Formal poets

The leading figure of the late 1940s was Robert Lowell, who, influenced by Eliot and such Metaphysical poets as John Donne and Gerard Manley Hopkins, explored his spiritual torments and family history in Lord Weary’s Castle (1946). Other impressive formal poets included Theodore Roethke, who, influenced by William Butler Yeats, revealed a genius for ironic lyricism and a profound empathy for the processes of nature in The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948); the masterfully elegant Richard Wilbur (Things of This World [1956]); two war poets, Karl Shapiro (V-Letter and Other Poems [1944]) and Randall Jarrell (Losses [1948]); and a group of young poets influenced by W.H. Auden, including James Merrill, W.S. Merwin, James Wright, Adrienne Rich, and John Hollander. Although they displayed brilliant technical skill, they lacked Auden’s strong personal voice.

Experimentation and Beat poetry

By the mid-1950s, however, a strong reaction had developed. Poets began to turn away from Eliot and Metaphysical poetry to more-romantic or more-prosaic models such as Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, and D.H. Lawrence. A group of poets associated with Black Mountain College in western North Carolina, including Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Edward Dorn, and Denise Levertov, treated the poem as an unfolding process rather than a containing form. Olson’s Maximus Poems (1953–68) showed a clear affinity with the jagged line and uneven flow of Pound’s Cantos and Williams’s Paterson. Allen Ginsberg’s incantatory, prophetic “Howl” (1956) and his moving elegy for his mother, “Kaddish” (1961), gave powerful impetus to the Beat movement. Written with extraordinary intensity, these works were inspired by writers as diverse as Whitman, the biblical prophets, and English poets William Blake and Christopher Smart, as well as by the dream-logic of the French Surrealists and the spontaneous jazz aesthetic of Ginsberg’s friend the novelist Jack Kerouac. Other Beat poets included Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, and Gary Snyder, a student of Eastern religion who, in Turtle Island (1974), continued the American tradition of nature poetry.

The openness of Beat poetry and the prosaic directness of Williams encouraged Lowell to develop a new autobiographical style in the laconic poetry and prose of Life Studies (1959) and For the Union Dead (1964). Lowell’s new work influenced nearly all American poets but especially a group of “confessional” writers, including Anne Sexton in To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960) and All My Pretty Ones (1962) and Sylvia Plath in the posthumously published Ariel (1965). In her poetry Plath joined an icy sarcasm to white-hot emotional intensity. Another poet influenced by Lowell was John Berryman, whose Dream Songs (1964, 1968) combined autobiographical fragments with minstrel-show motifs to create a zany style of self-projection and comic-tragic lament. Deeply troubled figures, Sexton, Plath, and Berryman all took their own lives. Lowell’s influence can still be discerned in the elegant quatrains and casually brutal details of Frederick Seidel’s Life on Earth (2001), as in the crisp elegiac poems of his award-winning Sunrise (1980).

“Deep image” poets

Through his personal charisma and his magazine The Fifties (later The Sixties and The Seventies), Robert Bly encouraged a number of poets to shift their work toward the individual voice and open form; they included Galway Kinnell, James Wright, David Ignatow, and, less directly, Louis Simpson, James Dickey, and Donald Hall. Sometimes called the “deep image” poets, Bly and his friends sought spiritual intensity and transcendence of the self rather than confessional immediacy. Their work was influenced by the poetry of Spanish and Latin American writers such as Federico García Lorca, Juan Ramón Jiménez, César Vallejo, and Pablo Neruda, especially their surreal association of images, as well as by the “greenhouse poems” (1946–48) and the later meditative poetry of Roethke, with their deep feeling for nature as a vehicle of spiritual transformation. Yet, like their Hispanic models, they were also political poets, instrumental in organizing protest and writing poems against the Vietnam War. Kinnell was a Lawrentian poet who, in poems such as “The Porcupine” and “The Bear,” gave the brutality of nature the power of myth. His vatic sequence, The Book of Nightmares (1971), and the quieter poems in Mortal Acts, Mortal Words (1980) are among the most rhetorically effective works in contemporary poetry.

New directions

James Wright’s style changed dramatically in the early 1960s. He abandoned his stiffly formal verse for the stripped-down, meditative lyricism of The Branch Will Not Break (1963) and Shall We Gather at the River (1968), which were more dependent on the emotional tenor of image than on metre, poetic diction, or rhyme. In books such as Figures of the Human (1964) and Rescue the Dead (1968), David Ignatow wrote brief but razor-sharp poems that made their effect through swiftness, deceptive simplicity, paradox, and personal immediacy. Another poet whose work ran the gamut from prosaic simplicity to Emersonian transcendence was A.R. Ammons. His short poems in Briefings (1971) were close to autobiographical jottings, small glimpses, and observations, but, like his longer poems, they turned the natural world into a source of vision. Like Ignatow, he made it a virtue to seem unliterary and found illumination in the pedestrian and the ordinary.

Both daily life and an exposure to French Surrealism helped inspire a group of New York poets, among them Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, and John Ashbery. Whether O’Hara was jotting down a sequence of ordinary moments or paying tribute to film stars, his poems had a breathless immediacy that was distinctive and unique. Koch’s comic voice swung effortlessly from the trivial to the fantastic. Strongly influenced by Wallace Stevens, Ashbery’s ruminative poems can seem random, discursive, and enigmatic. Avoiding poetic colour, they do their work by suggestion and association, exploring the interface between experience and perception.

Other impressive poets of the postwar years included Elizabeth Bishop, whose precise, loving attention to objects was reminiscent of her early mentor, Marianne Moore. Though she avoided the confessional mode of her friend Lowell, her sense of place, her heartbreaking decorum, and her keen powers of observation gave her work a strong personal cast. In The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), James Merrill, previously a polished lyric poet, made his mandarin style the vehicle of a lighthearted personal epic, in which he, with the help of a Ouija board, called up the shades of all his dead friends, including the poet Auden. In a prolific career highlighted by such poems as Reflections on Espionage (1976), “Blue Wine” (1979), and Powers of Thirteen (1983), John Hollander, like Merrill, displayed enormous technical virtuosity. Richard Howard imagined witty monologues and dialogues for famous people of the past in poems collected in Untitled Subjects (1969) and Two-Part Inventions (1974).

Autobiographical approaches

With the autobiographical knots and parables of Reasons for Moving (1968) and Darker (1970), Mark Strand’s paradoxical language achieved a resonant simplicity. He enhanced his reputation with Dark Harbor (1993) and Blizzard of One (1998). Other strongly autobiographical poets working with subtle technique and intelligence in a variety of forms included Philip Levine, Charles Simic, Robert Pinsky, Gerald Stern, Louise Glück, and Sharon Olds. Levine’s background in working-class Detroit gave his work a unique cast, while Glück and Olds brought a terrific emotional intensity to their poems. Pinsky’s poems were collected in The Figured Wheel (1996). He became a tireless and effective advocate for poetry during his tenure as poet laureate from 1997 to 2000. With the sinuous sentences and long flowing lines of Tar (1983) and Flesh and Blood (1987), C.K. Williams perfected a narrative technique founded on distinctive voice, sharply etched emotion, and cleanly observed detail. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Repair (2000). Adrienne Rich’s work gained a burning immediacy from her lesbian feminism. The Will to Change (1971) and Diving into the Wreck (1973) were turning points for women’s poetry in the wake of the 1960s.

That decade also enabled some older poets to become more loosely autobiographical and freshly imaginative, among them Stanley Kunitz, Robert Penn Warren, and W.S. Merwin. The 1960s invigorated gifted Black poets such as Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Michael S. Harper. It formed the background for the work of the young poets of the 1980s, such as Edward Hirsch, Alan Shapiro, Jorie Graham, Cathy Song, and Rita Dove, whose sequence about her grandparents, Thomas and Beulah, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1987. Graham’s increasingly abstract and elusive work culminated in The Dream of the Unified Field (1995), selected from five previous volumes. The AIDS crisis inspired My Alexandria (1993) by Mark Doty, The Man with Night Sweats (1992) by Thom Gunn, and a superb memoir, Borrowed Time (1988), and a cycle of poems, Love Alone (1988), by the poet Paul Monette. With razor-sharp images and finely honed descriptive touches, Louisiana-born Yusef Komunyakaa emerged as an impressive African American voice in the 1990s. He wrote about his time as a soldier and war correspondent in Vietnam in Dien Cai Dau (1988) and received the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for his volume of new and selected poems Neon Vernacular (1993). His poems were collected in Pleasure Dome (2001). Billy Collins found a huge audience for his engagingly witty and conversational poetry, especially that collected in Sailing Alone Around the Room (2001), published the year he became poet laureate.