Allen Ginsberg 19261997
Allen Ginsberg was as renowned for his poetry readings as for his poetry itself, although his work had an important impact upon his own and subsequent generations and reached a wide readership. He was at the center of the 1950s Beat Movement that included William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Gregory Corso. He was probably the best known American poet of the second half of the century. Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey, and grew up in nearby Paterson. His father Louis was a high-school...
New York Albert and Charles Boni 1914
Des Imagistes, an anthology of poems by various figures associated with Ezra Pound's London circle before the First World War, was a pivotal volume in a number of ways. The book established some important relationships, and foreshadowed the direction of international modernist poetry while at the same time providing a strategy for a more nativist modernism in the United States. While most of the poems and poets of Des Imagistes were familiar to readers of avant-garde magazines in London, and...
Amiri Baraka b 1934
Amiri Baraka was born Everett LeRoy Jones in Newark, New Jersey, and adopted the spelling LeRoi in 1951. He took his Muslim name in 1967, a period when he dedicated his poetry and political activity to Black Nationalism. His poetry, as well as his plays, novels, essays, and short stories, speak with a power and commitment that have made him a prominent figure for more than 35 years. Baraka sees art as a weapon, and a weapon of revolution, although he now sees that revolution in Marxist rather...
American Poetry and a Century of Wars
Many essays on twentieth-century poetry and war are likely not to mention any examples of American poetry. Nevertheless, American poets have fought in and responded to many of the major conflicts of the century, and a case can be made that war, and the subject of war poetry, has been a significant concern for a number of American poets. The United States entered the First World War late, in 1917, and did not have such poets as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Isaac Rosenberg on the front...
Garden City NY Doubleday Co 1948
The Lost Son and Other Poems, Theodore Roethke's second book, was published seven years after his first, Open House. In this 1948 volume Roethke developed a poetic style that moved away from the more formal lyrical mode of his earlier work, finding a way to express interior monologues both intense and descriptive. Assessments differ over whether the book marks Roethke's finest achievement in the form, or whether the book serves as precursor to the important work to follow. The years around the...
New York Harcourt Brace 1922
Claude McKay's 1922 Harlem Shadows was a pioneer volume of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance, appearing before the first books by Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Sterling Brown. When he appeared prominently in Alain Locke's important anthology The New Negro in 1925, McKay was a good deal older than most of the other poets represented. And yet the 1922 volume is a curious one to hold such a position in the vanguard. McKay's patrons back in his native Jamaica, where he published his...
Rita Dove b 1952
Rita Dove's poetry encompasses historical events, mythic contexts, and deeply personal poems about her immediate and past family history. The connection is that the poems seek to understand history through the lives of individuals, seeing the points of view, dreams, and injustices that make up individual lives and the culture that surrounds them, in a poetry that is finally about tolerance and patience, the importance of language, understanding, and the responsibility of the poet to help stress...
Brooks
Selected as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Her poetry covers a wide range of forms and styles - including free verse, dramatic monologues, lyrics, and objective presentations driven by a controlled but powerful rage. The poetry is always rooted in the concrete experience and the localities of the characters whose stories she tells. The culture in which the characters of her poetry live out their lives is by turns oppressive, dynamic, and dangerous. Within this culture, the...
New York Horace Liveright 1930
Horace Liveright published Crane's The Bridge, the poet's second book, a month after the limited edition was published in Paris by the Black Sun Press. The critical response was mixed, and Crane was especially disappointed by the reservations of some critics whom he considered friends, such as Allen Tate. But most reviewers, whatever their final assessment of Crane's achievement in the poem, acknowledged the ambitious scope of its lyric and thematic intent, and treated Crane as an important...
Anthologies Polemical and Historical
Anthologies have always served a valuable purpose in bringing back into print poems that have appeared in the more ephemeral media of newspapers, magazines, or journals, putting the poems between hard - or, later in the century, soft - covers, at least as a bridging operation until the poet published the poem in his or her next collection. Such was the value, for example, of the annual Anthology of Magazine Verse and Year Book of American Poetry edited by William Stanley Braithwaite from 1913...
Pittsburgh Carnegie Mellon University Press 1986
Dove's sequence of poems based upon the lives of her maternal grandparents won her the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1987, and was only her third book. In direct but evocative concrete detail, the poems tell the story of the courage amidst the hardship and racial injustice of two of the many blacks among those who traveled from the south to the industrial north for work in the early and mid-century, in this case to the tire city of Akron, Ohio. Dove has said that one concern was to show the...
Adrienne Rich
Demanding that poetry be committed to necessary change, and that it be recognized as coming out of and connecting to its cultural moment and that moment's true history. Rich began to date her poems in 1956 to emphasize this last point. In her poem North American Time (1983) she writes Poetry never stood a chance of standing outside history. One line typed twenty years ago can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint And in Poetry I (1985) she imagines someone young in anger asking Can you remember...
Boston Houghton Mifflin 1946
Writing poems was always a slow process for Elizabeth Bishop. Although she had published prose and poetry in college magazines at Vassar, which she attended from 1930 to 1934, her first book of poems, North & South, did not appear until 1946. She worried about the thinness of the volume - it contained only 32 poems - and kept promising the publishers additional poems, which in the event were not completed in time. She also worried about the poems appearing to take no account of the recently...
Edwin Arlington Robinson 18691935
Robinson has a claim to be the most important immediate forerunner of modernist American poetry, although he appears to have influenced few later poets, and much of the later work in his 20 published volumes is probably more respected than it is read. He remained throughout his career committed to formal qualities of verse, but the sometimes bleak, always questioning direction of his poetry marks his work as modern, and he brought some novelist devices into American poetry through his...
William Carlos Williams 18831963
William Carlos Williams, like Wallace Stevens, had a successful professional career outside of poetry, in Williams's case as a small-town physician in Rutherford, New Jersey. The two were also both members of the Others group centered around New York City at the time of the First World War, and remained lifelong if intermittent correspondents and generally respected each other's work. But whereas recognition and awards began to come Stevens's way from the 1940s, Williams had to wait until the...
The Twentieth Century American Long Poem
The long poem in twentieth-century American poetry has taken a variety of forms and raised a number of critical issues, including the question of exactly how a long poem might be defined, and what principles of coherence it could and should have. These questions became more difficult to answer as the century progressed. Certainly, however, the long poem retained for many poets its traditional status as important for a poet for write, although the New Critical poets of the 1940s and 1950s are an...
HD Hilda Doolittle
Imagiste, along with some of Aldington's, to Poetry in Chicago, where they were published by Harriet Monroe. H.D.'s poems then began to appear in The Egoist, where Aldington served as literary editor until he went off to war, upon which H.D. herself took over the position, to be followed by T. S. Eliot. H.D. married Aldington in 1913, but the marriage was not successful. A daughter, Perdita, born in 1919, was not Aldington's, and in that year the couple split...
The Romantic Legacy and the Genteel Tradition
At the beginning of the century the American poetry that found most favor in general circulation magazines, and in magazines devoted entirely to poetry, largely conformed to the expectations firmly established in the nineteenth century as to what a poem should be about, and how it should express itself. Rhymed lyric poetry was to the fore, and such poetry was directly addressed to the reader, usually expressed the feelings of the poet - feelings that were heightened in some way - and, even if...
New York Harper Row 1981
The Country Between Us was Carolyn Forch 's second book, following her Gathering the Tribes published in the Yale Younger Poets series in 1976. The earlier book is composed of personal, often sensual, lyrics, but the second marked a political direction in Forch 's poetry that has characterized all of her work since. The book, which was awarded the Lamont Poetry Prize of the Academy of American Poets, is divided into three parts In Salvador, 197880, Reunion, and Ourselves or Nothing - the third...
Rebellion in the Fifties and Sixties The Two Anthologies
The formal, crafted style endorsed by the New Criticism continued to shape the poetry of some important poets into the 1950s, including Allen Tate, Richard Wilbur, Howard Nemerov, and Melvin Tolson. The early poetry of John Berryman, Adrienne Rich, and Robert Lowell was also in this style, but they, along with a number of other poets, began to regard it as too constricting and artificial and their later work moved in different directions. The divisions emerging in American poetry in the 1950s...
San Francisco City Lights Books 1956
City Lights Books developed as a project of the City Lights bookstore. The store had opened in June 1953 at the beginning of what would become known as the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. Run by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, City Lights was the first bookstore in America devoted to selling quality paperbacks, and once Ferlinghetti had bought out his original partner, Peter Martin, he began publishing a paperback series titled The Pocket Poets. Allen Ginsberg's Howl and other Poems was the...
Paris Contact Publishing Company 1923
William Carlos Williams did not achieve wide recognition until the late 1940s with the publication of the first volumes of his long poem Paterson. By then he was in his sixties and close to retiring from his medical practice. He continued to publish for another dozen years, his final volume, Pictures from Brueghel, winning him a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1963. In the 1950s, and for some years following, Williams's later work was seen as his finest achievement, the culmination of a career...
Transatlantic Connections
Pound, writing from England, had urged Williams to acquaint himself with the London writers in order to modernize himself. The letter, and the reading list that accompanied Pound's advice, were part of his tireless attempts to bring news of the London avant-garde to his home country, which he saw as hopelessly provincial. But in the years leading up to the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914, in the war years themselves, and in the decade that followed, the United States increasingly became more...
Denise Levertov 19231997
Denise Levertov was born in Ilford, England, a suburb of London, and became a US citizen in 1955. Her mother was Welsh, and her father of Russian Jewish ancestry who converted to Christianity and became an Anglican priest. Levertov's work in the 1950s responded to the examples of William Carlos Williams and of the Black Mountain College poets, especially Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan, but by the 1960s she had found her own powerful voice. Her poetry combines visionary mysticism with a focus...