[ اللغة الانجليزية ] : ~||Last semester of Senior Year ||~

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المشاركة الأصلية كتبت بواسطة توفيه

بنات احس يبيلي كذاا


موب قادره اذاكر هالتاريخ اللغه
لان دكتور جديد بالنسبه لي ومنهج جديد

ماعرف اسلوب الدكتور
واحسه كثير المنهج يمه:cry111:

ان شاء الله اذا جيت الثلاثاء واحضر المراجعه افهم شسالفه

ياحياتي لا تشيلين هم المادة صح طويلة بس صدقيني مع احمد ابراهيم تجنن هو قال راح يجيب سؤال ترجمة وحدد لنا ثلاث نصوص بس نحفظها, وسؤال تعاريف, وسؤال مقالي ياراح يكون عن البحث الي سويناه او من المنهج , انتي الي عليك تسوينه تمسكين الملزمة وكل يوم لخصي تقريبا 3 فصول ويوم الاختبار ذاكري الي انتي ملخصته بس ...

[shwshw]

بنات الي اختبروا ترجمة مع دكتورة سلوى كان الاختبار من انجليزي لعربي ؟ ولا العكس ؟

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المشاركة الأصلية كتبت بواسطة تولآيّ

بنات تكفون كلاس حصه البويتري الي بكرا الي من الساعه 10 لين 11 ونص
عندهم كويز بكرا ؟؟ او شي تكفون افيدوني لاني كنت غايبه الاسبوع الماضي ومادري

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بنات ايش احضر في ماده الحضاره مع دكتور صلاح


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[kawthar Y]

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Translation
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Poetry
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Health Education
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History of English Language
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[ms.2012]

An Introduction to American Poetry

List of Some Noted American Poets

I INTRODUCTION
American Literature: Poetry, verse in English that originates from the territory now known as the United States. American poetry differs from British or English poetry chiefly because America’s culturally diverse traditions exerted pressure on the English language, altering its tones, diction, forms, and rhythms until something identifiable as American English emerged. American poetry is verse written in this altered form of English.
The term American poetry is in some ways a contradiction. America represents a break with tradition and the invention of a new culture separate from the European past. Poetry, on the other hand, represents tradition itself, a long history of expression carried to America from a European past. American poetry thus embodies a clearly identifiable tension between tradition and innovation, past and future, and old forms and new forms. American poetry remains a hybrid, a literature that tries to separate itself from the tradition of English literature even as it adds to and alters that tradition.
American poetry could be defined differently, however, especially if it is not limited to poetry in English. Without that qualifying term, American poetry has its origins in the rich oral traditions of Native American cultures. Each of these cultures developed complex symbolic tales of the origins and history of its people, akin to epic poems in the European tradition. These tales were performed as part of rituals and passed on through memorization from one generation to the next. Some of them have been translated into English. Yet these works tend to vanish from most histories of American poetry because they were part of ongoing performances based in spoken rather than written language. Moreover, their rhythms and sounds are bound to the native languages in which they evolved. Similarly, there is a rich heritage of Spanish-language poetry written in America from the time of the earliest Spanish explorers to current Hispanic and Chicano and Chicana poetry. American poetry traditions also have thrived in many other languages, from Chinese to Yiddish, as the result of centuries of immigration to the United States.
But most people mean by American poetry those rhythmic, memorable, and significant verse forms composed in English in the United States or in lands that became the United States. This overview of more than 300 years of American poetry tracks the creation of a national literature identifiably different from that of any other nation. In the 1600s colonial poets responded to the challenges of their new world and expressed the hopes and fears of Europeans who settled there. In the years following the Declaration of Independence (1776) American poets created a patriotic poetry as a defining literature for the new nation. A powerful new kind of poetry flowered in the mid- and late 19th century among the first poets to be born and raised as actual citizens of the United States. American modernist poetry emerged in the first half of the 20th century, as many writers sought to subdue nationalist impulses in their poetry and define themselves as part of an international advance in the arts. Finally, in the second half of the 20th century a multiplicity of diverse voices redefined American poetry. For information on American prose or drama, see American Literature: Prose; American Literature: Drama.
II BEGINNINGS: 1600S THROUGH THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION (1775-1783)
From the beginning until well into the 19th century, widespread agreement existed that American poetry would be judged by British standards, and that poetry written in America was simply British poetry composed on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Yet in responding to British styles, American poetry took inspiration from the new physical environment and the evolving culture of the colonies. In the process it recorded a subtle shift from poets who were dependent imitators to poets who spoke for and in the language of the new nation.
A New England Puritan Poetry
Puritans who had settled in New England were the first poets of the American colonies. Most Puritan poets saw the purpose of poetry as careful Christian examination of their lives; and private poems, like Puritan diaries, served as a forum where the self could be measured daily against devout expectations. Puritan leaders deemed poetry a safe and inspiriting genre, since they considered the Bible itself to be God’s poetry. Thus poetry became the literary form that allowed devout believers to express, with God’s help, divine lessons. Other genres, such as drama and fiction, were considered dangerous, capable of generating lies and leading to idle entertainment instead of moral uplift.
B Southern Satire
Colonial poets of the 18th century still looked to British poets of their time, such as Alexander Pope and Ambrose Philips. Both were masters of pastoral verse—poetry that celebrated an idealized English countryside and rural life—and of satirical verse. Initially, this satiric tone was more prevalent in the southern colonies than in New England.
Two poets from the Maryland Colony, Ebenezer Cook and Richard Lewis, wrote accomplished satirical poems based on British pastoral models. But their poems cleverly undermine those models by poking fun at the British. Cook’s The Sot-Weed Factor (1708) is a long narrative poem written in rhyming couplets that mocks Americans as a backward people but aims its satire most effectively at the poem’s narrator, who is a British snob. Americans may be laughable, Cook suggests, but they are not as ridiculous as the British with their ignorance and prejudice about Americans.
C Revolutionary Era Patriotic Poetry
A penchant for satire continued in the American Revolutionary era, when American poetry was centered on Connecticut and a group of poets known as the Connecticut Wits (or Hartford Wits). This group, most of whose members were associated with Yale University, included David Humphreys, John Trumbull, and Joel Barlow. Along with other writers they produced The Anarchiad (1786-1787), a mock epic poem warning against the chaos that would ensue if a strong central government, as advocated by the Federalists, was not implemented in the United States. American poets used the British literary model of the mock epic as a tool to satirize and criticize British culture. Trumbull’s mock epic M’Fingal (1775-1782) lampooned the British Loyalists during the Revolution.
Revolutionary-era poets composed more than satire, however. They felt an urgency to produce a serious—even monumental—national poetry that would celebrate the country’s new democratic ideals. Epic poems, they believed, would confer importance and significance on the new nation’s culture. Educated in the classics, these poets were also lawyers, ministers, and busy citizens of the new republic. They did not bother with the question whether a new nation required new forms of poetry, but were content to use traditional forms to write about new subjects in order to create the first truly American poetry. Whereas traditional epics celebrated past accomplishments of a civilization, American epics by necessity celebrated the future. Examples of such epics include Barlow’s The Vision of Columbus (1787), later revised as The Columbiad (1807); Greenfield Hill (1794) by clergyman Timothy Dwight; and The Rising Glory of America (1772) by Philip Freneau. All offered the prospect of America as the future culmination of civilization.
Freneau, the most accomplished patriot poet, was not associated with Connecticut. He was born in New York City and later lived in a variety of places. His range of experience and clarity of expression made him a very popular poet, widely regarded as the first poet who spoke for the entire country. Much of his poetry focused on America’s future greatness, but he also wrote on other subjects, including the beauties of the natural world. Such lyric poems as “The Wild Honey Suckle” (1786) and “On a Honey Bee” (1809), can be seen as the first expressions in American poetry of a deep spiritual engagement with nature.
D Early Black Voices
Slavery was the great contradiction in the new nation that had affirmed in its Declaration of Independence a basic belief that “all men are created equal” and have “inalienable” rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Many of the country’s early leaders believed that African slaves were intellectually inferior to whites. Phillis Wheatley [1753?-1784], a Boston slave, challenged those racist assumptions early on. Brought to America as a young girl, Wheatley was educated by her masters in English and Latin. She became an accomplished poet, and her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) was published in England. Like the white patriot poets, Wheatley wrote in 18th-century literary forms. But her highly structured and elegant poetry nonetheless expressed her frustration at enslavement and desire to reach a heaven where her color and social position would no longer keep her from singing in her full glory.
Wheatley’s poetry, along with that of other slaves, begins a powerful African American tradition in American poetry. In 1746 Lucy Terry, a slave in Massachusetts who was also educated by her owner, wrote the first poem to be published by a black American: "Bar's Fight." The poem, which was not published until 1855, describes the victims and survivors of a Native American raid against settlers. It was followed by Jupiter Hammon’s biblically inspired, hymnlike verse, “An Evening Thought; Salvation by Christ, with Penitential Cries” (1761).
Born at the time of the founding of the nation, African American poetry retained its concern with the burning issues of the American Revolution, including liberty, independence, equality, and identity. It also expressed African American experiences of divided loyalties. Just as white Americans experienced divided loyalties in the republic’s early years—unsure whether their identity derived from the new country or from their European past—so too did African Americans, who looked always to their African past and to their problematic American present.
III THE 19TH CENTURY
The 19th century began with high hopes for poetic accomplishment. The first comprehensive anthologies of American poetry appeared in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s. In the first half of the century poets sought to entertain, to inform, and to put into memorable language America’s history, myths, manners, and topography, but they did not seek to forge a radical new poetic tradition. Their poetry built upon tradition, and they met the first great goal of American poetry: that it be able to compete in quality, intelligence, and breadth with British poetry. But just as they achieved this goal, poetic aspirations began to change. By the mid-19th century the new goal for American poetry was to create something very different from British poetry. Innovative poets, particularly Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, led the way.
A The Fireside Poets
William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and John Greenleaf Whittier constituted a group sometimes called the Fireside Poets. They earned this nickname because they frequently used the hearth as an image of comfort and unity, a place where families gathered to learn and tell stories. These tremendously popular poets also were widely read around the hearthsides of 19th-century American families. The consensus of American critics was that the Fireside Poets first put American poetry on an equal footing with British poetry.
B Abolitionist Poetry
During the 19th century, black and white poets wrote about the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of slaves. George Moses Horton, a North Carolina slave, was the first Southern black poet. Joshua McCarter Simpson was a black poet from Ohio whose memorable songs of emancipation were set to popular tunes and sung by fugitive slaves. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper wrote passionate abolitionist and early feminist poems that called both blacks and whites to action against oppression. Black poets appropriated the language and style of the predominantly white, mainstream patriotic America. In using mainstream language, these black poets showed their white audiences how differently songs of liberty and freedom sounded from the perspective of those who had been left out of the “all men are created equal” equation. Black poets also often expressed themselves with irony and ambiguity so that different audiences heard different intonations and meanings, a double voicing that would become central to later African American writing.
White abolitionist poets, from their more privileged social position, could afford to be more confrontational about the issue of slavery. Whittier was a fiery abolitionist whose numerous antislavery poems were collected in Voices of Freedom (1846). Longfellow’s Poems on Slavery (1842) forms a long-forgotten but illuminating contribution to the tradition of American political poems. Lowell also was an ardent abolitionist.
C Mid-Century Innovation
Many 20th-century critics date the beginnings of a uniquely American poetry to the appearance of Leaves of Grass (1855) by Walt Whitman. Whitman drew a good deal of inspiration from New England writer Ralph Waldo Emerson. In his 1844 essay “The Poet,” Emerson called for a radically new American poet who would make poetry out of the rough experience of America and break free of conventional patterns of writing and thinking. Emerson could not answer his own call; his poetry, always challenging and often cryptic and highly symbolic, tended to fall into conventional rhythms and remained aloof from day-to-day reality. After reading Leaves of Grass, Emerson realized that Whitman might be the first truly original American poet: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career,” he wrote to Whitman.
D Walt Whitman
A newspaper reporter and editor, Whitman first published poems that were traditional in form and conventional in sentiment. In the early 1850s, however, he began experimenting with a mixture of the colloquial diction and prose rhythms of journalism; the direct address and soaring voice of oratory; the repetitions and catalogues of the Bible; and the lyricism, music, and drama of popular opera. He sought to write a democratic poetry—a poetry vast enough to contain all the variety of burgeoning 19th-century American culture. In 1855 Whitman published the first edition of Leaves of Grass, the book he would revise and expand for the rest of his life. The first edition contained only 12 untitled poems. The longest poem, which he eventually named “Song of Myself,” has become one of the most discussed poems in all of American poetry. In it Whitman constructs a democratic “I,” a voice that sets out to celebrate itself and the rapture of its senses experiencing the world, and in so doing to celebrate the unfettered potential of every individual in a democratic society. Emerging from a working class family, Whitman grew up in New York City and on nearby Long Island. He was one of the first working-class American poets and one of the first writers to compose poetry that is set in and draws its energy from the bustling, crowded, diverse streets of the city.
Whitman later added a variety of poems to Leaves of Grass. They include “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” (1856), in which Whitman addresses both contemporary and future riders of the ferry, and “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” (1860), a reverie about his boyhood on the shores of Long Island. Other poems were about affection between men and about the experiences and sufferings of soldiers in the Civil War (1861-1865).
Whitman’s work was initially embraced more fully in Britain than in the United States. An influential 1872 anthology, American Poems, published in England and edited by English literary critic William Michael Rossetti, was dedicated to Whitman and gave him more space than any other poet. From then on American poetry was judged not by how closely it approximated the best British verse, but by how radically it divorced itself from British tradition. Rough innovation came to be admired over polished tradition.
E Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson, along with Whitman, is one of the most original and demanding poets in American literature. Living her whole life in Amherst, Massachusetts, Dickinson composed nearly 2,000 short, untitled poems. Despite her productivity, only a handful of Dickinson’s poems were published before her death in 1886. Most of her poems borrow the repeated four-line, rhymed stanzas of traditional Christian hymns, with two lines of four-beat meter alternating with two lines of three-beat meter. A master of imagery that makes the spiritual materialize in surprising ways, Dickinson managed manifold variations within her simple form: She used imperfect rhymes, subtle breaks of rhythm, and idiosyncratic syntax and punctuation to create fascinating word puzzles, which have produced greatly divergent interpretations over the years.
Dickinson’s intensely private poems cover a wide range of subjects and emotions. She was fascinated with death, and many of her poems struggle with the contradictions and seeming impossibility of an afterlife. She carries on an argument with God, sometimes expressing faith in him and sometimes denying his existence. Many of her poems record moments of freezing paralysis that could be death, pain, doubt, fear, or love. She remains one of the most private and cryptic voices in American literature.
Because of Dickinson’s prominence, it sometimes seems that she was the only female poet in America in the 19th century. Yet nearly a hundred women published poetry in the first six decades of the 1800s, and most early anthologies of American poetry contained far more women writers than appeared in anthologies in the first half of the 20th century. Dickinson’s work can be better understood if read in the context of these poets. Lydia Huntley Sigourney, for example, was a popular early-19th-century poet whose work set the themes for other female poets: motherhood, sentiment, and the ever-present threat of death, particularly to children. She developed, among other forms, the same hymn stanza that Dickinson used, although she experimented with fewer variations on it than Dickinson, and her poetry was simple and accessible. The work of Sigourney, along with that of Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Frances Sargent Locke Osgood, Alice and Phoebe Cary, and Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt, was dismissed by most 20th-century critics until feminist critics began to rediscover the ironic edge to what had before seemed to be conventional sentimentality. The work of these and other women poets offers a window into the way 19th-century culture constructed and understood such concepts as gender, love, marriage, and motherhood.

G Toward the 20th Century
Whitman had hoped that his work would generate new energy in American poetry. But when he died in 1892, the American poetic scene was relatively barren. Most of the major poets had died and no successor to Whitman was emerging. William Vaughn Moody, a poet born in Indiana, wrote The Masque of Judgement (1900), which was the first in a series of verse dramas about humanity’s spiritual tortures and eventual spiritual victory. Stephen Crane, best known for his novels, published two volumes of poetry, The Black Riders and Other Lines (1895) and War Is Kind and Other Poems (1899). In their tone and fragmented form, his grim poems anticipate the concerns of many modern writers. But neither poet lived far into the 20th century.
IV THE 20TH CENTURY
By 1900 the United States was far different from the new nation it had been a hundred years earlier. Westward expansion, waves of immigration, and increasing urbanization all combined to create a physically larger, more populous, and far more diverse country than its founders could have imagined. These changes are tracked more visibly in America’s fiction than in its poetry, but the nation’s growing diversity is evident in the diverse voices of 20th-century American poets. American poetry in the opening decades of the century displayed far less unity than most anthologies and critical histories indicate. Shifting allegiances, evolving styles, and the sheer number of poets make it difficult to categorize 20th-century poetry.
A Regionalism
In the last decades of the 19th century, American literature had entered a period of regionalism, exploring the stories, dialects, and idiosyncrasies of the many regions of the United States. Dialect poetry—written in exaggerated accents and colorful idioms—became a sensation for a time though it produced little of lasting value. However, one major poet who rose to fame on the basis of his dialect poems was Paul Laurence Dunbar, a black writer from Ohio. Dunbar’s dialect poems, which romanticized the life of slaves in the pre-Civil War South, were extremely popular. His volumes Oak and Ivy (1893) and Majors and Minors (1895) brought attention to African American literature, although the dialect poems later embarrassed many black poets. Dunbar also wrote many nondialect poems and initiated through his work an important debate in African American literature about what voices and materials are appropriate for black writers.
B Modernism
The early 20th century was a time of huge industrial expansion in America, and many writers found the conditions for creating art unfavorable in a culture that was so focused on business and making money. Part of the struggle among modernist writers concerned the possibility or even desirability of continuing to develop a specifically American poetic tradition. Many writers exiled themselves in cultures that seemed more conducive to art, while others decided to stay and resist through their poetry the growing materialistic culture. One way to categorize the major modernist poets is to separate those who left the United States and wrote most of their poetry as expatriates in Europe from those who stayed in America. Among the expatriates are Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle (who wrote under the pen name H. D.), T. S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein. Those who stayed in the United States include William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, Langston Hughes, and Robinson Jeffers. Most of the latter group visited Europe at some point and flirted with the idea of staying there to write.
B1 The Whitman Tradition
During the first half of the 20th century a number of poets carried on what we might call a Whitman tradition. They wrote in free verse—a rhythm that responds to the specific subject instead of adhering to a predetermined, set meter. And they strived for a poetry that would have a wide appeal and would help define and develop a democracy.
B2 Imagism and After
Early in Williams’s career he belonged to a group led by Ezra Pound called the imagists. Pound, Williams, and Doolittle all met at the University of Pennsylvania and became part of Pound’s self-declared movement to remake poetry, or, as he said, to “make it new.” The imagist credo called for new rhythms, clear and stripped-down images, free choice of subject matter, concentrated or compressed poetic expression, and use of common speech. The poets who subscribed to this credo applied it differently: Williams found his new rhythms in everyday speech, while Pound sought his new rhythms in adaptations in English of Chinese, Greek, Provencal (southern France), and other poetic traditions. Pound’s Personae (1909) demonstrated his remarkable ability to write intense, beautiful experimental verse, echoing poems from other languages. Pound introduced the poetry of Hilda Doolittle as the model of imagism, and her chiseled and often erotic Sea Garden poems (1916) became for many the movement’s signature book. H. D., Pound, and Williams left imagism behind, but it continued to influence some poets for a number of years under the leadership of Amy Lowell, a descendent of James Russell Lowell.
Pound took his modernist revolution in a surprising new direction, building his brief imagist poems into a jagged collage that eventually became a massive long poem, The Cantos. While the individual poems that went to make up the Cantos were published in various forms from 1917 until the 1960s, the first complete English language edition of the poem was published in 1970 as The Cantos of Ezra Pound. This lifelong work invites comparisons with Whitman’s lifelong project, Leaves of Grass. Pound distanced himself from Whitman, however, disliking what he saw as the 19th-century poet’s over infatuation with America. Pound believed the poet should be a citizen of the world and a contemporary of all the ages, able to learn from excellence wherever and whenever it appeared. He and Williams debated this issue for years, Williams insisting that original poetry could emerge only from the local and the present and Pound insisting that fresh beauty could come only by encounters with the distant and the past, the lost and forgotten. Whereas Williams’s Paterson insists on staying in one place, Pound’s Cantos move through time, languages, and cultures—leading Pound eventually to a flirtation with fascism, which he embraced while in Italy during World War II (1939-1945). Yet both of their compilations share a collage style, built of sudden, unexpected juxtapositions of disparate materials. Doolittle also turned to long poems with her trilogy, The Walls Do Not Fall (1944), Tribute to Angels (1945), and The Flowering of the Rod (1946). In these works she turned to Egyptian mythology, ancient history, and a reconfiguration of Christian tradition as a response to the violence of World War II.
An important result of Pound’s push to build long poems out of imagist fragments was his editing of The Waste Land (1922) by T. S. Eliot. For many readers this poem ranks as the great statement of despair in the aftermath of World War I (1914-1918). Before its publication Pound condensed and reshaped this highly allusive, darkly suggestive work, which is built on fertility myths and the legend of the Holy Grail. The Waste Land has been read in many different ways, its meaning as unstable and fluid as its diverse imagery. Eliot, born in St. Louis, Missouri, eventually became a British citizen and joined the Church of England. Much of his later verse, including Ash-Wednesday (1930) and Four Quartets (1943), relates to his spiritual concerns and suggests a religious pathway out of despair and toward a renewed sense of purpose.
Some American poets tried writing responses to The Waste Land. Williams was incensed by Eliot’s poem, because its erudition suggested that readers of poetry had to be scholars. Williams, meanwhile, championed a poetry more accessible to the general reader, a poetry written in the language of the common person. He saw his own Paterson as a kind of local and optimistic answer to Eliot’s cosmopolitan poem of pessimism. Hart Crane, too, viewed his epic-length The Bridge (1930) as an answer to Eliot. Crane sought a way to bridge the American past to a productive American future and reveal the wasteland of the present as a necessary stepping-stone to that future. The Bridge is a difficult poem, written in highly charged, symbolic language and suffused in dense imagery, much of it derived from American myth, legend, and history. Crane eventually came to believe it was a failure. Instead of answering Eliot, Robinson Jeffers wrote some of the bleakest poetry in all of American literature from his isolated home in California. His bitter vision, a kind of post-Waste Land, is of a cold natural world that would be better off cleansed of humanity. With no hint of redemption, Jeffers’s poetry anticipates the dark tones of the kind of science fiction that imagines the world after ecological or nuclear holocaust.
Other modernist poets focused even more intently on experimentation with language and form. Some of their work was quite playful and some of it showed the influence of dada and surrealism—European movements that undermined and mocked the value and traditions of art. E. E.
C After Modernism
As noted earlier a period of inaction in American poetry followed the death of the great 19th-century poets and lasted until the modernist poets arose a decade or so into the 20th century. A similar lull came after the great poems by the modernists in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. American poetry paused as many poets imitated what had been innovative a few decades before and produced the new formal poems that New Critics called for. By the 1950s most of the major modernists were still alive but they seldom produced innovative work and no longer had any interest in continuing to lead a poetic revolution.
Sylvia Plath in Ariel (1966). Steeped in Freudian analysis and imagery, these poems tracked psychological breakdowns; and a number of confessional poets, including Sexton and Plath, took their own lives. Their poetry explored tortured family relationships and examined the female psyche, the female body, and the dynamics of mother-daughter interactions. Sexton’s and Plath’s poetry influenced the development of feminist poetry—poetry by women that questioned the traditional roles society assigned to females. Confessional poetry in general served as a counterforce to the prevailing mood of the country in the 1950s and 1960s, when the family was presented in the mass media as the source of stability and happiness.
D New Directions
Many poets who had begun writing formal poetry in the 1950s and 1960s underwent changes similar to Rich’s, making striking alterations in their verse forms and opening their poetry up to more experimental rhythms and more radical social thoughts. Some poets, including Richard Wilbur, Donald Justice, and Anthony Hecht, have devoted their entire careers to writing elegantly structured poems, becoming among the most accomplished formal poets in American history. Others who started out as formalists gave up allegiance to traditional forms to explore and respond to radical political change by opening up their own work to new forms and structures. W. S. Merwin, an admirer of Pound’s early work, wrote remarkable poetry in traditional forms in the 1950s. However, in The Moving Target (1963) he suddenly abandoned punctuation and created a haunting, new prophetic voice, free of conventional techniques. In later books such as The Lice (1967), he addressed societal ills, including the prospect of ecological disaster as a result of human irresponsibility. American poetry became less formal and more political, more engaged in the immediate moment during the 1960s, as America faced the social turbulence of the Civil Rights movement and protests against the Vietnam War (1959-1975).
This break from new formalism traces back to Black Mountain College, an experimental school in North Carolina, where Charles Olson taught, and where poets Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Ed Dorn, and others studied in the early 1950s (see Black Mountain Poets). Olson owed much to Pound but had less interest in Pound’s love of tradition than in his attempt to construct a kind of poetic compendium of history and myth, as in the Cantos. Olson’s great work was The Maximus Poems (1953-1975), which focused on his hometown of Gloucester, Massachusetts, and owed much to Williams’s epic based on the city of Paterson. Olson developed a theory of poetry called projective verse, which called for poets to return to an organic basis for their form, to a poetic line controlled by the physiology of the poet's breathing instead of by pre-set meter. He urged an open form that would allow for poetry to be a process of discovery, where form emerged from the needs of the particular poem. Olson’s student Duncan later described the experience of reading and writing the new poetry as an “opening of the field,” the entering of a poetic space where one could wander and explore instead of being led along predetermined pathways. Olson’s call influenced many writers, who formed a variety of dissident groups from coast to coast—all dedicated to undermining the orthodox insistence on predetermined, closed form.
In the 1960s black poetry underwent redefinition and turned to a more confrontational style. Rejecting the old gradualist and integrationist model that saw blacks merging into white society, it became a poetry written in support of social revolution and sought to be a distinctive voice of the black community. Gwendolyn Brooks had written poems about the Chicago slums since 1945, and in 1950 she became the first black to win a Pulitzer Prize for poetry. But with the black arts movement of the 1960s, she redefined her poetic mission, writing more directly for a black audience and becoming, as she said, more “non-compromising.” LeRoi Jones, who later took the name Amiri Baraka, was a central figure in the movement. He specifically rejected Eliot and the modernists and embraced the chanting, rebellious voices of Whitman, Williams, and the Beats. The new black poetry turned to the streets of the black communities for its language and to the powerful tradition of African American jazz, blues, and rock music for its rhythms. It also aligned itself with the poetry of oppressed people in other countries, particularly developing countries around the world.
A number of black poets developed the poetic possibilities of black urban speech in politically aware, performance-based writing, which sometimes involved chanting or rapping. Another direction away from formal modernism led to deep image poetry, a name given to the work of Robert Bly, James Wright, Galway Kinnell, and others who were born in the 1920s. These poets rejected what they saw as capitalism’s sterile public facade and turned to what Bly called a “deep inwardness,” looking to internal spiritual sources that lie deep within the self and taking leaps into the unconscious to retrieve mysterious, disturbing, and often healing images.
Yet another direction led to the New York School, a group of artists, writers, and musicians in which John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara represented poetry. Ashbery and O’Hara wrote wildly experimental poetry that derived from dada and from an embrace of Whitman’s open-road aesthetic—namely a desire to keep moving and to celebrate change, instability, and chance. The resulting poems provide verbal trips through landscapes of shifting discourse with no center and no fixed voice: modes of speech alternate rapidly, high diction is mixed with street slang, and moments from different realms of experience are juxtaposed. This work influenced Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, and others who are known as Language poets. This group attacks the idea of a unified voice and, through collaborative work, disguises or erases the distinctions between individual poets. In doing so, the Language poets work to undermine all the institutions that are built on America’s infatuation with individualism, including much of American poetry itself.
It is impossible to name the myriad schools and movements in American poetry that flourished near the turn of the century, when vigorous and unbridled variety marked the poetic scene more than ever. Philip Levine, Frank Bidart, Sharon Olds, Louise Glück, and many other poets were developing the confessional poem in surprising ways, focusing autobiographical examination in more intense lyric forms than earlier confessional poets had. C. K. Williams added to the confessional poem a sometimes brutal narrative edge as he extended the possibilities (and the length) of the long line favored by Whitman and Ginsberg. Jorie Graham extended the poetic line as well, developing Stevens’s philosophical poetry through fascinating labyrinths of speculation and imagery that cross and juxtapose the multiple cultures of her experience.
E Multicultural Voices
In the last decades of the 20th century American poetry gained much of its energy from a melding of America’s many distinct cultural traditions. For example, Asian American writers—themselves part of a diverse and multicultured community—turned increasingly to poetry as a means of exploring both their integration into American culture and their growing sense of distinctive ethnic identity within that culture. Garrett Hongo, Alan Chong Lau, John Yau, and Cathy Song are just a few of the recent and remarkable poets whose work expands the definition of Asian American poetry.
Chicano and Chicana poetry also has a long history in America, much of it centered in New Mexico, where Victor Bernal published intricate lyrics in the early 20th century. But the amount of poetry increased dramatically after 1967, when Quinto Sol Publications was founded to publish Chicano and Chicana work. José Montoya, Rudolfo Anaya, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Cherrie Moraga, Benjamin Alire Sбenz, and Gary Soto are among the innovative Chicano and Chicana writers. Much of their work blends poetry and prose, Spanish and English, and oral and written traditions.
Native Americans, of course, have the longest sustained tradition of poetry in North America, and many of the powerful Native American writers at work today ground their work in the long-standing traditions and oral cultures of their peoples. As with Chicano and Chicana writers, some Native American poets wrote in English early in the nation’s history. But most Native American poetry in English is of relatively recent origin.
The history of American poetry is usually told as the story of a handful of great poets, from Anne Bradstreet through William Cullen Bryant, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, and Robert Frost. But these poets form a small part of America’s vast poetic production, much of which is by people whose names are forgotten. Journals and newspapers preserve much of their work, and scholars have just begun to rediscover 18th- and 19th-century American poetry in those archives. Similarly, much of the most popular, politically astute, and radical 20th-century poetry appeared in workers’ newspapers and journals and popular songbooks—and a great deal of this work still awaits rediscovery.
With the vast amount of culturally diverse poetry being written today and with the growth and reach of the Internet, American poetry may well be approaching its most prolific stage. The Internet dwarfs the archives of the past in its ability to make thousands of new poetic voices available to everyone who cares to read them. “To have great poets, there must be great audiences, too,” wrote Whitman in 1855. His challenge remains valid today: The poets are out there, thousands of them, waiting for the audience that will be worthy of them.
Contributed By: Ed Folsom, e-mail: ed-folsom@uiowa.edu
Research Librarian: Kathy Magarrell, e-mail: kathy-magarrell@uiowa.edu
“American Literature: Poetry” Microsoft® Encarta® Encyclopedia 2001 http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_...re_Poetry.html


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[ms.2012]

An Introduction to American Poetry

List of Some Noted American Poets

I INTRODUCTION
American Literature: Poetry, verse in English that originates from the territory now known as the United States. American poetry differs from British or English poetry chiefly because America’s culturally diverse traditions exerted pressure on the English language, altering its tones, diction, forms, and rhythms until something identifiable as American English emerged. American poetry is verse written in this altered form of English.
The term American poetry is in some ways a contradiction. America represents a break with tradition and the invention of a new culture separate from the European past. Poetry, on the other hand, represents tradition itself, a long history of expression carried to America from a European past. American poetry thus embodies a clearly identifiable tension between tradition and innovation, past and future, and old forms and new forms. American poetry remains a hybrid, a literature that tries to separate itself from the tradition of English literature even as it adds to and alters that tradition.
American poetry could be defined differently, however, especially if it is not limited to poetry in English. Without that qualifying term, American poetry has its origins in the rich oral traditions of Native American cultures. Each of these cultures developed complex symbolic tales of the origins and history of its people, akin to epic poems in the European tradition. These tales were performed as part of rituals and passed on through memorization from one generation to the next. Some of them have been translated into English. Yet these works tend to vanish from most histories of American poetry because they were part of ongoing performances based in spoken rather than written language. Moreover, their rhythms and sounds are bound to the native languages in which they evolved. Similarly, there is a rich heritage of Spanish-language poetry written in America from the time of the earliest Spanish explorers to current Hispanic and Chicano and Chicana poetry. American poetry traditions also have thrived in many other languages, from Chinese to Yiddish, as the result of centuries of immigration to the United States.
But most people mean by American poetry those rhythmic, memorable, and significant verse forms composed in English in the United States or in lands that became the United States. This overview of more than 300 years of American poetry tracks the creation of a national literature identifiably different from that of any other nation. In the 1600s colonial poets responded to the challenges of their new world and expressed the hopes and fears of Europeans who settled there. In the years following the Declaration of Independence (1776) American poets created a patriotic poetry as a defining literature for the new nation. A powerful new kind of poetry flowered in the mid- and late 19th century among the first poets to be born and raised as actual citizens of the United States. American modernist poetry emerged in the first half of the 20th century, as many writers sought to subdue nationalist impulses in their poetry and define themselves as part of an international advance in the arts. Finally, in the second half of the 20th century a multiplicity of diverse voices redefined American poetry. For information on American prose or drama, see American Literature: Prose; American Literature: Drama.
II BEGINNINGS: 1600S THROUGH THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION (1775-1783)
From the beginning until well into the 19th century, widespread agreement existed that American poetry would be judged by British standards, and that poetry written in America was simply British poetry composed on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Yet in responding to British styles, American poetry took inspiration from the new physical environment and the evolving culture of the colonies. In the process it recorded a subtle shift from poets who were dependent imitators to poets who spoke for and in the language of the new nation.
A New England Puritan Poetry
Puritans who had settled in New England were the first poets of the American colonies. Most Puritan poets saw the purpose of poetry as careful Christian examination of their lives; and private poems, like Puritan diaries, served as a forum where the self could be measured daily against devout expectations. Puritan leaders deemed poetry a safe and inspiriting genre, since they considered the Bible itself to be God’s poetry. Thus poetry became the literary form that allowed devout believers to express, with God’s help, divine lessons. Other genres, such as drama and fiction, were considered dangerous, capable of generating lies and leading to idle entertainment instead of moral uplift.
B Southern Satire
Colonial poets of the 18th century still looked to British poets of their time, such as Alexander Pope and Ambrose Philips. Both were masters of pastoral verse—poetry that celebrated an idealized English countryside and rural life—and of satirical verse. Initially, this satiric tone was more prevalent in the southern colonies than in New England.
Two poets from the Maryland Colony, Ebenezer Cook and Richard Lewis, wrote accomplished satirical poems based on British pastoral models. But their poems cleverly undermine those models by poking fun at the British. Cook’s The Sot-Weed Factor (1708) is a long narrative poem written in rhyming couplets that mocks Americans as a backward people but aims its satire most effectively at the poem’s narrator, who is a British snob. Americans may be laughable, Cook suggests, but they are not as ridiculous as the British with their ignorance and prejudice about Americans.
C Revolutionary Era Patriotic Poetry
A penchant for satire continued in the American Revolutionary era, when American poetry was centered on Connecticut and a group of poets known as the Connecticut Wits (or Hartford Wits). This group, most of whose members were associated with Yale University, included David Humphreys, John Trumbull, and Joel Barlow. Along with other writers they produced The Anarchiad (1786-1787), a mock epic poem warning against the chaos that would ensue if a strong central government, as advocated by the Federalists, was not implemented in the United States. American poets used the British literary model of the mock epic as a tool to satirize and criticize British culture. Trumbull’s mock epic M’Fingal (1775-1782) lampooned the British Loyalists during the Revolution.
Revolutionary-era poets composed more than satire, however. They felt an urgency to produce a serious—even monumental—national poetry that would celebrate the country’s new democratic ideals. Epic poems, they believed, would confer importance and significance on the new nation’s culture. Educated in the classics, these poets were also lawyers, ministers, and busy citizens of the new republic. They did not bother with the question whether a new nation required new forms of poetry, but were content to use traditional forms to write about new subjects in order to create the first truly American poetry. Whereas traditional epics celebrated past accomplishments of a civilization, American epics by necessity celebrated the future. Examples of such epics include Barlow’s The Vision of Columbus (1787), later revised as The Columbiad (1807); Greenfield Hill (1794) by clergyman Timothy Dwight; and The Rising Glory of America (1772) by Philip Freneau. All offered the prospect of America as the future culmination of civilization.
Freneau, the most accomplished patriot poet, was not associated with Connecticut. He was born in New York City and later lived in a variety of places. His range of experience and clarity of expression made him a very popular poet, widely regarded as the first poet who spoke for the entire country. Much of his poetry focused on America’s future greatness, but he also wrote on other subjects, including the beauties of the natural world. Such lyric poems as “The Wild Honey Suckle” (1786) and “On a Honey Bee” (1809), can be seen as the first expressions in American poetry of a deep spiritual engagement with nature.
D Early Black Voices
Slavery was the great contradiction in the new nation that had affirmed in its Declaration of Independence a basic belief that “all men are created equal” and have “inalienable” rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Many of the country’s early leaders believed that African slaves were intellectually inferior to whites. Phillis Wheatley [1753?-1784], a Boston slave, challenged those racist assumptions early on. Brought to America as a young girl, Wheatley was educated by her masters in English and Latin. She became an accomplished poet, and her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) was published in England. Like the white patriot poets, Wheatley wrote in 18th-century literary forms. But her highly structured and elegant poetry nonetheless expressed her frustration at enslavement and desire to reach a heaven where her color and social position would no longer keep her from singing in her full glory.
Wheatley’s poetry, along with that of other slaves, begins a powerful African American tradition in American poetry. In 1746 Lucy Terry, a slave in Massachusetts who was also educated by her owner, wrote the first poem to be published by a black American: "Bar's Fight." The poem, which was not published until 1855, describes the victims and survivors of a Native American raid against settlers. It was followed by Jupiter Hammon’s biblically inspired, hymnlike verse, “An Evening Thought; Salvation by Christ, with Penitential Cries” (1761).
Born at the time of the founding of the nation, African American poetry retained its concern with the burning issues of the American Revolution, including liberty, independence, equality, and identity. It also expressed African American experiences of divided loyalties. Just as white Americans experienced divided loyalties in the republic’s early years—unsure whether their identity derived from the new country or from their European past—so too did African Americans, who looked always to their African past and to their problematic American present.
III THE 19TH CENTURY
The 19th century began with high hopes for poetic accomplishment. The first comprehensive anthologies of American poetry appeared in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s. In the first half of the century poets sought to entertain, to inform, and to put into memorable language America’s history, myths, manners, and topography, but they did not seek to forge a radical new poetic tradition. Their poetry built upon tradition, and they met the first great goal of American poetry: that it be able to compete in quality, intelligence, and breadth with British poetry. But just as they achieved this goal, poetic aspirations began to change. By the mid-19th century the new goal for American poetry was to create something very different from British poetry. Innovative poets, particularly Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, led the way.
A The Fireside Poets
William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and John Greenleaf Whittier constituted a group sometimes called the Fireside Poets. They earned this nickname because they frequently used the hearth as an image of comfort and unity, a place where families gathered to learn and tell stories. These tremendously popular poets also were widely read around the hearthsides of 19th-century American families. The consensus of American critics was that the Fireside Poets first put American poetry on an equal footing with British poetry.
B Abolitionist Poetry
During the 19th century, black and white poets wrote about the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of slaves. George Moses Horton, a North Carolina slave, was the first Southern black poet. Joshua McCarter Simpson was a black poet from Ohio whose memorable songs of emancipation were set to popular tunes and sung by fugitive slaves. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper wrote passionate abolitionist and early feminist poems that called both blacks and whites to action against oppression. Black poets appropriated the language and style of the predominantly white, mainstream patriotic America. In using mainstream language, these black poets showed their white audiences how differently songs of liberty and freedom sounded from the perspective of those who had been left out of the “all men are created equal” equation. Black poets also often expressed themselves with irony and ambiguity so that different audiences heard different intonations and meanings, a double voicing that would become central to later African American writing.
White abolitionist poets, from their more privileged social position, could afford to be more confrontational about the issue of slavery. Whittier was a fiery abolitionist whose numerous antislavery poems were collected in Voices of Freedom (1846). Longfellow’s Poems on Slavery (1842) forms a long-forgotten but illuminating contribution to the tradition of American political poems. Lowell also was an ardent abolitionist.
C Mid-Century Innovation
Many 20th-century critics date the beginnings of a uniquely American poetry to the appearance of Leaves of Grass (1855) by Walt Whitman. Whitman drew a good deal of inspiration from New England writer Ralph Waldo Emerson. In his 1844 essay “The Poet,” Emerson called for a radically new American poet who would make poetry out of the rough experience of America and break free of conventional patterns of writing and thinking. Emerson could not answer his own call; his poetry, always challenging and often cryptic and highly symbolic, tended to fall into conventional rhythms and remained aloof from day-to-day reality. After reading Leaves of Grass, Emerson realized that Whitman might be the first truly original American poet: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career,” he wrote to Whitman.
D Walt Whitman
A newspaper reporter and editor, Whitman first published poems that were traditional in form and conventional in sentiment. In the early 1850s, however, he began experimenting with a mixture of the colloquial diction and prose rhythms of journalism; the direct address and soaring voice of oratory; the repetitions and catalogues of the Bible; and the lyricism, music, and drama of popular opera. He sought to write a democratic poetry—a poetry vast enough to contain all the variety of burgeoning 19th-century American culture. In 1855 Whitman published the first edition of Leaves of Grass, the book he would revise and expand for the rest of his life. The first edition contained only 12 untitled poems. The longest poem, which he eventually named “Song of Myself,” has become one of the most discussed poems in all of American poetry. In it Whitman constructs a democratic “I,” a voice that sets out to celebrate itself and the rapture of its senses experiencing the world, and in so doing to celebrate the unfettered potential of every individual in a democratic society. Emerging from a working class family, Whitman grew up in New York City and on nearby Long Island. He was one of the first working-class American poets and one of the first writers to compose poetry that is set in and draws its energy from the bustling, crowded, diverse streets of the city.
Whitman later added a variety of poems to Leaves of Grass. They include “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” (1856), in which Whitman addresses both contemporary and future riders of the ferry, and “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” (1860), a reverie about his boyhood on the shores of Long Island. Other poems were about affection between men and about the experiences and sufferings of soldiers in the Civil War (1861-1865).
Whitman’s work was initially embraced more fully in Britain than in the United States. An influential 1872 anthology, American Poems, published in England and edited by English literary critic William Michael Rossetti, was dedicated to Whitman and gave him more space than any other poet. From then on American poetry was judged not by how closely it approximated the best British verse, but by how radically it divorced itself from British tradition. Rough innovation came to be admired over polished tradition.
E Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson, along with Whitman, is one of the most original and demanding poets in American literature. Living her whole life in Amherst, Massachusetts, Dickinson composed nearly 2,000 short, untitled poems. Despite her productivity, only a handful of Dickinson’s poems were published before her death in 1886. Most of her poems borrow the repeated four-line, rhymed stanzas of traditional Christian hymns, with two lines of four-beat meter alternating with two lines of three-beat meter. A master of imagery that makes the spiritual materialize in surprising ways, Dickinson managed manifold variations within her simple form: She used imperfect rhymes, subtle breaks of rhythm, and idiosyncratic syntax and punctuation to create fascinating word puzzles, which have produced greatly divergent interpretations over the years.
Dickinson’s intensely private poems cover a wide range of subjects and emotions. She was fascinated with death, and many of her poems struggle with the contradictions and seeming impossibility of an afterlife. She carries on an argument with God, sometimes expressing faith in him and sometimes denying his existence. Many of her poems record moments of freezing paralysis that could be death, pain, doubt, fear, or love. She remains one of the most private and cryptic voices in American literature.
Because of Dickinson’s prominence, it sometimes seems that she was the only female poet in America in the 19th century. Yet nearly a hundred women published poetry in the first six decades of the 1800s, and most early anthologies of American poetry contained far more women writers than appeared in anthologies in the first half of the 20th century. Dickinson’s work can be better understood if read in the context of these poets. Lydia Huntley Sigourney, for example, was a popular early-19th-century poet whose work set the themes for other female poets: motherhood, sentiment, and the ever-present threat of death, particularly to children. She developed, among other forms, the same hymn stanza that Dickinson used, although she experimented with fewer variations on it than Dickinson, and her poetry was simple and accessible. The work of Sigourney, along with that of Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Frances Sargent Locke Osgood, Alice and Phoebe Cary, and Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt, was dismissed by most 20th-century critics until feminist critics began to rediscover the ironic edge to what had before seemed to be conventional sentimentality. The work of these and other women poets offers a window into the way 19th-century culture constructed and understood such concepts as gender, love, marriage, and motherhood.

G Toward the 20th Century
Whitman had hoped that his work would generate new energy in American poetry. But when he died in 1892, the American poetic scene was relatively barren. Most of the major poets had died and no successor to Whitman was emerging. William Vaughn Moody, a poet born in Indiana, wrote The Masque of Judgement (1900), which was the first in a series of verse dramas about humanity’s spiritual tortures and eventual spiritual victory. Stephen Crane, best known for his novels, published two volumes of poetry, The Black Riders and Other Lines (1895) and War Is Kind and Other Poems (1899). In their tone and fragmented form, his grim poems anticipate the concerns of many modern writers. But neither poet lived far into the 20th century.
IV THE 20TH CENTURY
By 1900 the United States was far different from the new nation it had been a hundred years earlier. Westward expansion, waves of immigration, and increasing urbanization all combined to create a physically larger, more populous, and far more diverse country than its founders could have imagined. These changes are tracked more visibly in America’s fiction than in its poetry, but the nation’s growing diversity is evident in the diverse voices of 20th-century American poets. American poetry in the opening decades of the century displayed far less unity than most anthologies and critical histories indicate. Shifting allegiances, evolving styles, and the sheer number of poets make it difficult to categorize 20th-century poetry.
A Regionalism
In the last decades of the 19th century, American literature had entered a period of regionalism, exploring the stories, dialects, and idiosyncrasies of the many regions of the United States. Dialect poetry—written in exaggerated accents and colorful idioms—became a sensation for a time though it produced little of lasting value. However, one major poet who rose to fame on the basis of his dialect poems was Paul Laurence Dunbar, a black writer from Ohio. Dunbar’s dialect poems, which romanticized the life of slaves in the pre-Civil War South, were extremely popular. His volumes Oak and Ivy (1893) and Majors and Minors (1895) brought attention to African American literature, although the dialect poems later embarrassed many black poets. Dunbar also wrote many nondialect poems and initiated through his work an important debate in African American literature about what voices and materials are appropriate for black writers.
B Modernism
The early 20th century was a time of huge industrial expansion in America, and many writers found the conditions for creating art unfavorable in a culture that was so focused on business and making money. Part of the struggle among modernist writers concerned the possibility or even desirability of continuing to develop a specifically American poetic tradition. Many writers exiled themselves in cultures that seemed more conducive to art, while others decided to stay and resist through their poetry the growing materialistic culture. One way to categorize the major modernist poets is to separate those who left the United States and wrote most of their poetry as expatriates in Europe from those who stayed in America. Among the expatriates are Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle (who wrote under the pen name H. D.), T. S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein. Those who stayed in the United States include William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, Langston Hughes, and Robinson Jeffers. Most of the latter group visited Europe at some point and flirted with the idea of staying there to write.
B1 The Whitman Tradition
During the first half of the 20th century a number of poets carried on what we might call a Whitman tradition. They wrote in free verse—a rhythm that responds to the specific subject instead of adhering to a predetermined, set meter. And they strived for a poetry that would have a wide appeal and would help define and develop a democracy.
B2 Imagism and After
Early in Williams’s career he belonged to a group led by Ezra Pound called the imagists. Pound, Williams, and Doolittle all met at the University of Pennsylvania and became part of Pound’s self-declared movement to remake poetry, or, as he said, to “make it new.” The imagist credo called for new rhythms, clear and stripped-down images, free choice of subject matter, concentrated or compressed poetic expression, and use of common speech. The poets who subscribed to this credo applied it differently: Williams found his new rhythms in everyday speech, while Pound sought his new rhythms in adaptations in English of Chinese, Greek, Provencal (southern France), and other poetic traditions. Pound’s Personae (1909) demonstrated his remarkable ability to write intense, beautiful experimental verse, echoing poems from other languages. Pound introduced the poetry of Hilda Doolittle as the model of imagism, and her chiseled and often erotic Sea Garden poems (1916) became for many the movement’s signature book. H. D., Pound, and Williams left imagism behind, but it continued to influence some poets for a number of years under the leadership of Amy Lowell, a descendent of James Russell Lowell.
Pound took his modernist revolution in a surprising new direction, building his brief imagist poems into a jagged collage that eventually became a massive long poem, The Cantos. While the individual poems that went to make up the Cantos were published in various forms from 1917 until the 1960s, the first complete English language edition of the poem was published in 1970 as The Cantos of Ezra Pound. This lifelong work invites comparisons with Whitman’s lifelong project, Leaves of Grass. Pound distanced himself from Whitman, however, disliking what he saw as the 19th-century poet’s over infatuation with America. Pound believed the poet should be a citizen of the world and a contemporary of all the ages, able to learn from excellence wherever and whenever it appeared. He and Williams debated this issue for years, Williams insisting that original poetry could emerge only from the local and the present and Pound insisting that fresh beauty could come only by encounters with the distant and the past, the lost and forgotten. Whereas Williams’s Paterson insists on staying in one place, Pound’s Cantos move through time, languages, and cultures—leading Pound eventually to a flirtation with fascism, which he embraced while in Italy during World War II (1939-1945). Yet both of their compilations share a collage style, built of sudden, unexpected juxtapositions of disparate materials. Doolittle also turned to long poems with her trilogy, The Walls Do Not Fall (1944), Tribute to Angels (1945), and The Flowering of the Rod (1946). In these works she turned to Egyptian mythology, ancient history, and a reconfiguration of Christian tradition as a response to the violence of World War II.
An important result of Pound’s push to build long poems out of imagist fragments was his editing of The Waste Land (1922) by T. S. Eliot. For many readers this poem ranks as the great statement of despair in the aftermath of World War I (1914-1918). Before its publication Pound condensed and reshaped this highly allusive, darkly suggestive work, which is built on fertility myths and the legend of the Holy Grail. The Waste Land has been read in many different ways, its meaning as unstable and fluid as its diverse imagery. Eliot, born in St. Louis, Missouri, eventually became a British citizen and joined the Church of England. Much of his later verse, including Ash-Wednesday (1930) and Four Quartets (1943), relates to his spiritual concerns and suggests a religious pathway out of despair and toward a renewed sense of purpose.
Some American poets tried writing responses to The Waste Land. Williams was incensed by Eliot’s poem, because its erudition suggested that readers of poetry had to be scholars. Williams, meanwhile, championed a poetry more accessible to the general reader, a poetry written in the language of the common person. He saw his own Paterson as a kind of local and optimistic answer to Eliot’s cosmopolitan poem of pessimism. Hart Crane, too, viewed his epic-length The Bridge (1930) as an answer to Eliot. Crane sought a way to bridge the American past to a productive American future and reveal the wasteland of the present as a necessary stepping-stone to that future. The Bridge is a difficult poem, written in highly charged, symbolic language and suffused in dense imagery, much of it derived from American myth, legend, and history. Crane eventually came to believe it was a failure. Instead of answering Eliot, Robinson Jeffers wrote some of the bleakest poetry in all of American literature from his isolated home in California. His bitter vision, a kind of post-Waste Land, is of a cold natural world that would be better off cleansed of humanity. With no hint of redemption, Jeffers’s poetry anticipates the dark tones of the kind of science fiction that imagines the world after ecological or nuclear holocaust.
Other modernist poets focused even more intently on experimentation with language and form. Some of their work was quite playful and some of it showed the influence of dada and surrealism—European movements that undermined and mocked the value and traditions of art. E. E.
C After Modernism
As noted earlier a period of inaction in American poetry followed the death of the great 19th-century poets and lasted until the modernist poets arose a decade or so into the 20th century. A similar lull came after the great poems by the modernists in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. American poetry paused as many poets imitated what had been innovative a few decades before and produced the new formal poems that New Critics called for. By the 1950s most of the major modernists were still alive but they seldom produced innovative work and no longer had any interest in continuing to lead a poetic revolution.
Sylvia Plath in Ariel (1966). Steeped in Freudian analysis and imagery, these poems tracked psychological breakdowns; and a number of confessional poets, including Sexton and Plath, took their own lives. Their poetry explored tortured family relationships and examined the female psyche, the female body, and the dynamics of mother-daughter interactions. Sexton’s and Plath’s poetry influenced the development of feminist poetry—poetry by women that questioned the traditional roles society assigned to females. Confessional poetry in general served as a counterforce to the prevailing mood of the country in the 1950s and 1960s, when the family was presented in the mass media as the source of stability and happiness.
D New Directions
Many poets who had begun writing formal poetry in the 1950s and 1960s underwent changes similar to Rich’s, making striking alterations in their verse forms and opening their poetry up to more experimental rhythms and more radical social thoughts. Some poets, including Richard Wilbur, Donald Justice, and Anthony Hecht, have devoted their entire careers to writing elegantly structured poems, becoming among the most accomplished formal poets in American history. Others who started out as formalists gave up allegiance to traditional forms to explore and respond to radical political change by opening up their own work to new forms and structures. W. S. Merwin, an admirer of Pound’s early work, wrote remarkable poetry in traditional forms in the 1950s. However, in The Moving Target (1963) he suddenly abandoned punctuation and created a haunting, new prophetic voice, free of conventional techniques. In later books such as The Lice (1967), he addressed societal ills, including the prospect of ecological disaster as a result of human irresponsibility. American poetry became less formal and more political, more engaged in the immediate moment during the 1960s, as America faced the social turbulence of the Civil Rights movement and protests against the Vietnam War (1959-1975).
This break from new formalism traces back to Black Mountain College, an experimental school in North Carolina, where Charles Olson taught, and where poets Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Ed Dorn, and others studied in the early 1950s (see Black Mountain Poets). Olson owed much to Pound but had less interest in Pound’s love of tradition than in his attempt to construct a kind of poetic compendium of history and myth, as in the Cantos. Olson’s great work was The Maximus Poems (1953-1975), which focused on his hometown of Gloucester, Massachusetts, and owed much to Williams’s epic based on the city of Paterson. Olson developed a theory of poetry called projective verse, which called for poets to return to an organic basis for their form, to a poetic line controlled by the physiology of the poet's breathing instead of by pre-set meter. He urged an open form that would allow for poetry to be a process of discovery, where form emerged from the needs of the particular poem. Olson’s student Duncan later described the experience of reading and writing the new poetry as an “opening of the field,” the entering of a poetic space where one could wander and explore instead of being led along predetermined pathways. Olson’s call influenced many writers, who formed a variety of dissident groups from coast to coast—all dedicated to undermining the orthodox insistence on predetermined, closed form.
In the 1960s black poetry underwent redefinition and turned to a more confrontational style. Rejecting the old gradualist and integrationist model that saw blacks merging into white society, it became a poetry written in support of social revolution and sought to be a distinctive voice of the black community. Gwendolyn Brooks had written poems about the Chicago slums since 1945, and in 1950 she became the first black to win a Pulitzer Prize for poetry. But with the black arts movement of the 1960s, she redefined her poetic mission, writing more directly for a black audience and becoming, as she said, more “non-compromising.” LeRoi Jones, who later took the name Amiri Baraka, was a central figure in the movement. He specifically rejected Eliot and the modernists and embraced the chanting, rebellious voices of Whitman, Williams, and the Beats. The new black poetry turned to the streets of the black communities for its language and to the powerful tradition of African American jazz, blues, and rock music for its rhythms. It also aligned itself with the poetry of oppressed people in other countries, particularly developing countries around the world.
A number of black poets developed the poetic possibilities of black urban speech in politically aware, performance-based writing, which sometimes involved chanting or rapping. Another direction away from formal modernism led to deep image poetry, a name given to the work of Robert Bly, James Wright, Galway Kinnell, and others who were born in the 1920s. These poets rejected what they saw as capitalism’s sterile public facade and turned to what Bly called a “deep inwardness,” looking to internal spiritual sources that lie deep within the self and taking leaps into the unconscious to retrieve mysterious, disturbing, and often healing images.
Yet another direction led to the New York School, a group of artists, writers, and musicians in which John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara represented poetry. Ashbery and O’Hara wrote wildly experimental poetry that derived from dada and from an embrace of Whitman’s open-road aesthetic—namely a desire to keep moving and to celebrate change, instability, and chance. The resulting poems provide verbal trips through landscapes of shifting discourse with no center and no fixed voice: modes of speech alternate rapidly, high diction is mixed with street slang, and moments from different realms of experience are juxtaposed. This work influenced Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, and others who are known as Language poets. This group attacks the idea of a unified voice and, through collaborative work, disguises or erases the distinctions between individual poets. In doing so, the Language poets work to undermine all the institutions that are built on America’s infatuation with individualism, including much of American poetry itself.
It is impossible to name the myriad schools and movements in American poetry that flourished near the turn of the century, when vigorous and unbridled variety marked the poetic scene more than ever. Philip Levine, Frank Bidart, Sharon Olds, Louise Glück, and many other poets were developing the confessional poem in surprising ways, focusing autobiographical examination in more intense lyric forms than earlier confessional poets had. C. K. Williams added to the confessional poem a sometimes brutal narrative edge as he extended the possibilities (and the length) of the long line favored by Whitman and Ginsberg. Jorie Graham extended the poetic line as well, developing Stevens’s philosophical poetry through fascinating labyrinths of speculation and imagery that cross and juxtapose the multiple cultures of her experience.
E Multicultural Voices
In the last decades of the 20th century American poetry gained much of its energy from a melding of America’s many distinct cultural traditions. For example, Asian American writers—themselves part of a diverse and multicultured community—turned increasingly to poetry as a means of exploring both their integration into American culture and their growing sense of distinctive ethnic identity within that culture. Garrett Hongo, Alan Chong Lau, John Yau, and Cathy Song are just a few of the recent and remarkable poets whose work expands the definition of Asian American poetry.
Chicano and Chicana poetry also has a long history in America, much of it centered in New Mexico, where Victor Bernal published intricate lyrics in the early 20th century. But the amount of poetry increased dramatically after 1967, when Quinto Sol Publications was founded to publish Chicano and Chicana work. José Montoya, Rudolfo Anaya, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Cherrie Moraga, Benjamin Alire Sбenz, and Gary Soto are among the innovative Chicano and Chicana writers. Much of their work blends poetry and prose, Spanish and English, and oral and written traditions.
Native Americans, of course, have the longest sustained tradition of poetry in North America, and many of the powerful Native American writers at work today ground their work in the long-standing traditions and oral cultures of their peoples. As with Chicano and Chicana writers, some Native American poets wrote in English early in the nation’s history. But most Native American poetry in English is of relatively recent origin.
The history of American poetry is usually told as the story of a handful of great poets, from Anne Bradstreet through William Cullen Bryant, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, and Robert Frost. But these poets form a small part of America’s vast poetic production, much of which is by people whose names are forgotten. Journals and newspapers preserve much of their work, and scholars have just begun to rediscover 18th- and 19th-century American poetry in those archives. Similarly, much of the most popular, politically astute, and radical 20th-century poetry appeared in workers’ newspapers and journals and popular songbooks—and a great deal of this work still awaits rediscovery.
With the vast amount of culturally diverse poetry being written today and with the growth and reach of the Internet, American poetry may well be approaching its most prolific stage. The Internet dwarfs the archives of the past in its ability to make thousands of new poetic voices available to everyone who cares to read them. “To have great poets, there must be great audiences, too,” wrote Whitman in 1855. His challenge remains valid today: The poets are out there, thousands of them, waiting for the audience that will be worthy of them.
Contributed By: Ed Folsom, e-mail: ed-folsom@uiowa.edu
Research Librarian: Kathy Magarrell, e-mail: kathy-magarrell@uiowa.edu
“American Literature: Poetry” Microsoft® Encarta® Encyclopedia 2001 http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_...re_Poetry.html


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[J A M I L A H]

صبآيآ , آختبـآر الـ proficiency يَ اللي اليوم آختبرنآه

كيف نعرف نتيجته ؟ واذا فيه شهآده من من نستلمها ؟

[عهد العتيبي]

بنات اللة يعطيكم العافية اللي اختبر مع سلوى كوز من اي مجموعة تحطلي الكلمات اللي جابتها بليزززززز