Poetry: The 1950s to the Present

A half century ago, when this annual debuted, it included a chapter titled “Poetry: 1930 to the Present” by Oliver Evans. Devoted to scholarship on poets including Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Lowell, its selection was hardly representative: mostly Anglo and mostly male, it was a grouping that reflected nothing so much as the constitution of the American academy in the mid-1960s. It is not that poets like Gwendolyn Brooks and Langston Hughes were not hard at work—it is that poetry scholars were not paying that much attention to them or to the poets featured in Donald Allen’s anthology The New American Poetry, 1945–1960 (1960). This was a time when most poems were lyric poems and few poets functioned as creative writing professors.

In the foreword to that first edition of American Literary Scholarship, James Woodress acknowledged that each chapter was designed “to provide a guide for scholars in areas adjacent to their own fields of specialization.” During the mid-1960s, scholars actually specialized in “poetry,” and adjacency signaled specialists in “drama” or the “novel.” Today, even specialists within the same genre (“poetry”) and the same period (“the present”) are in some sense adjacent to one another, given the emergence of new critical (not to be confused with New Critical) approaches from ecocriticism and ethnic studies to queer theory and thing theory. Meanwhile, the proliferation of poetries, schools, and theories may have reached a plateau of sorts. In the “Program Era,” as defined in 2009 by Mark McGurl, MFAs have come to outnumber PhDs, but in recent years there have been fewer full-time academic positions for degree holders of any kind. For now, poets, poetry critics, and poetry scholars remain firmly ensconced in colleges and universities, but one wonders how far into the 21st century this status quo is likely to persist.

Over the last decade, the chapter “Poetry: The 1940s to the Present” has been ably and nimbly managed by my predecessor, Frank J. Kearful. In taking up the reins I work with a new periodization, “Poetry: The 1950s to the Present.” Thus if Evans’s original chapter occupied the heart of modernism, my initial contribution shares just over a decade with that first effort, and shades more fully into postmodernist realms. Contending with a span twice as long, and exponentially more diverse, I have restructured the chapter accordingly, acknowledging that the scholars of the contemporary period seem less vexed by temporal parameters than by the nature of poetry itself. What is it and who makes it? How does it relate to other forms of expression? To what degree of success does it accomplish its aims and toward what ends?

One of the most substantial resources of the year comes in The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry since 1945. Prefaced by a useful “chronology of publications and events,” the collection is bookended by a pair of essays by editor Jennifer Ashton—on periodization by way of introduction and on poetry in the first decade of the 21st century by way of conclusion. Most other areas the collection chooses to address—from mid-20th-century movements such as beat poetry and confessional poetry through subsequent developments such as the Black Arts movement, feminist poetry, language writing, and recent innovations such as ecopoetry and spoken word—are outlined in clear, crisp essays. Yet the near-total absence of reference to the Asian American, Latino, and Native American traditions—together over 20 percent of the U.S. population and together producing some of the most vibrant American poetry in recent decades—does no credit to the volume’s aspiration to “represent the most important poetic developments in the period … in the context of the social, political, professional, and above all, aesthetic forces that shaped those developments.”

The collection proves strongest when thinking broadly about aesthetic movements. Charles Altieri’s chapter on New York School poets (pp. 47–65) makes strong connections between the dual influences of abstract painters and surrealist writers on poets such as John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, and Frank O’Hara, although an extended reading...