Poetry: The 1940s to the Present

Everyone is prepared to shed a nostalgic tear over the San Francisco Renaissance, but who has ever heard of the Los Angeles Renaissance? Bill Mohr’s Hold-Outs: The Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance, 1948–1992 will put you in the picture, if that does not sound too Hollywoodish. Evie Shockley’s Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry severs the double bind that black aesthetics is either too black to be avant-garde or is not black enough when it becomes palsy-walsy with the avant-garde. Tom Rogers’s God of Rescue: John Berryman and Christianity maintains that a lifelong search for religious faith is the driving force in Berryman’s life and art, not a search for the next drink or the next woman. Diederik Oostdijk’s Among the Nightmare Fighters: American Poets of World War II punctures the “Good War” myth and uncovers the war’s troubling presence in the work of many middle-generation poets. A recent pleasant surprise was the launching of a new series of the Hopkins Review, which this year featured well-turned essays by David Wyatt on Elizabeth Bishop, Helen Vendler on A. R. Ammons, and Willard Spiegelman on John Updike’s deathbed poetry. Given the whirligig of time and the changing of the avant-garde, it should not come as much of a surprise that the poets who enjoyed their time in the sun in the Contemporary Literature overview of poetry in the last decade of the 20th century (see AmLS 2003, pp. 467–73) are missing persons in the journal’s account of where the action was in the first decade of the new century.

i World War II and the Middle Generation

Diederik Oostdijk’s Among the Nightmare Fighters: American Poets of World War II (So. Car.) probes the war’s impact on a generation of young poets whose wartime ranks included active-duty servicemen, conscientious objectors, and some judged physically unfit for the military. The title echoes the grim ending of the best-known World War II poem, Randall Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball-Turret Gunner”—“I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. / When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.” Four overlapping topics—tradition, identity, masculinity, and the afterlife—provide a four-part structure, each part in turn subdivided into four chapters. In part 1, “Haunting Traditions,” Oostdijk suggests that what most distinguishes American poets of World War II from earlier war poets is that nearly all wrote intertextual war poems revolving around their “incapacity, unwillingness, or reluctance to take on the masculine challenge to be soldiers.” John Ciardi, Randall Jarrell, James Dickey, Louis Simpson, and Alan Dugan exemplify how poets drew on war poetry from Homer to World War I in order to undermine myths of the heroic warrior and the sort of grandiloquent patriotism that Rupert Brooke immortalized: “If I should die, think only thus of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is forever England.” American World War II poets simply wanted get to the job done as quickly as possible and to survive. The modernism of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot also seemed irrelevant to their wartime experiences, which fostered a “recognition of the pain and anguish of others” and a “sense of empathy and acceptance of others” that transcended cultural, ethnic, gender, and historical boundaries. Jarrell’s 1942 essay “The End of the Line” declared the passing of modernism and hailed the advent of “post- or anti-modernist poetry.” Auden’s poetry remained influential because it appeared to be, according to Jarrell, “the only novel and successful reaction away from modernism.” Gradually, the poets all became disenchanted with Auden to one degree or another, no one more so than Jarrell, who came to view Auden as a naive Marxist who slipped into a Christian moralist’s garb but did not comprehend the moral implications of war.

Part 2, “Emerging Selves,” relates the unsettling effects of military life on the poets’ sense of personal identity. The act of writing—whether letters, diaries, or...