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3 INTRODUCTION Mid-twentieth-century american poetry witnessed revolutions in form and content that were as sweeping as the modernist revolutions of the earlier twentieth century. Whereas many modernist poets had emphasized impersonality , many midcentury poets brought a seemingly autobiographical speaker into their texts. While earlier high modernist poets, such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Allen Tate, had often expressed anxiety about social change, repugnance toward mass culture, and nostalgia for an idealized past, the midcentury poets were more likely to celebrate change, to display ambivalence toward the past, and to reveal a keen fascination with mass culture. Perhaps this new generation of poets was learning to live in and resonate with the conditions of their rapidly altering universe, even though they usually confronted those conditions with complicated feelings. Their modernist predecessors continued to have an impact on the midcentury generation, whom Randall Jarrell was among the first to label “postmodernist.” But the new poets, often after serving an informal apprenticeship under one or more members of the elder generation, moved ahead on their own terms, building on their mentors’ formal experiments while transforming the sometimes conservative ethos of those older poets into something rich, unpredictable, and fresh. Midcentury was a complicated and contradictory time. Although many Americans increased their wealth in the 1950s, the gap between rich and poor was widening, and the apparent general prosperity was interrupted and threatened by intermittent recessions. Thrilled at their triumph in World War II, and buoyed by material advances, numerous Americans experienced what one historian , William O’Neill, has called an “American high.” But this era of good feeling came at a price: social conformity, persistent racial and gender iniquities, foreign crises, an expanding “military-industrial complex” (as President Eisenhower called it), and, over all, a dread of nuclear annihilation. The 1960s ushered in a mixed period of social progress and social conflict, culminating in the Vietnam War, in which more than fifty-eight thousand Americans and many times more Vietnamese and others lost their lives. It was a complex fate being an American poet at midcentury. Most of these poets grew increasingly wary about key elements of American domestic and Ø Introduction to Part One 4 foreign policy while at the same time they engaged in fruitful efforts to reinvent American poetry for the post–World War II era. They were estranged, but they were also increasingly entrenched, as more and more of them found positions teaching in the nation’s schools and universities. American poetry of the 1950s and 1960s participated in Cold War culture. The ways of seeing instilled by the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union and by the ever-present threat of nuclear war filtered subtly into poetic and everyday consciousness. Containment policy, which stipulated that the United States try to “contain” Soviet power and influence, fostered a reliance on dualisms of “us” and “them” that affected nearly all cultural projects. Middle-class women and families were in effect “contained” in newly built suburbs, while many poor people, single people, immigrants, and people of color were left stranded in urban areas that suffered from a loss of jobs, a contracting tax base, worsening schools, and a rising crime rate. These conditions were complexly mirrored and critiqued in the poetry of the period. Although African-American advocacy groups succeeded in dismantling the legal foundations of racial segregation, these hard-won political changes were not necessarily accompanied by social or economic improvement . By the mid- and late 1960s, American culture was in crisis. Assassinations claimed the lives of President John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert Kennedy, and Malcolm X. The Vietnam War raged. Many American poets opposed the war, and a large and visible body of them actively resisted it. The placid conformity and the patina of progress that had marked 1950s culture came crashing down, and poetry was at the center of the social conflict. While it is impossible to categorize all the important trends in mid-twentiethcentury American poetry—because this body of work was so various and dynamic —we can roughly divide the poets into four distinct, yet interrelated groups, which will be discussed in more detail below. The mainstream poets were a loosely affiliated assemblage that included but was not limited to the “confessional,” “introspective,” or “domestic” poets who made such an impact in their time. Although sometimes viewed as less aesthetically adventurous than their artistic rivals, these poets explored personal experience with unprecedented candor...

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