American poetry
Much of the American poetry published between 1910 and 1945 remains lost in the pages of small circulation political periodicals, particularly the ones on the far left, destroyed by librarians during the 1950s McCarthy era.
Louise Glück and Bob Dylan have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature As England's contact with the Americas increased after the 1490s, English 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 and distributed in London by her brother-in-law, Rev.
[4] Then in May 1627, Thomas Morton of Merrymount – a Devon-born West Country outdoorsman, attorney at law, man of letters and colonial adventurer – raised a maypole to celebrate and foster success at his fur-trading settlement and nailed a "Poem" and "Song" (one a densely literary manifesto on how European 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).
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.
A 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.
[citation needed] 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.
The name "Fireside Poets" is derived from that popularity: their general adherence to poetic convention (standard forms, regular meter, and rhymed stanzas) made their body of work particularly suitable for being memorized and recited in school and at home, where it was a source of entertainment for families gathered around the fire.
[citation needed] Other notable poets to emerge in the early and middle 19th century include Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), Sidney Lanier (1842–1881), and James Whitcomb Riley (1849–1916).
Edgar Allan Poe was a unique poet during this time, brooding over themes of the macabre and dark, connecting his poetry and aesthetic vision to his philosophical, psychological, moral, and cosmological theories.
[20] The development of these idioms, as well as 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), Carl Sandburg (1878–1967), and Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950).
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.
But from Whitman and Dickinson 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 1920s.
As Colin Falck noted, "To the Whitmanian heritage of cadenced free verse she [Millay] brings the greater reflective tightness of Robinson Jeffers.
He believed 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.
The cerebral and skeptical Romantic Stevens helped revive the philosophical lyric,[25] 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.
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.
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).
In contrast, the Beat poets, who included such figures as Jack Kerouac (1922–1969), Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997), Gregory Corso (1930–2001), Joanne Kyger (1934-2017), Gary Snyder (born 1930), Diane Di Prima (1934-2020), Amiri Baraka (1934-2014) and Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919-2020), were distinctly raw.
Reflecting, sometimes in an extreme form, the 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.
This in turn influenced the works of Michael McClure (1932-2020), Kenneth Irby (1936–2015), and Ronald Johnson (1935–1998), poets from the Midwestern United States who moved to San Francisco, and in so doing extended the influence of the Black Mountain school geographically westward; their participation in the poetic circles of San Francisco can be seen as partly forming the basis for what would later be known as "Language poetry.
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.
Deep Image poetry was inspired by the symbolist theory of correspondences, in particular the work of Spanish poet Federico García Lorca.
The Deep Image movement was 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.
Gene Fowler, A.D. Winans, Hugh Fox, street poet and activist Jack Hirschman, Paul Foreman, Jim Cohn, John Bennett, and F.A.
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.
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.
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, Michael Dylan Welch, 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.
During the contemporary time frame, there were 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.
On October 13, 2016, the Nobel committee announced that it would be awarding Bob Dylan the literature prize "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition".
[38] The New York Times reported: "Mr. Dylan, 75, is the first musician to win the award, and his selection on Thursday is perhaps the most radical choice in a history stretching back to 1901.
