary Snyder
would also become known for their interest in environmental and ecological concerns.
The Small Press
poets (sometimes called the mimeograph movement) are another influential and eclectic group of poets who also surfaced in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1950s and are still active today. Fiercely independent editors, who were also poets, edited and published low-budget periodicals and chapbooks of emerging poets who might otherwise have gone unnoticed. This work ranged from formal to experimental. Gene Fowler
, A. D. Winans
, Hugh Fox, street poet and activist Jack Hirschman
, Paul Foreman, Jim Cohn
, John Bennett, and F. A. Nettelbeck
are among the many poets who are still actively continuing the Small Press Poets tradition. Many have turned to the new medium of the Web for its distribution capabilities.
Los Angeles poets: Leland Hickman
(1934–1991), Holly Prado ( born 1938), Harry Northup
(born 1940), Wanda Coleman
(born 1946),
Michael C. Ford
(born 1939), Kate Braverman
(born 1950), Eloise Klein Healy
, Bill Mohr, Laurel Ann Bogen, met at Beyond Baroque
Literary Arts Center, in Venice, California. They are lyric poets, heavily autobiographical; some are practitioners of the experimental long poem. Mavericks all, their L.A. predecessors are Ann Stanford
(1916–1987), Thomas McGrath
(1916–1990), Jack Hirschman
(born 1933). Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center
, created by George Drury Smith in 1968, is the central literary arts center in the Los Angeles area.
Just as the West Coast had the San Francisco Renaissance and the Small Press Movement, the East Coast produced the New York School
. This group aimed to write poetry that spoke directly of everyday experience in everyday language and produced a poetry of urbane wit and elegance that contrasts with the work of their Beat contemporaries (though in other ways, including their mutual respect for American slang and disdain for academic or "cooked" poetry, they were similar). Leading members of the group include John Ashbery
(born 1927
), Frank O'Hara
(1926
–1966
), Kenneth Koch
(1925
–2002
), James Schuyler
(1923
–1991
), Barbara Guest
(1920
–2006
), Ted Berrigan
(1934
–1983
), Anne Waldman
(born 1945
) and Bernadette Mayer
(born 1945
). Of this group, John Ashbery, in particular, has emerged as a defining force in recent poetics, and he is regarded by many as the most important American poet since World War II.
The 1970s saw a revival of interest in surrealism
, with the most prominent poets working in this field being Andrei Codrescu
(born 1946
), Russell Edson
(born 1935
) and Maxine Chernoff
(born 1952
). Performance poetry also emerged from the Beat and hippie
happenings, and the talk-poems of David Antin
(born 1932
) and ritual events performed by Rothenberg, to become a serious poetic stance which embraces multiculturalism
and a range of poets from a multiplicity of cultures. This mirrored a general growth of interest in poetry by African Americans including Gwendolyn Brooks
(born 1917
), Maya Angelou
(born 1928
), Ishmael Reed
(born 1938
),Vim Karénin, Nikki Giovanni
(born 1943
), and Detrick Hughes
(born 1966
).
Another group of poets, the Language
school (or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
, after the magazine that bears that name), have continued and extended the Modernist and Objectivist
traditions of the 1930s. Some poets associated with the group are Lyn Hejinian
, Ron Silliman
, Bob Perelman
and Leslie Scalapino
. Their poems—fragmentary, purposefully ungrammatical, sometimes mixing texts from different sources and idioms—can be by turns abstract, lyrical, and highly comic. Critics of the Language school point out that, by abandoning sense and context, their poetry could just as well be written by the proverbial infinite roomful of monkeys with typewriters.
The Language
school includes a high proportion of women, which mirrors another general trend—the rediscovery and promotion of poetry written both by earlier and contemporary women poets. A number of the most prominent African American poets to emerge are women, and other prominent women writers include Adrienne Rich
(born 1929
), Jean Valentine
(born 1934
) and Amy Gerstler
(born 1956
).
Although poetry in traditional classical forms had mostly fallen out of fashion by the 1960s, the practice was kept alive by poets of great formal virtuosity like James Merrill
(1926
–1995
), author of the epic poem The Changing Light at Sandover
(1982
), Richard Wilbur
, and British-born San Francisco poet Thom Gunn
. The 1980s and 1990s saw a re-emergent interest in traditional form, sometimes dubbed New Formalism
or Neoformalism
. These include poets such as Molly Peacock
, Brad Leithauser
, Dana Gioia
, Donna J. Stone
, Timothy Steele
, and Marilyn Hacker
. Some of the more outspoken New Formalists
have declared that the return to rhyme
and more fixed meters
to be the new avant-garde. Their critics sometimes associate this traditionalism with the conservative politics of the Reagan
era, noting the recent appointment of Gioia
as Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts
. More recent examples of New Formalism
, however, have sometimes crossed over into the more experimental territory of Language poetry
, suggesting that both schools are being gradually absorbed into the poetic mainstream.
Haiku
has also attracted a community of American poets dedicated to its development as a serious poetic genre in English. The extremely terse Japanese haiku first influenced the work of Pound and the Imagists, and post-war poets such as Kerouac and Richard Wright
wrote substantial bodies of original haiku in English
. Other poets such as Ginsberg, Snyder, Wilbur, Merwin, and many others have at least dabbled with haiku, often simply as a syllabic form. Starting in 1963, with the founding of the journal American Haiku, poets such as Cor van den Heuvel
, Nick Virgilio
, Raymond Roseliep
, John Wills, Anita Virgil, Gary Hotham, Marlene Mountain, Wally Swist
, Peggy Willis Lyles, George Swede
, vincent tripi, Jim Kacian
, and others have created significant oeuvres of haiku poetry, evincing continuities with both Transcendentalism
and Imagism
and often maintaining an anti-anthropocentric environmental focus on nature during an unparalleled age of habitat destruction and human alienation.
The last two decades have also seen a revival of the Beat poetry spoken word tradition, in the form of the poetry slam. Devised in 1984
, by Chicago construction worker Marc Smith, these competitive audience-judged poetry performances emphasize a style of writing that is topical, provocative and easily understood. Poetry slam opened the door for a new generation of writers and spoken word
performers, including Alix Olson
, Apollo Poetry, Taylor Mali
, and Saul Williams
, and inspired hundreds of open mics across the country. Poetry has also become a significant presence on the Web, with a number of new online journals, 'zines, blogs and other websites.
During this time frame there were also major independent voices who defied links to well-known American poetic movements and forms such as poet and literary critic Robert Peters
, greatly influenced by the Victorian English poet Robert Browning
’s poetic monologues, became reputable for executing his monologic personae like his Mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria
into popular one-man performances.
Robert Pinsky
has a special place in American poetry as he was the Poet Laureate of the United States for three terms. No other poet has been so honored. His "Favorite Poem Project" is unique, inviting all citizens to share their all-time favorite poetic composition and why they love it. He is a professor at Boston University and the poetry editor at Slate. "Poems to Read" is only one demonstration of his masterful poetic vision, joining the word and the common man.
In general, poetry in the contemporary era has been moving out of the mainstream and onto the college and university campus. The growth in the popularity of graduate creative writing
programs has given poets the opportunity to make a living as teachers. This increased professionalization of poetry, combined with the reluctance of most major book and magazine presses to publish poetry, has meant that, for the foreseeable future at least, poetry may have found its new home in the academy and in small independent journals.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, arose first as efforts by colonists to add their voices to English poetry
English poetry
The history of English poetry stretches from the middle of the 7th century to the present day. Over this period, English poets have written some of the most enduring poems in Western culture, and the language and its poetry have spread around the globe. Consequently, the term English poetry is...
in the 17th century, well before the constitutional
United States Constitution
The Constitution of the United States is the supreme law of the United States of America. It is the framework for the organization of the United States government and for the relationship of the federal government with the states, citizens, and all people within the United States.The first three...
unification of the thirteen colonies
Thirteen Colonies
The Thirteen Colonies were English and later British colonies established on the Atlantic coast of North America between 1607 and 1733. They declared their independence in the American Revolution and formed the United States of America...
(although before this, a strong oral tradition
Oral tradition
Oral tradition and oral lore is cultural material and traditions transmitted orally from one generation to another. The messages or testimony are verbally transmitted in speech or song and may take the form, for example, of folktales, sayings, ballads, songs, or chants...
often likened to poetry existed among Native American
Native Americans in the United States
Native Americans in the United States are the indigenous peoples in North America within the boundaries of the present-day continental United States, parts of Alaska, and the island state of Hawaii. They are composed of numerous, distinct tribes, states, and ethnic groups, many of which survive as...
societies). Unsurprisingly, most of the early colonists' work relied on contemporary British models of poetic form
Meter (poetry)
In poetry, metre is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse. Many traditional verse forms prescribe a specific verse metre, or a certain set of metres alternating in a particular order. The study of metres and forms of versification is known as prosody...
, diction
Diction
Diction , in its original, primary meaning, refers to the writer's or the speaker's distinctive vocabulary choices and style of expression in a poem or story...
, and theme. However, in the 19th century, a distinctive American idiom began to emerge. By the later part of that century, when Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman
Walter "Walt" Whitman was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse...
was winning an enthusiastic audience abroad, poets from the United States had begun to take their place at the forefront of the English-language
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
.
This position was sustained into the 20th century to the extent that Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
and T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
were perhaps the most influential English-language poets in the period during World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
. By the 1960s, the young poets of the British Poetry Revival
British Poetry Revival
The British Poetry Revival is the general name given to a loose poetry movement in Britain that took place in the 1960s and 1970s. The revival was a modernist-inspired reaction to the Movement's more conservative approach to British poetry.-Beginnings:...
looked to their American contemporaries and predecessors as models for the kind of poetry they wanted to write. Toward the end of the millennium
Millennium
A millennium is a period of time equal to one thousand years —from the Latin phrase , thousand, and , year—often but not necessarily related numerically to a particular dating system....
, consideration of American poetry had diversified, as scholars placed an increased emphasis on poetry by women, African American
African American
African Americans are citizens or residents of the United States who have at least partial ancestry from any of the native populations of Sub-Saharan Africa and are the direct descendants of enslaved Africans within the boundaries of the present United States...
s, Hispanic
Hispanic
Hispanic is a term that originally denoted a relationship to Hispania, which is to say the Iberian Peninsula: Andorra, Gibraltar, Portugal and Spain. During the Modern Era, Hispanic sometimes takes on a more limited meaning, particularly in the United States, where the term means a person of ...
s, Chicanos
Chicano poetry
Chicano poetry is a branch of American literature written by and primarily about Mexican Americans and the Mexican-American way of life in society. The term "Chicano" is a political and cultural term of identity specifically identifying people of Mexican descent who are born in the United States...
and other cultural groupings. Poetry, and creative writing
Creative writing
Creative writing is considered to be any writing, fiction, poetry, or non-fiction, that goes outside the bounds of normal professional, journalistic, academic, and technical forms of literature. Works which fall into this category include novels, epics, short stories, and poems...
in general, also tended to become more professionalized with the growth of creative writing
Creative writing
Creative writing is considered to be any writing, fiction, poetry, or non-fiction, that goes outside the bounds of normal professional, journalistic, academic, and technical forms of literature. Works which fall into this category include novels, epics, short stories, and poems...
programs in the English studies
English studies
English studies is an academic discipline that includes the study of literatures written in the English language , English linguistics English studies is an academic discipline that includes the study of literatures written in the English language (including literatures from the U.K., U.S.,...
departments of campuses
Higher education
Higher, post-secondary, tertiary, or third level education refers to the stage of learning that occurs at universities, academies, colleges, seminaries, and institutes of technology...
across the country.
Poetry in the colonies
Anne Bradstreet
Anne Dudley Bradstreet was New England's first published poet. Her work met with a positive reception in both the Old World and the New World.-Biography:...
's "The Tenth Muse
The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America
The Tenth Muse, lately Sprung up in America, or Several Poems Compiled with Great Variety of Wit and Learning, Full of Delight, Wherein especially is Contained a Complete Discourse and Description of the Four Elements, Constitutions, Ages of Man, Seasons of the Year, together with an exact Epitome...
," which was written in America, most likely in Ipswich, Massachusetts
Ipswich, Massachusetts
Ipswich is a coastal town in Essex County, Massachusetts, United States. The population was 12,987 at the 2000 census. Home to Willowdale State Forest and Sandy Point State Reservation, Ipswich includes the southern part of Plum Island...
or North Andover, Massachusetts
North Andover, Massachusetts
North Andover is a town in Essex County, Massachusetts, United States. North Andover is the home of Merrimack College, a private, Catholic four-year institution ....
) and printed/distributed in London, England by her brother-in-law, Rev. John Woodbridge. There are 14 such writers whom we might on that basis call American poets (they had actually been to America and to different degrees, wrote poems or verses about the place). Early examples include a 1616 "testimonial poem" on the sterling warlike character of Captain John Smith (in Barbour, ed. "Works") and Rev. William Morrell's 1625 "Nova Anglia" or "New England," which is a rhymed catalog of everything from American weather to glimpses of Native women, framed with a thin poetic "conceit" or "fiction" characterizing the country as a "sad and forlorn" female pining for English domination. Then in May 1627 Thomas Morton of Merrymount---an English West Country outdoorsman, attorney at law, man of letters and colonial adventurer---raised a Maypole to celebrate and foster more success at this fur-trading plantation and nailed up a "Poem" and "Song" (one a densely-literary manifesto on how English and Native people came together there and must keep doing so for a successful America; the other a light "drinking song" also full of deeper American implications). These were published in book form along with other examples of Morton's American poetry in "New English Canaan" (1637); and based on the criteria of "First," "American" and Poetry," they make Morton (and not Anne Bradstreet) America's first poet in English. (See Jack Dempsey, ed., "New English Canaan by Thomas Morton of 'Merrymount'" and his biography "Thomas Morton: The Life & Renaissance of an Early American Poet" Scituate MA: Digital Scanning 2000).
One of the first recorded poets of the British colonies was Anne Bradstreet
Anne Bradstreet
Anne Dudley Bradstreet was New England's first published poet. Her work met with a positive reception in both the Old World and the New World.-Biography:...
(1612–1672), who remains one of the earliest known women poets who wrote in English.
The poems she published during her lifetime address religious and political themes. She also wrote tender evocations of home, family life and of her love for her husband, many of which remained unpublished until the 20th century.
Edward Taylor
Edward Taylor
Edward Taylor was a colonial American poet, pastor and physician.-Early life:...
(1645–1729) wrote poems expounding Puritan
Puritan
The Puritans were a significant grouping of English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries. Puritanism in this sense was founded by some Marian exiles from the clergy shortly after the accession of Elizabeth I of England in 1558, as an activist movement within the Church of England...
virtues in a highly wrought metaphysical
Metaphysical poets
The metaphysical poets is a term coined by the poet and critic Samuel Johnson to describe a loose group of British lyric poets of the 17th century, who shared an interest in metaphysical concerns and a common way of investigating them, and whose work was characterized by inventiveness of metaphor...
style that can be seen as typical of the early colonial period.
This narrow focus on the Puritan ethic was, understandably, the dominant note of most of the poetry written in the colonies during the 17th and early 18th centuries. The earliest "secular" poetry published in New England was by Samuel Danforth
Samuel Danforth
Samuel Danforth was a Puritan minister, preacher, poet, and astronomer, and an associate of the Rev. John Eliot of Roxbury, Massachusetts, known as the “Apostle to the Indians.”...
in his "almanacks" for 1647–1649, published at Cambridge; these included "puzzle poems" as well as poems on caterpillars, pigeons, earthquakes, and hurricanes. Of course, being a Puritan minister as well as a poet, Danforth never ventured far from a spiritual message.
Another distinctly American lyric voice of the colonial period was Phillis Wheatley
Phillis Wheatley
Phillis Wheatley was the first African American poet and first African-American woman whose writings were published. Born in Gambia, Senegal, she was sold into slavery at age seven...
, a slave
Slavery in Colonial America
The origins of slavery in the colonial United States are complex and there are several theories that have been proposed to explain the trade.In 1607, English settlers established Jamestown as the first permanent English colony in the New World. Tobacco became the chief crop of the colony, due to...
whose book "Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral," was published in 1773. She was one of the best-known poets of her day, at least in the colonies, and her poems were typical of New England
New England
New England is a region in the northeastern corner of the United States consisting of the six states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut...
culture at the time, meditating on religious
Religion
Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values. Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to...
and classical
Classics
Classics is the branch of the Humanities comprising the languages, literature, philosophy, history, art, archaeology and other culture of the ancient Mediterranean world ; especially Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome during Classical Antiquity Classics (sometimes encompassing Classical Studies or...
ideas.
The 18th century saw an increasing emphasis on America itself as fit subject matter for its poets. This trend is most evident in the works of Philip Freneau (1752–1832), who is also notable for the unusually sympathetic attitude to Native Americans
Native Americans in the United States
Native Americans in the United States are the indigenous peoples in North America within the boundaries of the present-day continental United States, parts of Alaska, and the island state of Hawaii. They are composed of numerous, distinct tribes, states, and ethnic groups, many of which survive as...
shown in his writings, sometimes reflective of a skepticism toward Anglo-American culture and civilization. However, as might be expected from what was essentially provincial writing, this late colonial poetry is generally somewhat old-fashioned in form and syntax, deploying the means and methods of Pope
Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope was an 18th-century English poet, best known for his satirical verse and for his translation of Homer. He is the third-most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare and Tennyson...
and Gray
Thomas Gray
Thomas Gray was a poet, letter-writer, classical scholar and professor at Cambridge University.-Early life and education:...
in the era of Blake
William Blake
William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age...
and Burns
Robert Burns
Robert Burns was a Scottish poet and a lyricist. He is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland, and is celebrated worldwide...
.
On the whole, the development of poetry in the American colonies mirrors the development of the colonies themselves. The early poetry is dominated by the need to preserve the integrity of the Puritan ideals that created the settlement in the first place. As the colonists grew in confidence, the poetry they wrote increasingly reflected their drive towards independence. This shift in subject matter was not reflected in the mode of writing which tended to be conservative, to say the least. This can be seen as a product of the physical remove at which American poets operated from the center of English-language poetic developments in London.
Postcolonial poetry
William Cullen Bryant
William Cullen Bryant was an American romantic poet, journalist, and long-time editor of the New York Evening Post.-Youth and education:...
(1794–1878), whose great contribution was to write rhapsodic poems on the grandeur of prairie
Prairie
Prairies are considered part of the temperate grasslands, savannas, and shrublands biome by ecologists, based on similar temperate climates, moderate rainfall, and grasses, herbs, and shrubs, rather than trees, as the dominant vegetation type...
s and forest
Forest
A forest, also referred to as a wood or the woods, is an area with a high density of trees. As with cities, depending where you are in the world, what is considered a forest may vary significantly in size and have various classification according to how and what of the forest is composed...
s. Other notable poets to emerge in the early and middle 19th century include Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century...
, (1803–1882), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was an American poet and educator whose works include "Paul Revere's Ride", The Song of Hiawatha, and Evangeline...
(1807–1882), John Greenleaf Whittier
John Greenleaf Whittier
John Greenleaf Whittier was an influential American Quaker poet and ardent advocate of the abolition of slavery in the United States. He is usually listed as one of the Fireside Poets...
(1807–1892), Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...
(1809–1849), Oliver Wendell Holmes
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. was an American physician, professor, lecturer, and author. Regarded by his peers as one of the best writers of the 19th century, he is considered a member of the Fireside Poets. His most famous prose works are the "Breakfast-Table" series, which began with The Autocrat...
(1809–1894), Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau was an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and leading transcendentalist...
(1817–1862), James Russell Lowell
James Russell Lowell
James Russell Lowell was an American Romantic poet, critic, editor, and diplomat. He is associated with the Fireside Poets, a group of New England writers who were among the first American poets who rivaled the popularity of British poets...
(1819–1891), and Sidney Lanier
Sidney Lanier
Sidney Lanier was an American musician and poet.-Biography:Sidney Lanier was born February 3, 1842, in Macon, Georgia, to parents Robert Sampson Lanier and Mary Jane Anderson; he was mostly of English ancestry. His distant French Huguenot ancestors immigrated to England in the 16th century...
(1842–1881). As might be expected, the works of these writers are united by a common search for a distinctive American voice to distinguish them from their British
British literature
British Literature refers to literature associated with the United Kingdom, Isle of Man and Channel Islands. By far the largest part of British literature is written in the English language, but there are bodies of written works in Latin, Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Scots, Cornish, Manx, Jèrriais,...
counterparts. To this end, they explored the landscape and traditions of their native country as materials for their poetry.
The most significant example of this tendency may be The Song of Hiawatha
The Song of Hiawatha
The Song of Hiawatha is an 1855 epic poem, in trochaic tetrameter, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, featuring an Indian hero and loosely based on legends and ethnography of the Ojibwe and other Native American peoples contained in Algic Researches and additional writings of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft...
by Longfellow. This poem uses Native American tales collected by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, who was superintendent of Indian affairs for Michigan
Michigan
Michigan is a U.S. state located in the Great Lakes Region of the United States of America. The name Michigan is the French form of the Ojibwa word mishigamaa, meaning "large water" or "large lake"....
from 1836 to 1841. Longfellow also imitated the meter
Meter (poetry)
In poetry, metre is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse. Many traditional verse forms prescribe a specific verse metre, or a certain set of metres alternating in a particular order. The study of metres and forms of versification is known as prosody...
of the Finnish epic poem
Epic poetry
An epic is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation. Oral poetry may qualify as an epic, and Albert Lord and Milman Parry have argued that classical epics were fundamentally an oral poetic form...
Kalevala
Kalevala
The Kalevala is a 19th century work of epic poetry compiled by Elias Lönnrot from Finnish and Karelian oral folklore and mythology.It is regarded as the national epic of Finland and is one of the most significant works of Finnish literature...
, possibly to avoid British models. The resulting poem, while a popular success, did not provide a model for future U.S. poets.
Transcendentalism
Transcendentalism is a philosophical movement that developed in the 1830s and 1840s in the New England region of the United States as a protest against the general state of culture and society, and in particular, the state of intellectualism at Harvard University and the doctrine of the Unitarian...
of the poet/philosophers Emerson and Thoreau. Transcendentalism was the distinctly American strain of English Romanticism
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
that began with William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads....
and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, Romantic, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla...
. Emerson, arguably one of the founders of transcendentalism, had visited England as a young man to meet these two English poets, as well as Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle was a Scottish satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher during the Victorian era.He called economics "the dismal science", wrote articles for the Edinburgh Encyclopedia, and became a controversial social commentator.Coming from a strict Calvinist family, Carlyle was...
. While Romanticism transitioned into Victorianism
Victorianism
Victorianism is the name given to the attitudes, art, and culture of the later two-thirds of the 19th century. This usage is strong within social history and the study of literature, less so in philosophy. Many disciplines do not use the term, but instead prefer Victorian Era, or simply "Late 19th...
in post-reform England, it grew more energetic in America from the 1830s through to the Civil War
American Civil War
The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...
.
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...
was probably the most recognized American poet outside of America during this period. Diverse authors in France
French literature
French literature is, generally speaking, literature written in the French language, particularly by citizens of France; it may also refer to literature written by people living in France who speak traditional languages of France other than French. Literature written in French language, by citizens...
, Sweden
Swedish literature
Swedish literature refers to literature written in the Swedish language or by writers from Sweden.The first literary text from Sweden is the Rök Runestone, carved during the Viking Age circa 800 AD. With the conversion of the land to Christianity around 1100 AD, Sweden entered the Middle Ages,...
and Russia
Russian literature
Russian literature refers to the literature of Russia or its émigrés, and to the Russian-language literature of several independent nations once a part of what was historically Russia or the Soviet Union...
were heavily influenced by his works, and his poem "The Raven
The Raven
"The Raven" is a narrative poem by American writer Edgar Allan Poe, first published in January 1845. It is often noted for its musicality, stylized language, and supernatural atmosphere. It tells of a talking raven's mysterious visit to a distraught lover, tracing the man's slow descent into madness...
" swept across Europe, translated into many languages. In the twentieth century the American poet William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...
said of Poe that he is the only solid ground on which American poetry is anchored.
Whitman and Dickinson
Walt Whitman
Walter "Walt" Whitman was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse...
(1819–1892) and Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was an American poet. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a successful family with strong community ties, she lived a mostly introverted and reclusive life...
(1830–1886). On the surface, these two poets could not have been less alike. Whitman's long lines, derived from the metric of the King James Version of the Bible
King James Version of the Bible
The Authorized Version, commonly known as the King James Version, King James Bible or KJV, is an English translation of the Christian Bible by the Church of England begun in 1604 and completed in 1611...
, and his democratic inclusiveness stand in stark contrast with Dickinson's concentrated phrases and short lines and stanza
Stanza
In poetry, a stanza is a unit within a larger poem. In modern poetry, the term is often equivalent with strophe; in popular vocal music, a stanza is typically referred to as a "verse"...
s, derived from Protestant hymn
Hymn
A hymn is a type of song, usually religious, specifically written for the purpose of praise, adoration or prayer, and typically addressed to a deity or deities, or to a prominent figure or personification...
als.
What links them is their common connection to Emerson (a passage from whom Whitman printed on the second edition of Leaves of Grass
Leaves of Grass
Leaves of Grass is a poetry collection by the American poet Walt Whitman . Though the first edition was published in 1855, Whitman spent his entire life writing Leaves of Grass, revising it in several editions until his death...
), and the daring originality of their visions. These two poets can be said to represent the birth of two major American poetic idiom
Idiom
Idiom is an expression, word, or phrase that has a figurative meaning that is comprehended in regard to a common use of that expression that is separate from the literal meaning or definition of the words of which it is made...
s—the free metric and direct emotional expression of Whitman, and the gnomic
Gnomic
A gnomic aspect , sometimes called a neutral, generic or universal aspect or tense, is a grammatical aspect that expresses general truths or aphorisms—such as birds fly, sugar is sweet, a mother can always tell...
obscurity and irony
Irony
Irony is a rhetorical device, literary technique, or situation in which there is a sharp incongruity or discordance that goes beyond the simple and evident intention of words or actions...
of Dickinson—both of which would profoundly stamp the American poetry of the 20th century.
The development of these idioms, as well as more conservative reactions against them, can be traced through the works of poets such as Edwin Arlington Robinson
Edwin Arlington Robinson
Edwin Arlington Robinson was an American poet who won three Pulitzer Prizes for his work.- Biography :Robinson was born in Head Tide, Lincoln County, Maine, but his family moved to Gardiner, Maine, in 1870...
(1869–1935), Stephen Crane
Stephen Crane
Stephen Crane was an American novelist, short story writer, poet and journalist. Prolific throughout his short life, he wrote notable works in the Realist tradition as well as early examples of American Naturalism and Impressionism...
(1871–1900), Robert Frost
Robert Frost
Robert Lee Frost was an American poet. He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech. His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New England in the early twentieth century, using them to examine complex social and...
(1874–1963) and Carl Sandburg
Carl Sandburg
Carl Sandburg was an American writer and editor, best known for his poetry. He won three Pulitzer Prizes, two for his poetry and another for a biography of Abraham Lincoln. H. L. Mencken called Carl Sandburg "indubitably an American in every pulse-beat."-Biography:Sandburg was born in Galesburg,...
(1878–1967). Frost, in particular, is a commanding figure, who aligned strict poetic meter, particularly blank verse and terser lyrical forms, with a "vurry Amur'k'n" (as Pound put it) idiom. He successfully revitalized a rural tradition with many English antecedents from his beloved Golden Treasury and produced an oeuvre of major importance, rivaling or even excelling in achievement that of the key modernists and making him, within the full sweep of more traditional modern English-language verse, a peer of Hardy
Hardy
-Canada:* Port Hardy, British Columbia* Hardy Island Marine Provincial Park, British Columbia-United States:* Hardy, Arkansas* Hardy, California* Hardy, Iowa* Hardy, Kentucky* Hardy, Nebraska* Hardy, Virginia* Hardy, Mississippi* Hardy County, West Virginia...
and Yeats
Yeats
W. B. Yeats was an Irish poet and playwright.Yeats may also refer to:* Yeats ,* Yeats , an impact crater on Mercury* Yeats , an Irish thoroughbred racehorse-See also:...
. But from Whitman and Dickson the outlines of a distinctively new organic poetic tradition, less indebted to English formalism than Frost's work, were clear to see, and they would come to full fruition in the 1910's and 20's.
Modernism and after
This new idiom, combined with a study of 19th-century French poetryFrench literature
French literature is, generally speaking, literature written in the French language, particularly by citizens of France; it may also refer to literature written by people living in France who speak traditional languages of France other than French. Literature written in French language, by citizens...
, formed the basis of American input into 20th-century English-language poetic modernism
Modernist poetry in English
Modernist poetry in English is generally considered to have emerged in the early years of the 20th century with the appearance of the Imagists. In common with many other modernists, these poets wrote in reaction to the perceived excesses of Victorian poetry, with its emphasis on traditional...
. Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
(1885
1885 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Canada:* Frederick George Scott, Justin and Other Poems. Published at author's expense.-United Kingdom:...
–1972
1972 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* John Betjeman becomes Poet Laureate...
) and T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
(1888
1888 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Canada:*William Wilfred Campbell, Snowflakes and sunbeams. St. Stephen, NB: St. Croix Courier Press. Published at author's expense....
–1965
1965 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Meic Stephens founds Poetry Wales...
) were the leading figures at the time, with their rejection of traditional poetic form and meter and of Victorian diction. Both steered American poetry toward greater density, difficulty, and opacity, with an emphasis on techniques such as fragmentation, ellipsis, allusion, juxtaposition, ironic and shifting personae, and mythic parallelism. Pound, in particular, opened up American poetry to diverse influences, including the traditional poetries of China and Japan.
Numerous other poets made important contributions at this revolutionary juncture, including Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein was an American writer, poet and art collector who spent most of her life in France.-Early life:...
(1874
1874 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:-United Kingdom:* Alfred Austin, The Tower of Babel* Robert William Dale, The English Hymn Book...
–1946
1946 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* W. H. Auden becomes a U.S. citizen...
), Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens was an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as a lawyer for the Hartford insurance company in Connecticut.His best-known poems include "Anecdote of the Jar",...
(1879
1879 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-United Kingdom:* Edwin Arnold, The Light of Asia; or, The Great Renunciation...
–1955
1955 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* The Group, a British poetry movement, starts meeting in London with gatherings taking place once a week, on Friday evenings, at first at Hobsbaum's flat and later at the house of Edward Lucie-Smith...
), William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...
(1883
1883 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-United Kingdom:* William Allingham, The Fairies, including "Up the airy mountain ..."; reprinted from Poems 1850...
–1963
1963 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* January 26 – Raghunath Vishnu Pandit, an Indian poet who wrote in both Konkani and Marathi languages, publishes five books of poems this day* The Belfast Group, a discussion group of poets in...
), Hilda Doolittle (H.D.)
H.D.
H.D. was an American poet, novelist and memoirist known for her association with the early 20th century avant-garde Imagist group of poets such as Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington...
(1886
1886 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Frederick James Furnivall founds the Shelley Society...
–1961
1961 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* January 20–Robert Frost recites his poem "The Gift Outright" at United States President John F...
), Marianne Moore
Marianne Moore
Marianne Moore was an American Modernist poet and writer noted for her irony and wit.- Life :Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, in the manse of the Presbyterian church where her maternal grandfather, John Riddle Warner, served as pastor. She was the daughter of mechanical engineer and inventor...
(1887
1887 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Canada:* George Frederick Cameron, Lyrics on Freedom, Love and Death, posthumously published ....
–1972
1972 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* John Betjeman becomes Poet Laureate...
), E. E. Cummings
E. E. Cummings
Edward Estlin Cummings , popularly known as E. E. Cummings, with the abbreviated form of his name often written by others in lowercase letters as e.e. cummings , was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright...
(1894
1894 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* The Yellow Book, published 1894–97...
–1962
1962 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Writers in the Soviet Union this year were allowed to publish criticism of Joseph Stalin and were given more freedom generally, although many were severely criticized for doing so...
), and Hart Crane
Hart Crane
-Career:Throughout the early 1920s, small but well-respected literary magazines published some of Crane’s lyrics, gaining him, among the avant-garde, a respect that White Buildings , his first volume, ratified and strengthened...
(1899
1899 in poetry
— Opening lines of Rudyard Kipling's White Man's Burden, first published this yearNationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:...
–1932
1932 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:*W. B. Yeats rents a house in Dublin....
). The cerebral and skeptical Romantic Stevens helped revive the philosophical lyric, and Williams was to become exemplary for many later poets because he, more than any of his peers, contrived to marry spoken American English
American English
American English is a set of dialects of the English language used mostly in the United States. Approximately two-thirds of the world's native speakers of English live in the United States....
with free verse
Free verse
Free verse is a form of poetry that refrains from consistent meter patterns, rhyme, or any other musical pattern.Poets have explained that free verse, despite its freedom, is not free. Free Verse displays some elements of form...
rhythm
Rhythm
Rhythm may be generally defined as a "movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions." This general meaning of regular recurrence or pattern in time may be applied to a wide variety of cyclical natural phenomena having a periodicity or...
s. Cummings remains notable for his experiments with typography and evocation of a spontaneous, child-like vision of reality.
Whereas these poets were unambiguously aligned with high modernism
High modernism
High modernism is a particular instance of modernism, coined towards the end of modernism. "High modernism", like similar names designating intellectual and artistic eras such as "the high Middle Ages" or "the high Baroque", presumably is meant to specify the most characteristic, developed,...
, other poets active in the United States in the first third of the 20th century were not. Among the most important of the latter were those who were associated with what came to be known as the New Criticism
New Criticism
New Criticism was a movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic...
. These included John Crowe Ransom
John Crowe Ransom
John Crowe Ransom was an American poet, essayist, magazine editor, and professor.-Life:...
(1888
1888 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Canada:*William Wilfred Campbell, Snowflakes and sunbeams. St. Stephen, NB: St. Croix Courier Press. Published at author's expense....
–1974
1974 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:*The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics is founded by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman....
), Allen Tate
Allen Tate
John Orley Allen Tate was an American poet, essayist, social commentator, and Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1943 to 1944.-Life:...
(1899
1899 in poetry
— Opening lines of Rudyard Kipling's White Man's Burden, first published this yearNationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:...
–1979
1979 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* The Kenyon Review is restarted by Kenyon College 10 years after the original publication was closed....
), and Robert Penn Warren
Robert Penn Warren
Robert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the influential literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935...
(1905
1905 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Ezra Pound presents Hilda Doolittle with a sheaf of love poems with the collective title Hilda's Book...
–1989
1989 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Dead Poets Society, a film incorporating excerpts from many traditional poets, ending with the title and opening line of Walt Whitman's lament on the death of Abraham Lincoln, "O Captain! My...
). Other poets of the era, such as Archibald MacLeish
Archibald MacLeish
Archibald MacLeish was an American poet, writer, and the Librarian of Congress. He is associated with the Modernist school of poetry. He received three Pulitzer Prizes for his work.-Early years:...
(1892
1892 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* William Butler Yeats founds the Irish Literary Society in Dublin....
–1982
1982 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:*Final edition of This Magazine published....
), experimented with modernist techniques but were also drawn towards more traditional modes of writing. Still others, such as Robinson Jeffers
Robinson Jeffers
John Robinson Jeffers was an American poet, known for his work about the central California coast. Most of Jeffers' poetry was written in classic narrative and epic form, but today he is also known for his short verse, and considered an icon of the environmental movement.-Life:Jeffers was born in...
(1887
1887 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Canada:* George Frederick Cameron, Lyrics on Freedom, Love and Death, posthumously published ....
–1962
1962 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Writers in the Soviet Union this year were allowed to publish criticism of Joseph Stalin and were given more freedom generally, although many were severely criticized for doing so...
), adopted Modernist freedom while remaining aloof from Modernist factions and programs.
In addition, there were still other, early 20th Century poets who maintained or were forced to maintain a peripheral relationship to high modernism
High modernism
High modernism is a particular instance of modernism, coined towards the end of modernism. "High modernism", like similar names designating intellectual and artistic eras such as "the high Middle Ages" or "the high Baroque", presumably is meant to specify the most characteristic, developed,...
, likely due to the racially charged themes of their work. They include Countee Cullen
Countee Cullen
Countee Cullen was an American poet who was popular during the Harlem Renaissance.- Biography :Cullen was an American poet and a leading figure with Langston Hughes in the Harlem Renaissance. This 1920s artistic movement produced the first large body of work in the United States written by African...
(1903
1903 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Canada:* Bliss Carman, From the Green Book of Bards* E. Pauline Johnson, also known as "Tekahionwake", Canadian Born...
–1946
1946 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* W. H. Auden becomes a U.S. citizen...
), Alice Dunbar Nelson
Alice Dunbar Nelson
Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar Nelson was an American poet, journalist and political activist. Among the first generation born free in the South after the Civil War, she was one of the prominent African Americans involved in the artistic flourishing of the Harlem Renaissance...
(1875
1875 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:*October 1 - American poet and short story writer Edgar Allan Poe is reburied in Westminster Hall and Burying Ground with a larger memorial marker...
–1935
1935 in poetry
Links to nations or nationalities point to articles with information on that nation's poetry or literature. For example, United Kingdom links to English poetry and Indian links to Indian poetry.-Events:* Canada -- Charles G.D...
), Gwendolyn Bennett (1902
1902 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Hilda Doolittle meets and befriends Ezra Pound* Times Literary Supplement begins publication-Canada:* James B...
–1981
1981 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Jane Greer launched Plains Poetry Journal, an advance guard of the New Formalism movement....
), Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes
James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist. He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form jazz poetry. Hughes is best known for his work during the Harlem Renaissance...
(1902
1902 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Hilda Doolittle meets and befriends Ezra Pound* Times Literary Supplement begins publication-Canada:* James B...
–1967
1967 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:*Cecil Day-Lewis is selected as the new Poet Laureate of the UK....
), Claude McKay
Claude McKay
Claude McKay was a Jamaican-American writer and poet. He was a seminal figure in the Harlem Renaissance and wrote three novels: Home to Harlem , a best-seller which won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature, Banjo , and Banana Bottom...
(1889
1889 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Canada:* William Wilfred Campbell, Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature (for instance, Irish or France).-Canada:* William Wilfred Campbell, Nationality...
–1946=8
1948 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Sometime this year, Jack Kerouac introduced the phrase Beat Generation to describe his friends and as a general term describing the underground, anti-conformist youth gathering in New York at that...
), Jean Toomer
Jean Toomer
Jean Toomer was an American poet and novelist and an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance. His first book Cane is considered by many as his most significant.-Early life:...
(1894
1894 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* The Yellow Book, published 1894–97...
–1967
1946 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* W. H. Auden becomes a U.S. citizen...
) and other African American poets of the Harlem Renaissance
Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after the 1925 anthology by Alain Locke...
.
The modernist torch was carried in the 1930s mainly by the group of poets known as the Objectivists
Objectivist poets
The Objectivist poets were a loose-knit group of second-generation Modernists who emerged in the 1930s. They were mainly American and were influenced by, amongst others, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams...
. These included Louis Zukofsky
Louis Zukofsky
Louis Zukofsky was an American poet. He was one of the founders and the primary theorist of the Objectivist group of poets and thus an important influence on subsequent generations of poets in America and abroad.-Life:...
(1904
1904 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Nobel Prize in Literature is shared by French poet Frédéric Mistral and Spanish dramatist José Echegaray y Eizaguirre....
–1978
1978 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Magazine, edited by Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, first published...
), Charles Reznikoff
Charles Reznikoff
Charles Reznikoff was the poet for whom the term Objectivist was first coined. When asked by Harriet Munroe to provide an introduction to what became known as the Objectivist issue of Poetry, Louis Zukofsky provided his essay Sincerity and Objectification: With Special Reference to the Work of...
(1894
1894 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* The Yellow Book, published 1894–97...
–1976
1976 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Two poems written in 1965 by Mao Zedong just before the Cultural Revolution, including "Two Birds: A Dialogue", are published on January 1-Works published in English:Listed by nation where the work...
), George Oppen
George Oppen
George Oppen was an American poet, best known as one of the members of the Objectivist group of poets. He abandoned poetry in the 1930s for political activism, and later moved to Mexico to avoid the attentions of the House Un-American Activities Committee...
(1908
1908 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Ezra Pound leaves America for Europe...
–1984
1984 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:*December 19 - Philip Larkin turns down the British Poet Laureateship, and Ted Hughes becomes Poet Laureate....
), Carl Rakosi
Carl Rakosi
Carl Rakosi was the last surviving member of the original group of poets who were given the rubric Objectivist. He was still publishing and performing his poetry well into his 90s.-Early life:...
(1903
1903 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Canada:* Bliss Carman, From the Green Book of Bards* E. Pauline Johnson, also known as "Tekahionwake", Canadian Born...
–2004
2004 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* April 1 — Foetry.com Web site is launched for the announced purpose of "Exposing fraudulent contests. Tracking the sycophants...
) and, later, Lorine Niedecker
Lorine Niedecker
Lorine Faith Niedecker was a Wisconsin poet and the only woman associated with the Objectivist poets...
(1903
1903 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Canada:* Bliss Carman, From the Green Book of Bards* E. Pauline Johnson, also known as "Tekahionwake", Canadian Born...
–1970
1970 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* May – "La nuit de la poésie", a poetry reading in Montreal bringing together poets from French Canada to recite before an audience of more than 2,000 in the Théâtre du Gesu, lasting until 7...
). Kenneth Rexroth
Kenneth Rexroth
Kenneth Rexroth was an American poet, translator and critical essayist. He is regarded as a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance, and paved the groundwork for the movement...
, who was published in the Objectivist Anthology, was, along with Madeline Gleason
Madeline Gleason
Madeline Gleason was a United States poet and dramatist. She is often credited with the founding of the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University...
(1909
1909 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Andrew Cecil Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry* Founding of the Poetry Recital Society...
–1973
1973 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Canadian poet and author, Michael Ondaatje adapts his 1970 book of poetry, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, into a play which this year is first produced in Stratford, Ontario; it will appear in...
), a forerunner of the San Francisco Renaissance
San Francisco Renaissance
The term San Francisco Renaissance is used as a global designation for a range of poetic activity centered on San Francisco and which brought it to prominence as a hub of the American poetic avant-garde. However, others The term San Francisco Renaissance is used as a global designation for a range...
. Many of the Objectivists came from urban communities of new immigrants, and this new vein of experience and language enriched the growing American idiom.
World War II and after
Archibald MacleishArchibald MacLeish
Archibald MacLeish was an American poet, writer, and the Librarian of Congress. He is associated with the Modernist school of poetry. He received three Pulitzer Prizes for his work.-Early years:...
called John Gillespie Magee, Jr.
John Gillespie Magee, Jr.
John Gillespie Magee, Jr. was an American aviator and poet who died as a result of a mid-air collision over Lincolnshire during World War II. He was serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force, which he joined before the United States officially entered the war. He is most famous for his poem "High...
"the first poet of the war".
World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
saw the emergence of a new generation of poets, many of whom were influenced by Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens was an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as a lawyer for the Hartford insurance company in Connecticut.His best-known poems include "Anecdote of the Jar",...
. Richard Eberhart
Richard Eberhart
Richard Ghormley Eberhart was an American poet who published more than a dozen books of poetry and approximately twenty works in total...
(1904
1904 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Nobel Prize in Literature is shared by French poet Frédéric Mistral and Spanish dramatist José Echegaray y Eizaguirre....
–2005
2005 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* October 7 — Celebrations marking the 50th anniversary of the first reading of Allen Ginsberg's poem Howl were staged in San Francisco, New York City, and in Leeds in the UK...
), Karl Shapiro
Karl Shapiro
Karl Jay Shapiro was an American poet. He was appointed the fifth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1946.-Biography:...
(1913
1913 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* January 8—Harold Monro founds the Poetry Bookshop in London...
–2000
2000 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Griffin Poetry Prize is established, with one award given each year for the best work by a Canadian poet and one award given for best work in the English language internationally.* February —...
), Randall Jarrell
Randall Jarrell
Randall Jarrell was an American poet, literary critic, children's author, essayist, and novelist. He was the 11th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a role which now holds the title of US Poet Laureate.-Life:Jarrell was a native of Nashville, Tennessee...
(1914
1914 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* January 29 – Yone Noguchi lectures on "The Japanese Hokku Poetry" at Magdalen College, Oxford...
–1965
1965 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Meic Stephens founds Poetry Wales...
) and James Dickey
James Dickey
James Lafayette Dickey was an American poet and novelist. He was appointed the eighteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1966.-Early years:...
(1923
1923 in poetry
-- From Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening", first published this year in his collection New HampshireNationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:...
-1997
1997 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:*January 20 — Miller Williams of Arkansas reads his poem, "Of History and Hope," at President Clinton's inauguration....
) all wrote poetry that sprang from experience of active service. Together with Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop was an American poet and short-story writer. She was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949 to 1950, a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1956 and a National Book Award Winner for Poetry in 1970. Elizabeth Bishop House is an artists' retreat in Great Village, Nova Scotia...
(1911
1911 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Britain establishes six copyright libraries to which copies of all books published in the country must be sent: Bodleian Library ; British Library ; National Library of Scotland ; National Library of...
–1979
1979 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* The Kenyon Review is restarted by Kenyon College 10 years after the original publication was closed....
), Theodore Roethke
Theodore Roethke
Theodore Roethke was an American poet, who published several volumes of poetry characterized by its rhythm, rhyming, and natural imagery. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1954 for his book, The Waking.-Biography:...
(1908
1908 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Ezra Pound leaves America for Europe...
–1963
1963 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* January 26 – Raghunath Vishnu Pandit, an Indian poet who wrote in both Konkani and Marathi languages, publishes five books of poems this day* The Belfast Group, a discussion group of poets in...
) and Delmore Schwartz
Delmore Schwartz
Delmore Schwartz was an American poet and short story writer from Brooklyn, New York.-Biography:Schwartz was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. His parents, Harry and Rose, both Romanian Jews, separated when Schwartz was nine, and their divorce had a profound effect on him. Later, in 1930,...
(1913
1913 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* January 8—Harold Monro founds the Poetry Bookshop in London...
–1966
1966 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Raymond Souster founds the League of Canadian Poets...
), they formed a generation of poets that in contrast to the preceding generation often wrote in traditional verse forms.
After the war, a number of new poets and poetic movements emerged. John Berryman
John Berryman
John Allyn Berryman was an American poet and scholar, born in McAlester, Oklahoma. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and was considered a key figure in the Confessional school of poetry...
(1914
1914 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* January 29 – Yone Noguchi lectures on "The Japanese Hokku Poetry" at Magdalen College, Oxford...
–1972
1972 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* John Betjeman becomes Poet Laureate...
) and Robert Lowell
Robert Lowell
Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV was an American poet, considered the founder of the confessional poetry movement. He was appointed the sixth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress where he served from 1947 until 1948...
(1917
1917 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* July — Siegfried Sassoon issues his "Soldier's Declaration" and is sent by the military authorities to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh, where on August 17 Wilfred Owen introduces himself...
–1977
1977 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* January – James Dickey, composed a poem he read at new United States President Jimmy Carter’s inaugural gala although not at the inauguration itself.* British publication Gay News successfully...
) were the leading lights in what was to become known as the Confessional movement
Confessional poet
Confessional poetry emphasizes the intimate, and sometimes unflattering, information about details of the poet's personal life, such as in poems about mental illness, sexuality, and despondence. The confessionalist label was applied to a number of poets of the 1950s and 1960s...
, which was to have a strong influence on later poets like Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. Born in Massachusetts, she studied at Smith College and Newnham College, Cambridge before receiving acclaim as a professional poet and writer...
(1932
1932 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:*W. B. Yeats rents a house in Dublin....
–1963
1963 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* January 26 – Raghunath Vishnu Pandit, an Indian poet who wrote in both Konkani and Marathi languages, publishes five books of poems this day* The Belfast Group, a discussion group of poets in...
) and Anne Sexton
Anne Sexton
Anne Sexton was an American poet, known for her highly personal, confessional verse. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967...
(1928
1928 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Russian poets Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky found OBERIU , an avant-garde grouping of Russian post-Futurist poets in the 1920s-1930s* American poets Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen and Louis...
–1974
1974 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:*The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics is founded by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman....
). Though both Berryman and Lowell were closely acquainted with Modernism, they were mainly interested in exploring their own experiences as subject matter and a style that Lowell referred to as "cooked" -- that is, consciously and carefully crafted.
Beat generation
The Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired...
poets, who included such figures as Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac
Jean-Louis "Jack" Lebris de Kerouac was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as Catholic...
(1922–1969), Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...
(1926–1997), Gregory Corso
Gregory Corso
Gregory Nunzio Corso was an American poet, youngest of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers...
(1930
1930 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Canada:*Alfred Bailey, Tao: A Ryerson Poetry Chap Book, ....
–2001
2001 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Immediately after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, W. H...
), Joanne Kyger
Joanne Kyger
Joanne Kyger is an American poet. Her poetry is influenced by her practice of Zen Buddhism and her ties to the poets of Black Mountain, the San Francisco Renaissance, and the Beat generation.-Overview:...
(born 1934
1934 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* The Barretts of Wimpole Street, a film directed by Sidney Franklin, with Norma Shearer as Elizabeth Barrett and Fredric March as Robert Browning; redone in 1957, less successfully*The University...
), Gary Snyder
Gary Snyder
Gary Snyder is an American poet , as well as an essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist . Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry...
(born 1930
1930 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Canada:*Alfred Bailey, Tao: A Ryerson Poetry Chap Book, ....
), Diane Di Prima
Diane di Prima
Diane Di Prima is an American poet.-Early life:Di Prima was born in Brooklyn. She attended Hunter College High School and Swarthmore College before dropping out to be a poet in Manhattan...
(born 1934
1934 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* The Barretts of Wimpole Street, a film directed by Sidney Franklin, with Norma Shearer as Elizabeth Barrett and Fredric March as Robert Browning; redone in 1957, less successfully*The University...
), Amiri Baraka
Amiri Baraka
Amiri Baraka , formerly known as LeRoi Jones, is an American writer of poetry, drama, fiction, essays, and music criticism...
(born 1934
1934 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* The Barretts of Wimpole Street, a film directed by Sidney Franklin, with Norma Shearer as Elizabeth Barrett and Fredric March as Robert Browning; redone in 1957, less successfully*The University...
) and Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Ferlinghetti is an American poet, painter, liberal activist, and the co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers...
(born 1919
1919 in poetry
—From A Prayer for My Daughter by W. B. Yeats, first published this yearNationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Two paintings by E. E...
), were distinctly raw. Reflecting, sometimes in an extreme form, the more open, relaxed and searching society of the 1950s and 1960s, the Beats pushed the boundaries of the American idiom in the direction of demotic speech perhaps further than any other group.
Around the same time, the Black Mountain poets
Black Mountain poets
The Black Mountain poets, sometimes called projectivist poets, were a group of mid 20th century American avant-garde or postmodern poets centered on Black Mountain College.-Background:...
, under the leadership of Charles Olson
Charles Olson
Charles Olson , was a second generation American modernist poet who was a link between earlier figures such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the New American poets, which includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School, the Beat poets, and the San Francisco Renaissance...
(1910
1910 in poetry
— closing lines of Rudyard Kipling's If—, first published this year in Rewards and FairiesNationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Canada:...
–1970
1970 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* May – "La nuit de la poésie", a poetry reading in Montreal bringing together poets from French Canada to recite before an audience of more than 2,000 in the Théâtre du Gesu, lasting until 7...
), were working at Black Mountain College
Black Mountain College
Black Mountain College, a school founded in 1933 in Black Mountain, North Carolina, was a new kind of college in the United States in which the study of art was seen to be central to a liberal arts education, and in which John Dewey's principles of education played a major role...
. These poets were exploring the possibilities of open form but in a much more programmatic way than the Beats. The main poets involved were Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school's. He was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn. He served as the Samuel P...
(1926
1926 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* The remains of English war poet Isaac Rosenberg, killed in World War I at the age of 28 and originally buried in a mass grave, are re-interred at Bailleul Road East Cemetery, Plot V, St...
–2005
2005 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* October 7 — Celebrations marking the 50th anniversary of the first reading of Allen Ginsberg's poem Howl were staged in San Francisco, New York City, and in Leeds in the UK...
), Robert Duncan
Robert Duncan (poet)
Robert Duncan was an American poet and a student of H.D. and the Western esoteric tradition who spent most of his career in and around San Francisco. Though associated with any number of literary traditions and schools, Duncan is often identified with the poets of the New American Poetry and Black...
(1919
1919 in poetry
—From A Prayer for My Daughter by W. B. Yeats, first published this yearNationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Two paintings by E. E...
–1988
1988 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* The first annual The Best American Poetry volume is published this year....
), Denise Levertov
Denise Levertov
-Early life and influences:Levertov was born and grew up in Ilford, Essex.Couzyn, Jeni Contemporary Women Poets. Bloodaxe, p74 Her mother, Beatrice Spooner-Jones Levertoff, came from a small mining village in North Wales...
(1923
1923 in poetry
-- From Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening", first published this year in his collection New HampshireNationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:...
–1997
1997 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:*January 20 — Miller Williams of Arkansas reads his poem, "Of History and Hope," at President Clinton's inauguration....
), Ed Dorn
Ed Dorn
Edward Merton Dorn was an American poet and teacher often associated with the Black Mountain poets. His most famous work is Gunslinger.-Overview:...
(1929
1929 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* The Little Review, edited by Margaret Caroline Anderson and Jane Heap, ceases publication* The Dial ceases publication...
–1999
1999 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* July 1 — Scotland's Parliament opened with the singing of Robert Burns' "A Man's a Man For A'That", instead of "God Save The Queen"...
), Paul Blackburn (1926
1926 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* The remains of English war poet Isaac Rosenberg, killed in World War I at the age of 28 and originally buried in a mass grave, are re-interred at Bailleul Road East Cemetery, Plot V, St...
–1971
1971 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* This Magazine founded by Robert Grenier and Barrett Watten...
), Hilda Morley
Hilda Morley
Hilda Morley was an American poet associated with the Black Mountain movement.-Biography:She was born Hilda Auerbach in New York City to Russian parents. Her father, Rachmiel Auerbach, was a doctor, and her mother, Sonia Lubove Kamenetsky, was a feminist and Labor Zionist...
(1916
1916 in poetry
-- Closing lines of "Easter 1916" by William Butler Yeats, first published this yearNationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:...
–1998
1998 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Samizdat poetry magazine founded in Chicago .* Skanky Possum poetry magazine founded in Austin, Texas....
), John Wieners
John Wieners
John Joseph Wieners was an American lyric poet.-Biography:Born in Milton, Massachusetts, Wieners attended St. Gregory Elementary School in Dorchester, Massachusetts and Boston College High School. From 1950 to 1954, he studied at Boston College, where he earned his A.B...
(1934
1934 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* The Barretts of Wimpole Street, a film directed by Sidney Franklin, with Norma Shearer as Elizabeth Barrett and Fredric March as Robert Browning; redone in 1957, less successfully*The University...
–2002
2002 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* After Ghazi al-Gosaibi, the Saudi Arabian ambassador to Britain, publishes a poem praising a suicide bomber who had killed himself and two Israelis after blowing himself up in a supermarket; the...
), and Larry Eigner
Larry Eigner
Laurence Joel Eigner / Larry Eigner was an American poet of the second half of the twentieth century and one of the principal figures of the Black Mountain School....
(1927
1927 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* T. S. Eliot enters the Church of England and assumes British citizenship-Canada:...
–1996
1996 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* National Poetry Month was established by the Academy of American Poets in April 1996 as way to increase awareness and appreciation of poetry in the United States.* The movie Dead Man, written and...
). They based their approach to poetry on Olson's 1950
1950 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:*Charles Olson publishes his seminal essay, Projective Verse. In this, he called for a poetry of "open field" composition to replace traditional closed poetic forms with an improvised form that should...
essay Projective Verse, in which he called for a form based on the line, a line based on human breath and a mode of writing based on perceptions juxtaposed so that one perception leads directly to another.
Other poets often associated with the Black Mountain are Cid Corman
Cid Corman
Cid Corman was an American poet, translator and editor, most notably of Origin, who was a key figure in the history of American poetry in the second half of the 20th century.-Early life and writing:...
(1924
1924 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* October 10 — Ezra Pound leaves Paris permanently and moves to Rapallo, Italy...
–2004
2004 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* April 1 — Foetry.com Web site is launched for the announced purpose of "Exposing fraudulent contests. Tracking the sycophants...
) and Theodore Enslin
Theodore Enslin
Theodore Vernon Enslin was an American poet associated with Cid Corman's Origin and press. He is widely regarded as one of the most musical of American avant-garde poets. Enslin was born in Chester, Pennsylvania. His father was a biblical scholar and his mother a Latin scholar...
(born 1925
1925 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* T. S. Eliot joins the publishing house of Faber & Gwyer, leaves Lloyds bank....
), though they are perhaps more correctly viewed as direct descendants of the Objectivists. And one-time Black Mountain College resident, composer John Cage
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...
(1912
1912 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore takes a sheaf of his translated works to England, where they impress William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, Robert Bridges, Ernest Rhys, Thomas Sturge Moore, and others...
–1992
1992 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:The Forward Book of Poetry, an annual anthology of best British poems, is published for the first time by the Forward Poetry Trust. By 2003, the publication was selling 5,000 to 7,000 copies a year...
), along with Jackson Mac Low
Jackson Mac Low
Jackson Mac Low was an American poet, performance artist, composer and playwright, known to most readers of poetry as a practioneer of systematic chance operations and other non-intentional compositional methods in his work, which Mac Low first experienced in the musical work of John Cage, Earle...
(1922
1922 in poetry
— Opening lines from The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot, first published this yearNationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Pulitzer Prize for Poetry established...
–2004
2004 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* April 1 — Foetry.com Web site is launched for the announced purpose of "Exposing fraudulent contests. Tracking the sycophants...
), wrote poetry based on chance or aleatory techniques. Inspired by Zen
Zen
Zen is a school of Mahāyāna Buddhism founded by the Buddhist monk Bodhidharma. The word Zen is from the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese word Chán , which in turn is derived from the Sanskrit word dhyāna, which can be approximately translated as "meditation" or "meditative state."Zen...
, Dada
Dada
Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...
and scientific theories of indeterminacy
Indeterminacy
Indeterminacy or underdeterminacy may refer to:* Indeterminacy in computation * aleatoric music and indeterminacy in music.* Statically indeterminate*Indeterminacy a literary term...
, they were to prove to be important influences on the 1970s U.S avant-garde.
The Beats and some of the Black Mountain poets are often considered to have been responsible for the San Francisco Renaissance. However, as previously noted, San Francisco had become a hub of experimental activity from the 1930s thanks to Kenneth Rexroth
Kenneth Rexroth
Kenneth Rexroth was an American poet, translator and critical essayist. He is regarded as a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance, and paved the groundwork for the movement...
and Gleason
Madeline Gleason
Madeline Gleason was a United States poet and dramatist. She is often credited with the founding of the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University...
. Other poets involved in this scene included Charles Bukowski
Charles Bukowski
Henry Charles Bukowski was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles...
(1920
1920 in poetry
— Opening and closing lines of The Second Coming by W. B. Yeats, first published this yearNationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:...
–1994
1994 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Allen Ginsberg sells his papers to Stanford University for $1 million.* C. P...
) and Jack Spicer
Jack Spicer
Jack Spicer was an American poet often identified with the San Francisco Renaissance. In 2009, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer won the American Book Award for poetry.-Life and work:...
(1925
1925 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* T. S. Eliot joins the publishing house of Faber & Gwyer, leaves Lloyds bank....
–1965
1965 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Meic Stephens founds Poetry Wales...
). These poets sought to combine a contemporary spoken idiom with inventive formal experiment.
Jerome Rothenberg
Jerome Rothenberg
Jerome Rothenberg is an internationally known American poet, translator and anthologist who is noted for his work in ethnopoetics and poetry performance.-Early life and work:...
(born 1931
1931 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:*Louis Zukofsky edits the February issue of Poetry magazine. The issue eventually will be recognized as the founding document of the Objectivist poets...
) is well-known for his work in ethnopoetics
Ethnopoetics
Ethnopoetics is a poetic movement and subfield in linguistics, and anthropology. It was coined as a term by Jerome Rothenberg in collaboration with George Quasha in 1968, when Quasha asked Rothenberg to create a term using 'ethnos' and 'poetics' on the model of 'ethnomusicology' for inclusion in...
, but he was also the coiner of the term "deep image
Deep image
Deep image is a term coined by U.S. poets Jerome Rothenberg and Robert Kelly in the second issue of Trobar in 1961. They used it to describe poetry written by them and by Diane Wakoski and Clayton Eshleman....
," which he used to described the work of poets like Robert Kelly
Robert Kelly (poet)
Robert Kelly is an American poet associated with the deep image group.-Early life and education:Kelly was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Samuel Jason and Margaret Rose Kelly née Kane, in 1935. He did his undergraduate studies at the City College of the City University of New York, graduating in 1955...
(born 1935
1935 in poetry
Links to nations or nationalities point to articles with information on that nation's poetry or literature. For example, United Kingdom links to English poetry and Indian links to Indian poetry.-Events:* Canada -- Charles G.D...
), Diane Wakoski
Diane Wakoski
Diane Wakoski is a American poet who is primarily associated with the deep image poets, as well as the confessional and Beat poets of the 1960s.-Biography:...
(born 1937
1937 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Iowa Writers' Workshop founded by Paul Engle at the University of Iowa...
) and Clayton Eshleman
Clayton Eshleman
Clayton Eshleman is an American poet, translator, and editor.-Life:Eshleman has been translating since the early 1960s. He is the recipient of the National Book Award in 1979 for his co-translation of César Vallejo's Complete Posthumous Poetry...
(born 1935
1935 in poetry
Links to nations or nationalities point to articles with information on that nation's poetry or literature. For example, United Kingdom links to English poetry and Indian links to Indian poetry.-Events:* Canada -- Charles G.D...
). Deep Image poetry was inspired by the symbolist
Symbolism (arts)
Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire...
theory of correspondences, in particular the work of Spanish poet Federico García Lorca
Federico García Lorca
Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca was a Spanish poet, dramatist and theatre director. García Lorca achieved international recognition as an emblematic member of the Generation of '27. He is believed to be one of thousands who were summarily shot by anti-communist death squads...
. The term was later taken up and popularized by Robert Bly
Robert Bly
Robert Bly is an American poet, author, activist and leader of the Mythopoetic Men's Movement.-Life:Bly was born in Lac qui Parle County, Minnesota, to Jacob and Alice Bly, who were of Norwegian ancestry. Following graduation from high school in 1944, he enlisted in the United States Navy, serving...
. The Deep Image movement was also the most international, accompanied by a flood of new translations from Latin American and European poets such as Pablo Neruda
Pablo Neruda
Pablo Neruda was the pen name and, later, legal name of the Chilean poet, diplomat and politician Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. He chose his pen name after Czech poet Jan Neruda....
, César Vallejo
César Vallejo
César Abraham Vallejo Mendoza was a Peruvian poet. Although he published only three books of poetry during his lifetime, he is considered one of the great poetic innovators of the 20th century in any language. Thomas Merton called him "the greatest universal poet since Dante"...
and Tomas Tranströmer
Tomas Tranströmer
Tomas Gösta Tranströmer is a Swedish writer, poet and translator, whose poetry has been translated into over 60 languages. Tranströmer is acclaimed as one of the most important Scandinavian writers since the Second World War...
. Some of the poets who became associated with Deep Image are Galway Kinnell
Galway Kinnell
Galway Kinnell is an American poet. He was Poet Laureate of Vermont from 1989 to 1993. An admitted follower of Walt Whitman, Kinnell rejects the idea of seeking fulfillment by escaping into the imaginary world. His best-loved and most anthologized poems are "St...
, James Wright
James Wright (poet)
James Arlington Wright was an American poet.Wright first emerged on the literary scene in 1956 with The Green Wall, a collection of formalist verse that was awarded the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Prize. But by the early 1960s, Wright, increasingly influenced by the Spanish language...
, Mark Strand
Mark Strand
Mark Strand is an American poet, essayist, and translator. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1990. Since 2005, he has been a professor of English at Columbia University.- Biography :...
and W. S. Merwin
W. S. Merwin
William Stanley Merwin is an American poet, credited with over 30 books of poetry, translation and prose. During the 1960s anti-war movement, Merwin's unique craft was thematically characterized by indirect, unpunctuated narration. In the 1980s and 1990s, Merwin's writing influence derived from...
. Both Merwin and California poet Gary Snyder
Gary Snyder
Gary Snyder is an American poet , as well as an essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist . Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry...
would also become known for their interest in environmental and ecological concerns.
The Small Press
Small press
Small press is a term often used to describe publishers with annual sales below a certain level. Commonly, in the United States, this is set at $50 million, after returns and discounts...
poets (sometimes called the mimeograph movement) are another influential and eclectic group of poets who also surfaced in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1950s and are still active today. Fiercely independent editors, who were also poets, edited and published low-budget periodicals and chapbooks of emerging poets who might otherwise have gone unnoticed. This work ranged from formal to experimental. Gene Fowler
Gene Fowler
Gene Fowler was an American journalist, author and dramatist.He was born in Denver, Colorado. When his mother remarried, young Gene took his stepfather's name to become Gene Fowler. Fowler's career had a false start in taxidermy, which he later claimed permanently gave him a distaste for red meat...
, A. D. Winans
A. D. Winans
Allan Davis Winans , known as A. D. Winans, is an American poet, essayist, short story writer and publisher. Born in San Francisco, California, he returned home from Panama in 1958, after serving three years in the military...
, Hugh Fox, street poet and activist Jack Hirschman
Jack Hirschman
Jack Hirschman is an American poet and social activist who has written more than 50 volumes of poetry and essays.-Biography:...
, Paul Foreman, Jim Cohn
Jim Cohn
Jim Cohn is a poet, poetry activist, and spoken word artist in the United States. He was born in Highland Park, Illinois, in 1953. Early poetics and musical influences include Bob Dylan, the subject of a now lost audiotaped for a class project completed in his senior year at Shaker Heights High...
, John Bennett, and F. A. Nettelbeck
F. A. Nettelbeck
Frederick Arthur Nettelbeck was an American poet. In the early 1970s he began work on a long poem that was published in 1979: Bug Death. Bug Death was created using cut-up and collage texts combined with original writing. His literary magazine, This Is Important , published such writers as William S...
are among the many poets who are still actively continuing the Small Press Poets tradition. Many have turned to the new medium of the Web for its distribution capabilities.
Los Angeles poets: Leland Hickman
Leland Hickman
Leland Hickman was an American poet, editor, actor, and literary magazine publisher. During his lifetime, Hickman was best known as the publisher and editor of the influential magazine Temblor which was noted for the publication of many east and west coast language-related poets...
(1934–1991), Holly Prado ( born 1938), Harry Northup
Harry Northup
-Life and career:Northup was born in Amarillo, Texas. He lived in seventeen places by the time he was seventeen, but mostly lived in Sidney, Nebraska, where he graduated from high-school in 1958. From 1958 to 1961, he served in the United States Navy, where he attained the rank of Second Class...
(born 1940), Wanda Coleman
Wanda Coleman
Wanda Coleman is an American poet. She is known as "the L.A. Blueswoman," and "the unofficial poet laureate of Los Angeles."-Biography:...
(born 1946),
Michael C. Ford
Michael C. Ford
Michael C. Ford is a poet, playwright, editor and recording artist.-Bio:Ford in Chicago, Illinois and moved with his parents to Pasadena, California toward the end of World War II. Between 1974 and 1977 he co-edited a prose/poetry journal called The Sunset Palms Hotel...
(born 1939), Kate Braverman
Kate Braverman
Kate Braverman is an American novelist, short story writer, and poet, originally from Los Angeles, California.-Life:Braverman has a BA in Anthropology from University of California, Berkeley and an MA in English from Sonoma State University...
(born 1950), Eloise Klein Healy
Eloise Klein Healy
Eloise Klein Healy is an American poet. She has published five books of poetry and a chapbook. Her collection of poems, Passing, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry and the Audre Lorde Lesbian Poetry Prize from The Publishing Triangle...
, Bill Mohr, Laurel Ann Bogen, met at Beyond Baroque
Literary Arts Center, in Venice, California. They are lyric poets, heavily autobiographical; some are practitioners of the experimental long poem. Mavericks all, their L.A. predecessors are Ann Stanford
Ann Stanford
Ann Stanford was an American poet.-Life:She was graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1938 Phi Beta Kappa, and University of California, Los Angeles, with an M.A. in journalism in 1958, an M.A. in English in 1961, and a Ph.D...
(1916–1987), Thomas McGrath
Thomas McGrath (poet)
Thomas Matthew McGrath, was a celebrated American poet....
(1916–1990), Jack Hirschman
Jack Hirschman
Jack Hirschman is an American poet and social activist who has written more than 50 volumes of poetry and essays.-Biography:...
(born 1933). Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center
Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center
Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center is a literary arts center located at 681 Venice Blvd. Venice, California, founded in 1968.The Center launched its own imprint, Beyond Baroque Books, in 1998, dedicated to emerging, overlooked, out of print, and experimental writing, as well as the history and...
, created by George Drury Smith in 1968, is the central literary arts center in the Los Angeles area.
Just as the West Coast had the San Francisco Renaissance and the Small Press Movement, the East Coast produced the New York School
New York School
The New York School was an informal group of American poets, painters, dancers, and musicians active in the 1950s, 1960s in New York City...
. This group aimed to write poetry that spoke directly of everyday experience in everyday language and produced a poetry of urbane wit and elegance that contrasts with the work of their Beat contemporaries (though in other ways, including their mutual respect for American slang and disdain for academic or "cooked" poetry, they were similar). Leading members of the group include John Ashbery
John Ashbery
John Lawrence Ashbery is an American poet. He has published more than twenty volumes of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. But Ashbery's work still proves controversial...
(born 1927
1927 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* T. S. Eliot enters the Church of England and assumes British citizenship-Canada:...
), Frank O'Hara
Frank O'Hara
Francis Russell "Frank" O'Hara was an American writer, poet and art critic. He was a member of the New York School of poetry.-Life:...
(1926
1926 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* The remains of English war poet Isaac Rosenberg, killed in World War I at the age of 28 and originally buried in a mass grave, are re-interred at Bailleul Road East Cemetery, Plot V, St...
–1966
1966 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Raymond Souster founds the League of Canadian Poets...
), Kenneth Koch
Kenneth Koch
Kenneth Koch was an American poet, playwright, and professor, active from the 1950s until his death at age 77...
(1925
1925 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* T. S. Eliot joins the publishing house of Faber & Gwyer, leaves Lloyds bank....
–2002
2002 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* After Ghazi al-Gosaibi, the Saudi Arabian ambassador to Britain, publishes a poem praising a suicide bomber who had killed himself and two Israelis after blowing himself up in a supermarket; the...
), James Schuyler
James Schuyler
James Marcus Schuyler was an American poet whose awards include the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his 1980 collection The Morning of the Poem...
(1923
1923 in poetry
-- From Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening", first published this year in his collection New HampshireNationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:...
–1991
1991 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Forward Poetry Prize created...
), Barbara Guest
Barbara Guest
Barbara Guest née Barbara Ann Pinson was an American poet and prose stylist. Guest first gained recognition as a member of the first generation New York School of poetry....
(1920
1920 in poetry
— Opening and closing lines of The Second Coming by W. B. Yeats, first published this yearNationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:...
–2006
2006 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* French public notary Patrick Huet unveils Pieces of Hope to the Echo of the World in Lyon...
), Ted Berrigan
Ted Berrigan
-Early life:Berrigan was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on November 15, 1934. After high school, he spent a year at Providence College before joining the U.S. Army in 1954 to serve in the Korean War. After three years in the Army, he finished his college studies at the University of Tulsa in...
(1934
1934 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* The Barretts of Wimpole Street, a film directed by Sidney Franklin, with Norma Shearer as Elizabeth Barrett and Fredric March as Robert Browning; redone in 1957, less successfully*The University...
–1983
1983 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* The Frogmore Press founded by Andre Evans and Jeremy Page at the Frogmore tea-rooms in Folkestone...
), Anne Waldman
Anne Waldman
Anne Waldman is an American poet.Since the 1960s, Waldman has been an active member of the “Outrider” experimental poetry community as a writer, performer, collaborator, professor, editor, scholar, and cultural/political activist....
(born 1945
1945 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes, based on George Crabbe's The Borough...
) and Bernadette Mayer
Bernadette Mayer
Bernadette Mayer is a poet and prose writer. In 1967 she received a BA from New School for Social Research. She has since edited the journal 0 TO 9 with Vito Acconci and the United Artists Press with Lewis Warsh...
(born 1945
1945 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes, based on George Crabbe's The Borough...
). Of this group, John Ashbery, in particular, has emerged as a defining force in recent poetics, and he is regarded by many as the most important American poet since World War II.
American poetry today
The last thirty years in United States poetry have seen the emergence of a number of groups, schools, and trends, whose lasting importance has, necessarily, yet to be demonstrated.Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
, with the most prominent poets working in this field being Andrei Codrescu
Andrei Codrescu
Andrei Codrescu is a Romanian-born American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and commentator for National Public Radio. He was Mac Curdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University from 1984 until his retirement in 2009....
(born 1946
1946 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* W. H. Auden becomes a U.S. citizen...
), Russell Edson
Russell Edson
Russell Edson is an American poet, novelist, writer and illustrator, and the son of the cartoonist-screenwriter Gus Edson....
(born 1935
1935 in poetry
Links to nations or nationalities point to articles with information on that nation's poetry or literature. For example, United Kingdom links to English poetry and Indian links to Indian poetry.-Events:* Canada -- Charles G.D...
) and Maxine Chernoff
Maxine Chernoff
Maxine Chernoff is an American novelist, writer, poet, academic and literary magazine editor. She was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, and attended the University of Illinois at Chicago....
(born 1952
1952 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* November — The Group British poetry movement of the 1950s and 1960s began at Downing College, Cambridge University, Philip Hobsbaum along with two friends — Tony Davis and Neil Morris...
). Performance poetry also emerged from the Beat and hippie
Hippie
The hippie subculture was originally a youth movement that arose in the United States during the mid-1960s and spread to other countries around the world. The etymology of the term 'hippie' is from hipster, and was initially used to describe beatniks who had moved into San Francisco's...
happenings, and the talk-poems of David Antin
David Antin
David Antin is a United States poet and critic. In the late 1960s, Antin began performing extemporaneously, improvising "talk poems" at readings and exhibitions...
(born 1932
1932 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:*W. B. Yeats rents a house in Dublin....
) and ritual events performed by Rothenberg, to become a serious poetic stance which embraces multiculturalism
Multiculturalism
Multiculturalism is the appreciation, acceptance or promotion of multiple cultures, applied to the demographic make-up of a specific place, usually at the organizational level, e.g...
and a range of poets from a multiplicity of cultures. This mirrored a general growth of interest in poetry by African Americans including Gwendolyn Brooks
Gwendolyn Brooks
Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was an American poet. She was appointed Poet Laureate of Illinois in 1968 and Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1985.-Biography:...
(born 1917
1917 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* July — Siegfried Sassoon issues his "Soldier's Declaration" and is sent by the military authorities to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh, where on August 17 Wilfred Owen introduces himself...
), Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou is an American author and poet who has been called "America's most visible black female autobiographer" by scholar Joanne M. Braxton. She is best known for her series of six autobiographical volumes, which focus on her childhood and early adult experiences. The first and most highly...
(born 1928
1928 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Russian poets Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky found OBERIU , an avant-garde grouping of Russian post-Futurist poets in the 1920s-1930s* American poets Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen and Louis...
), Ishmael Reed
Ishmael Reed
Ishmael Scott Reed is an American poet, essayist, and novelist. A prominent African-American literary figure, Reed is known for his satirical works challenging American political culture, and highlighting political and cultural oppression.Reed has been described as one of the most controversial...
(born 1938
1938 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* In Nazi Germany, the Reichsschrifttumskammer banned German expressionist poet Gottfried Benn from further writing.-Australia:* Rex Ingamells and Ian Tilbrook, Conditional Culture, published in...
),Vim Karénin, Nikki Giovanni
Nikki Giovanni
Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni is an American poet, writer, commentator, activist, and educator. Her primary focus is on the individual and the power one has to make a difference in oneself and in the lives of others. Giovanni’s poetry expresses strong racial pride, respect for family, and her...
(born 1943
1943 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* September 12 – Abraham Sutzkever, a Polish Jew writing poetry in Yiddish, escapes the Vilna Ghetto with his wife and hides in the forests. Sutzkever and fellow Yiddish poet Shmerke...
), and Detrick Hughes
Detrick Hughes
Detrick Oliver Hughes, best known as Detrick Hughes, is an American Poet, and spoken word artist. Hughes is known for urban commentary and life expressions offered via the genre of poetry.-Personal:...
(born 1966
1966 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Raymond Souster founds the League of Canadian Poets...
).
Another group of poets, the Language
Language poets
The Language poets are an avant garde group or tendency in United States poetry that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s...
school (or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (magazine)
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E was an avant garde poetry magazine edited by Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews that ran thirteen issues from 1978 to 1981...
, after the magazine that bears that name), have continued and extended the Modernist and Objectivist
Objectivist poets
The Objectivist poets were a loose-knit group of second-generation Modernists who emerged in the 1930s. They were mainly American and were influenced by, amongst others, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams...
traditions of the 1930s. Some poets associated with the group are Lyn Hejinian
Lyn Hejinian
Lyn Hejinian is an American poet, essayist, translator and publisher. She is often associated with the Language poets and is well known for her landmark work My Life , as well as her book of essays, The Language of Inquiry .-Life:Hejinian was born in the San...
, Ron Silliman
Ron Silliman
Ron Silliman is an American poet. He has written and edited over 30 books, and has had his poetry and criticism translated into 12 languages. He is often associated with language poetry. Between 1979 and 2004, Silliman wrote a single poem, The Alphabet...
, Bob Perelman
Bob Perelman
Bob Perelman is an American poet, critic, editor and teacher. He is often associated with the Language School group of poets. Perelman is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.-Life and work:...
and Leslie Scalapino
Leslie Scalapino
Leslie Scalapino was a United States poet, experimental prose writer, playwright, essayist, and editor, sometimes grouped in with the Language poets, though she felt closely tied to the Beat poets. A longtime resident of California's Bay Area, she earned an M.A. in English from the University of...
. Their poems—fragmentary, purposefully ungrammatical, sometimes mixing texts from different sources and idioms—can be by turns abstract, lyrical, and highly comic. Critics of the Language school point out that, by abandoning sense and context, their poetry could just as well be written by the proverbial infinite roomful of monkeys with typewriters.
The Language
Language poets
The Language poets are an avant garde group or tendency in United States poetry that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s...
school includes a high proportion of women, which mirrors another general trend—the rediscovery and promotion of poetry written both by earlier and contemporary women poets. A number of the most prominent African American poets to emerge are women, and other prominent women writers include Adrienne Rich
Adrienne Rich
Adrienne Cecile Rich is an American poet, essayist and feminist. She has been called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century."-Early life:...
(born 1929
1929 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* The Little Review, edited by Margaret Caroline Anderson and Jane Heap, ceases publication* The Dial ceases publication...
), Jean Valentine
Jean Valentine
Jean Valentine is an American poet, and currently the New York State Poet . Her poetry collection, Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965–2003, was awarded the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry....
(born 1934
1934 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* The Barretts of Wimpole Street, a film directed by Sidney Franklin, with Norma Shearer as Elizabeth Barrett and Fredric March as Robert Browning; redone in 1957, less successfully*The University...
) and Amy Gerstler
Amy Gerstler
Amy Gerstler is an American poet. Her books of poetry include Ghost Girl ; Medicine - finalist for the Phi Beta Kappa Poetry Award; Crown of Weeds ; Nerve Storm ; Bitter Angel - winner of the 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award - The True Bride and Dearest Creature, .Described by the Los...
(born 1956
1956 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* February 27—Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath meet in Cambridge...
).
Although poetry in traditional classical forms had mostly fallen out of fashion by the 1960s, the practice was kept alive by poets of great formal virtuosity like James Merrill
James Merrill
James Ingram Merrill was an American poet whose awards include the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Divine Comedies...
(1926
1926 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* The remains of English war poet Isaac Rosenberg, killed in World War I at the age of 28 and originally buried in a mass grave, are re-interred at Bailleul Road East Cemetery, Plot V, St...
–1995
1995 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* February 16 — Announcement that 300 poems by S.T...
), author of the epic poem The Changing Light at Sandover
The Changing Light at Sandover
The Changing Light at Sandover is a 560-page epic poem by James Merrill . Sometimes described as a postmodern apocalyptic epic, the poem was published in three separate installments between 1976 and 1980, and in its entirety in 1982...
(1982
1982 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:*Final edition of This Magazine published....
), Richard Wilbur
Richard Wilbur
Richard Purdy Wilbur is an American poet and literary translator. He was appointed the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1987, and twice received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1957 and again in 1989....
, and British-born San Francisco poet Thom Gunn
Thom Gunn
Thom Gunn, born Thomson William Gunn , was an Anglo-American poet who was praised both for his early verses in England, where he was associated with The Movement and his later poetry in America, even after moving toward a looser, free-verse style...
. The 1980s and 1990s saw a re-emergent interest in traditional form, sometimes dubbed New Formalism
New Formalism
New Formalism is a late-20th and early 21st century movement in American poetry that has promoted a return to metrical and rhymed verse.-Origins and intentions:...
or Neoformalism
New Formalism
New Formalism is a late-20th and early 21st century movement in American poetry that has promoted a return to metrical and rhymed verse.-Origins and intentions:...
. These include poets such as Molly Peacock
Molly Peacock
Molly Peacock is an American-Canadian poet, essayist and creative nonfiction writer. She is an alumna of Binghamton University.-Career:...
, Brad Leithauser
Brad Leithauser
Brad E. Leithauser is an American poet, novelist, essayist, and teacher. After serving as the Emily Dickinson Lecturer in the Humanities at Mount Holyoke College and visiting professor at the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, he is now on faculty at The...
, Dana Gioia
Dana Gioia
-Poetry:It was as a poet that Gioia first began to attract widespread attention in the early 1980s, with frequent appearances in The Hudson Review, Poetry, and The New Yorker. In the same period, he published a number of essays and book reviews...
, Donna J. Stone
Donna J. Stone
Donna J. Stone was an American poet and philanthropist. Several of her poems were published individually, both before and after her death, as well as a book of poetry entitled Wielder of Words: A Collection of Poems. Wielder of Words, edited by Ms...
, Timothy Steele
Timothy Steele
Timothy Steele is an American poet and academic. Born in Burlington, Vermont, in 1948, he is a professor of English at California State University, Los Angeles. Some of Steele's early verse appeared in X. J. Kennedy's Counter/Measures in the early seventies. He went on to become a figure in the...
, and Marilyn Hacker
Marilyn Hacker
Marilyn Hacker is an American poet, translator and critic. She is Professor of English at the City College of New York....
. Some of the more outspoken New Formalists
New Formalism
New Formalism is a late-20th and early 21st century movement in American poetry that has promoted a return to metrical and rhymed verse.-Origins and intentions:...
have declared that the return to rhyme
Rhyme
A rhyme is a repetition of similar sounds in two or more words and is most often used in poetry and songs. The word "rhyme" may also refer to a short poem, such as a rhyming couplet or other brief rhyming poem such as nursery rhymes.-Etymology:...
and more fixed meters
Meter (poetry)
In poetry, metre is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse. Many traditional verse forms prescribe a specific verse metre, or a certain set of metres alternating in a particular order. The study of metres and forms of versification is known as prosody...
to be the new avant-garde. Their critics sometimes associate this traditionalism with the conservative politics of the Reagan
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Wilson Reagan was the 40th President of the United States , the 33rd Governor of California and, prior to that, a radio, film and television actor....
era, noting the recent appointment of Gioia
Dana Gioia
-Poetry:It was as a poet that Gioia first began to attract widespread attention in the early 1980s, with frequent appearances in The Hudson Review, Poetry, and The New Yorker. In the same period, he published a number of essays and book reviews...
as Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts
National Endowment for the Arts
The National Endowment for the Arts is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created by an act of the U.S. Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government. Its current...
. More recent examples of New Formalism
New Formalism
New Formalism is a late-20th and early 21st century movement in American poetry that has promoted a return to metrical and rhymed verse.-Origins and intentions:...
, however, have sometimes crossed over into the more experimental territory of Language poetry
Language poets
The Language poets are an avant garde group or tendency in United States poetry that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s...
, suggesting that both schools are being gradually absorbed into the poetic mainstream.
Haiku
Haiku
' , plural haiku, is a very short form of Japanese poetry typically characterised by three qualities:* The essence of haiku is "cutting"...
has also attracted a community of American poets dedicated to its development as a serious poetic genre in English. The extremely terse Japanese haiku first influenced the work of Pound and the Imagists, and post-war poets such as Kerouac and Richard Wright
Richard Wright (author)
Richard Nathaniel Wright was an African-American author of sometimes controversial novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction. Much of his literature concerns racial themes, especially those involving the plight of African-Americans during the late 19th to mid 20th centuries...
wrote substantial bodies of original haiku in English
Haiku in English
Haiku in English is a development of the Japanese haiku poetic form in the English language.Contemporary haiku are written in many languages, but most poets outside of Japan are concentrated in the English-speaking countries....
. Other poets such as Ginsberg, Snyder, Wilbur, Merwin, and many others have at least dabbled with haiku, often simply as a syllabic form. Starting in 1963, with the founding of the journal American Haiku, poets such as Cor van den Heuvel
Cor Van Den Heuvel
Cor van den Heuvel is an American haiku poet, editor, commentator and archivist.-Biography:Van den Heuvel was born in Biddeford, Maine, and grew up in Maine and New Hampshire. He lives in New York City with his wife Leonia Leigh Larrecq....
, Nick Virgilio
Nick Virgilio
Nicholas Anthony Virgilio was an internationally recognized haiku poet who is credited with helping to popularize the Japanese style of poetry in the United States....
, Raymond Roseliep
Raymond Roseliep
Raymond Roseliep was a poet and contemporary master of the English haiku and Catholic priest. He has been described as "the John Donne of Western haiku."- Early life :...
, John Wills, Anita Virgil, Gary Hotham, Marlene Mountain, Wally Swist
Wally Swist
Wally Swist is an American poet and writer. He is best known for his poems about nature. A spirituality unfettered to any specific religion pervades much of his work. He is also an Independent Scholar.-Biography:...
, Peggy Willis Lyles, George Swede
George Swede
George Swede , is a Canadian psychologist, poet and children's writer who lives in Toronto, Ontario...
, vincent tripi, Jim Kacian
Jim Kacian
James Michael Kacian, an American haiku poet, editor, publisher, and public speaker was born on July 26, 1953, in Worcester, Massachusetts, then adopted and raised in Gardner, Massachusetts. He has lived in London, Nashville, Bridgton and now resides in Winchester, Virginia...
, and others have created significant oeuvres of haiku poetry, evincing continuities with both Transcendentalism
Transcendentalism
Transcendentalism is a philosophical movement that developed in the 1830s and 1840s in the New England region of the United States as a protest against the general state of culture and society, and in particular, the state of intellectualism at Harvard University and the doctrine of the Unitarian...
and Imagism
Imagism
Imagism was a movement in early 20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. The Imagists rejected the sentiment and discursiveness typical of much Romantic and Victorian poetry. This was in contrast to their contemporaries, the Georgian poets,...
and often maintaining an anti-anthropocentric environmental focus on nature during an unparalleled age of habitat destruction and human alienation.
The last two decades have also seen a revival of the Beat poetry spoken word tradition, in the form of the poetry slam. Devised in 1984
1984 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:*December 19 - Philip Larkin turns down the British Poet Laureateship, and Ted Hughes becomes Poet Laureate....
, by Chicago construction worker Marc Smith, these competitive audience-judged poetry performances emphasize a style of writing that is topical, provocative and easily understood. Poetry slam opened the door for a new generation of writers and spoken word
Spoken word
Spoken word is a form of poetry that often uses alliterated prose or verse and occasionally uses metered verse to express social commentary. Traditionally it is in the first person, is from the poet’s point of view and is themed in current events....
performers, including Alix Olson
Alix Olson
Alix Olson is an American poet who works exclusively in spoken word. She graduated from Wesleyan University in 1997 and uses her work to address issues of capitalism, sexism, homophobia, heterosexism, transphobia, misogyny, and patriarchy...
, Apollo Poetry, Taylor Mali
Taylor Mali
Taylor Mali is an American slam poet, humorist, teacher, and voiceover artist.-Life:A 10th-generation native of New York City, Taylor Mali graduated from the Collegiate School, a private school for boys, in 1983. He received a B.A. in English from Bowdoin College in 1987 and an M.A. in...
, and Saul Williams
Saul Williams
Saul Stacey Williams is an American poet, writer, actor and musician known for his blend of poetry and alternative hip hop and for his leading role in the 1998 independent film Slam.-Biography:...
, and inspired hundreds of open mics across the country. Poetry has also become a significant presence on the Web, with a number of new online journals, 'zines, blogs and other websites.
During this time frame there were also major independent voices who defied links to well-known American poetic movements and forms such as poet and literary critic Robert Peters
Robert Peters
Robert Louis Peters is a poet, critic, scholar, playwright, editor, and actor born in an impoverished rural area of northern Wisconsin in 1924. He holds a Ph.D in Victorian literature. His poetry career began in 1967 when his young son Richard died unexpectedly of spinal meningitis...
, greatly influenced by the Victorian English poet Robert Browning
Robert Browning
Robert Browning was an English poet and playwright whose mastery of dramatic verse, especially dramatic monologues, made him one of the foremost Victorian poets.-Early years:...
’s poetic monologues, became reputable for executing his monologic personae like his Mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria
Ludwig II of Bavaria
Ludwig II was King of Bavaria from 1864 until shortly before his death. He is sometimes called the Swan King and der Märchenkönig, the Fairy tale King...
into popular one-man performances.
Robert Pinsky
Robert Pinsky
Robert Pinsky is an American poet, essayist, literary critic, and translator. From 1997 to 2000, he served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Pinsky is the author of nineteen books, most of which are collections of his own poetry...
has a special place in American poetry as he was the Poet Laureate of the United States for three terms. No other poet has been so honored. His "Favorite Poem Project" is unique, inviting all citizens to share their all-time favorite poetic composition and why they love it. He is a professor at Boston University and the poetry editor at Slate. "Poems to Read" is only one demonstration of his masterful poetic vision, joining the word and the common man.
In general, poetry in the contemporary era has been moving out of the mainstream and onto the college and university campus. The growth in the popularity of graduate creative writing
Creative writing
Creative writing is considered to be any writing, fiction, poetry, or non-fiction, that goes outside the bounds of normal professional, journalistic, academic, and technical forms of literature. Works which fall into this category include novels, epics, short stories, and poems...
programs has given poets the opportunity to make a living as teachers. This increased professionalization of poetry, combined with the reluctance of most major book and magazine presses to publish poetry, has meant that, for the foreseeable future at least, poetry may have found its new home in the academy and in small independent journals.
See also
- Academy of American PoetsAcademy of American PoetsThe Academy of American Poets is a non-profit organization dedicated to the art of poetry. The Academy was incorporated as a "membership corporation" in New York State in 1934...
- Chicano poetryChicano poetryChicano poetry is a branch of American literature written by and primarily about Mexican Americans and the Mexican-American way of life in society. The term "Chicano" is a political and cultural term of identity specifically identifying people of Mexican descent who are born in the United States...
- Haiku in EnglishHaiku in EnglishHaiku in English is a development of the Japanese haiku poetic form in the English language.Contemporary haiku are written in many languages, but most poets outside of Japan are concentrated in the English-speaking countries....
- List of national poetries
- List of poets from the United States
- Valley of the PoetsValley of the PoetsValley of the Poets is one description used for the Merrimack River Valley of Massachusetts.Stretching from Amesbury, North Andover and Lawrence in the north to Newburyport at the mouth of the Merrimack, this area of Essex County has spawned and supported some of the most beloved and famous of...
- Biker PoetryBiker poetryBiker poetry is a movement of poetry that grew out of the predominantly American lifestyle of the . The biker culture can be further explored when researching the subject of motorcycle clubs's and has grown considerably since its birth following World War II.Some biker poets argue that biker...
External links
- American English Literature Forum
- Cary Nelson, Ed. (1999–2002) Poet biographies at Modern American Poetry. Retrieved December 5, 2004
- Poet biographies at the Academy of American Poets Captured December 10, 2004
- Poet biographies at the Electronic Poetry Centre Captured December 10, 2004
- Various anthologies of American verse at Bartleby.com Captured December 10, 2004
- Poetry Resource a website for students of poetry
- Baym, Nina, et al. (eds.): The Norton Anthology of American Literature (Shorter sixth edition, 2003). ISBN 0-393-97969-5
- Cavitch, Max, American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman (University of Minnesota PressUniversity of Minnesota PressThe University of Minnesota Press is a university press that is part of the University of Minnesota.Founded in 1925, the University of Minnesota Press is best known for its books in social and cultural thought, critical theory, race and ethnic studies, urbanism, feminist criticism, and media...
, 2007). ISBN 0-8166-4893-X - Hoover, Paul (ed): Postmodern American PoetryPostmodern American PoetryPostmodern American Poetry is a 1994 poetry anthology edited by Paul Hoover; it is a Norton anthology published by W. W. Norton & Company. The introduction identifies the use of postmodern with its early mention by Charles Olson, and identifies the field chosen as experimental poetry from after 1945...
- A Norton Anthology (1994). ISBN 0-393-31090-6 - Moore, Geoffrey (ed): The Penguin Book of American Verse (Revised edition 1983) ISBN 0-14-042313-3