American poetry

Title page, second (posthumous) edition of Anne Bradstreet's poems, 1678

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).[1] 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 strengthened early in the 20th century to the extent that Ezra Pound and
T. S. Eliot were perhaps the most influential modernist English-language poets in the
period during World War I.[2] 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 Americans, Hispanics, Chicanos and other cultural groupings.

[edit] Poetry in the colonies

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).

Phillis Wheatley, a slave, wrote poetry during the Colonial Period.

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.[3] 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.[4]

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,[5] 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.[6][7]

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.[8] 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. The
work of Rebecca Hammond Lard (1772–1855), although quite old, still apply to life in
today's world. She writes about nature, not only the nature of environment, but also the
nature of humans.[9]

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.

[edit] Postcolonial poetry

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1873.

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
prairies and forests. 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), Sidney Lanier (1842–1881), and James Whitcomb Riley (1849–1916). 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.[10]

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.[citation
needed]

[edit] Whitman and Dickinson

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 stanzas, derived from Protestant hymnals.

Walt Whitman

Emily Dickinson

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 idioms—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.[11]
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 1910s and 20's.

[edit] Modernism and after

This new idiom, combined with a study of 19th-century French poetry, 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.

Ezra Pound
T.S. Eliot

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 rhythms. Cummings remains notable
for his experiments with typography and evocation of a spontaneous, childlike 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 (1889–1948), 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.

[edit] World War II and after

Archibald Macleish called John Gillespie Magee, Jr. "the first poet of the war".[12]

World War II saw the emergence of a new generation of poets, many of whom were
influenced by Wallace Stevens and 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.

Denise Levertov

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.[citation needed] 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. [citation needed]
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 in poetry1927), Frank O'Hara (1926–1966), Kenneth
Koch (1925–2002), James Schuyler (1923–1991), Barbara Guest (1920–2006), Ted
Berrigan (1934–1983), Anne Waldman (born in 1945) and Bernadette Mayer (born in
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.

[edit] American poetry today

The last forty 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.

Nikki Giovanni

The 1970s saw a revival of interest in surrealism, with the most prominent poets working
in this field being Andrei Codrescu (born in 1946), Russell Edson (born in 1935) and
Maxine Chernoff (born in 1952). Performance poetry also emerged from the Beat and
hippie happenings, the talk-poems of David Antin (born in 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, including Puerto
Rican born poets Giannina Braschi (born in 1953) and Julia de Burgos (born in 1914)
who lived and wrote in New York City about the plight of the Hispanic-American
immigrants.[13] This mirrored a general growth of interest in poetry by African Americans
including Gwendolyn Brooks (born in 1917), Maya Angelou (born in 1928), Ishmael
Reed (born in 1938), Vim Karénin, Nikki Giovanni (born in 1943), and Detrick Hughes
(born in 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 (1929–
2012), Jean Valentine (born in 1934) and Amy Gerstler (born in 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, 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, which was born of the Nuyorican movement led by New
York based Puerto Rican poets Pedro Pietri, Giannina Braschi, and Miguel Piñero.[14]
Chicago construction worker Marc Smith turned urban poetry performance into audience-
judged competitions in 1984. Poetry slams 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.[15]

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"[16] 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.[