Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 A new century: from the genteel poets to Robinson and Frost
- 2 Modernist expatriates: Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
- 3 Lyric modernism: Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane
- 4 Gendered modernism
- 5 William Carlos Williams and the modernist American scene
- 6 From the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts movement
- 7 The New Criticism and poetic formalism
- 8 The confessional moment
- 9 Lyric as meditation
- 10 The New American Poetry and the postmodern avant-garde
- Notes
- Glossary
- Index
10 - The New American Poetry and the postmodern avant-garde
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 A new century: from the genteel poets to Robinson and Frost
- 2 Modernist expatriates: Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
- 3 Lyric modernism: Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane
- 4 Gendered modernism
- 5 William Carlos Williams and the modernist American scene
- 6 From the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts movement
- 7 The New Criticism and poetic formalism
- 8 The confessional moment
- 9 Lyric as meditation
- 10 The New American Poetry and the postmodern avant-garde
- Notes
- Glossary
- Index
Summary
American poetry in the late 1950s and early 1960s was divided between two distinct poetic communities and two very different conceptions of what poetry should be. On the one hand, American poetry was still dominated by the mainstream lyric as represented by the work of poets like James Merrill, Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, and other members of the established literary culture. On the other hand, there was a growing body of work by poets who defined themselves as a new poetic counterculture. Where the poetic mainstream still regarded Eliot and Auden as their primary poetic models, the new avant-garde modeled itself on an experimental tradition of poets whose work could hardly be read by the methods of the New Critics: Pound, Williams, Gertrude Stein, and Louis Zukofsky. By the end of the 1950s, this postwar avant-garde was just beginning to be recognized by readers and publishers.
The decisive literary event of 1960 was the publication of an anthology entitled The New American Poetry. Published by Grove Press and edited by Donald Allen, the anthology would for the first time bring together many of the innovative young writers who were to constitute the next significant generation of avant-garde poetry. The New American Poetry was the most important anthology of American poetry to be published in the second half of the twentieth century.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Poetry , pp. 189 - 209Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003