20th-CENTURYAMERICAN

POETRYEDITED BY BURT KIMMELMAN

THE FACTS ON FILECOMPANION TO

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For Diane and Jane, as always

The Facts On File Companion to 20th-Century American Poetry

Copyright 2005 by Burt Kimmelman

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The Facts On File companion to 20th-century poetry /[edited by] Burt Kimmelman.p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 0-8160-4698-0 (alk. paper)1. American poetry20th centuryHistory and criticismHandbooks, manuals, etc. I. Title: Companion to 20th-centurypoetry. II. Kimmelman, Burt. III. Facts On File, Inc.

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APPENDIXES

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CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS v

FOREWORD vi

INTRODUCTION xiv

A-TO-Z ENTRIES 1

I. GLOSSARY 539

II. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 542

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS 547

INDEX 550

This volume is the result of the efforts of a good manypeople who have my deepest gratitude, some of whomI may neglect to mention here, fallible memory beingwhat it is. I am beholden to Mickey Pearlman, who con-tacted me and urged me to offer my services to FactsOn File; to Anne Savarese, former Facts On File editor,who worked with me to conceive this project and set itin motion; to Jeff Soloway, senior editor at Facts OnFile, whose patience, care, and acuity have been indis-pensable; and to Jessica Allen, whose perspicacity incopyediting has been more than one could have hopedfor. I must also thank my colleagues at New JerseyInstitute of Technology for their encouragement andunderstanding and, in some cases, their participationespecially Robert E. Lynch and Norbert Elliot, who,along with Doris Zames Fleischer, Robert S. Friedman,

Christopher Funkhouser, and Nikki Stiller, contributedessays to this book. I am also profoundly thankful forthe intelligence and time Norbert Elliot, Tom Fink, andSherry Kearns (who also contributed essays), as well asJeff Soloway, donated to the writing of the books intro-duction. And I am grateful to Burton Hatlen for hiswonderful foreword to the book. I must also thank themany contributors to this volume, whose knowledge,wit, and graceful writing will surely make it a success.Lastly, I am, as always, most thankful for the goodnatured love and support of my wife, Diane Simmons,and our daugther, Jane Kimmelman, without whomnone of this would have been possible.

Burt Kimmelman

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

v

20TH-CENTURY AMERICANPOETRY: SOME GUIDEPOSTS

As Burt Kimmelman emphasizes in his eloquent intro-duction to this volume, all of the poems, poets, and lit-erary movements described in the pages that followshare a common Americanness. Yet the very essenceof Americanness is diversity, the many in the one andthe one in the many, as Walt Whitman, grandfather ofall American bards, insisted: I hear America singing, /The varied carols I hear (emphasis mine). Thus it maybe useful to attempt a chart of the various kinds ofAmericanness at work in the poetry written in thiscountry during the last 100 years. The chartings that Iwill here propose are chronological as well as regionaland ideological, for the sense of what it means to be anAmerican, and specifically an American poet, has shift-ed over time. At the beginning of the 20th century, theUnited States made its first tentative forays towardbecoming an imperial power, but most Americans stillthought of themselves as a people apart, purified byimmersion in a New World Eden. With World War Ithe United States became a significant player on aninternational stage, but the interwar years saw arenewed sense of American uniqueness, often summedup in the label isolationism. Then World War II and theensuing decades saw a full-blown efflorescence of adistinctively American variety of imperialism, as thenation set out to become the arbiter of the destiny ofthe planet. Our poets have sometimes enthusiastically

participated in the dominant political mood of themoment, but more often, especially in the imperialepoch extending from World War II to the present,the poets have fiercely questioned beliefs and atti-tudes that most other Americans have apparentlyaccepted as simply common sense, so that the poet-ry community has seemed at times the most insis-tently skeptical and critical of the various Americancountercultures. (Robert Creeley, at the start of the21st century one of the last surviving members of ageneration of major poets that emerged in the 1950s,was recently heard to ask, How is it that I dontknow anyone who supports the policies of George W.Bush?) Yet regional differences have often been noless important than the historical shifts that haveoccurred over the course of the 20th century, for NewYork is not California, and New England is not theSouthwest. We must also recognize radically differentaesthetic commitments that have sometimes united,sometimes separated poets across both historicalepochs and cultural regions. And in the late decadesof the 20th century, the very notion that we candefine a single American identity has been challengedby poets seeking to speak for a range of previouslymarginalized communities defined by ethnicity, gen-der, and/or sexual preference.

On or about December 1910, human naturechanged, Virginia Woolf famously declared, and wemay date the birth of 20th-century American poetry tothe same pivotal moment. Among the tiny group of

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FOREWORD

vi

American poets whose careers carried across from the19th into the 20th centuries, only three poets surviveto find a place in this encyclopedia: Edwin ArlingtonRobinson, Adelaide Crapsey, and Jeanne Robert Foster.Aging anthologies and histories of American literaturepreserve a few other namesWilliam Vaughan Moody,Trumbull Stickney, George Santayana. However, in1905 the young Ezra Pound, H. D., and WilliamCarlos WilliamsPound and Williams were studentsat the University of Pennsylvania, and H. D was afriend of bothformed perhaps the first important lit-erary fellowship of the new century. Although Poundand Williams did not come to know and admireMarianne Moore until later, Moore and H. D. were atleast aware of one another during the year they spentas fellow students at Bryn Mawr, so we may add Mooreto form a unique quartet of Philadelphia modernists.Around this nexus of personal relationships a newpoetic movement would crystallize, although each ofthe poets in question would arrive at a unique person-al voice. In 1905 Pound and Williams were alreadywriting poetry, but in a distinctly 19th-century idiom:They were, in a phrase from Pounds 1921 poemHugh Selwyn Mauberley, in search of the sublime inthe old sense. But by 1910 Pound was in London,acutely aware of new poetic possibilities emerging onthe continent. In a series of essays published in 1913under the collective title The Approach to Paris, hedirected American poets toward a serious reading ofpoets such as Jules Laforgue, Tristan Corbiere, and,above all, Arthur Rimbaud, whose work of the 1870spointed the way toward a poetics of radical disjunc-tion and indeterminacy. By 1913 H. D. had alsomoved to London, and in that year Pound presentedher poetry as the model of imagisme, a literary move-ment consciously modeled on the various aestheticisms emanating from Paris: symbolisme, unanisme,etc., with cubism a first cousin in the visual arts. Thena year or so later, T. S. Eliot, who had already writtenportions of Portrait of a Lady and The Love Song ofJ. Alfred Prufrock while a student at Harvard, arrivedin London and quickly became a central figure in thePound circle. (Williams detested Eliots poetry, andEliot was indifferent to Williamss, but they had Poundin common.)

If to my list of the five poets grouped around Poundwe add Wallace Stevens and Gertrude Stein, we have agalaxy of major poets who collectively define the mostinfluential poetic movement of the 20th century, inter-national modernism. Pound showed no interest inStevenss poetry, but Williams came to know Stevens inNew York City during the World War I years, whenboth were members of a group of artists and writersthat met regularly at the home of Walter Arensberg, awealthy art patron. Moore also moved on the fringes ofthe Arensberg group, and she, too, came to know andadmire Stevenss work at this time. In his role as editorof Others magazine during the war years, Williams pub-lished Stevenss poetry, while in the 1920s Mooresolicited some of his poems for publication in The Dial.And in the 1930s Stevens contributed a preface toWilliamss first Collected Poems. Thus we can perhapscreate a subgroup of New Yorkarea modernistsencompassing Williams, Moore, and Stevens. Stein wasnever a close friend of any of the poets mentioned thusfar and an outspoken critic of some of them, althoughWilliams visited her in Paris and admired her work. Butwhile she was not part of the network of personal rela-tionships that linked our other poets, she is a crucialfigure in this story, as the most important mediatorbetween Parisian modernismcubism, fauvism, etc.and American writers, artists, and composers. ConradAiken, a friend of Eliots from Harvard, also perhapsbelongs in this list of major modernists, but to mostobservers he has come to seem a lesser figure. Somecritics would add to the list Mina Loy, a British expatri-ate who arrived in New York during the World War Iyears and there met Williams and possibly Stevens andMoore. Laura Riding (Jackson), E. E. Cummings, andHart Crane also belong on any list of major Americanmodernist poets, but they were somewhat younger thanthe poets mentioned thus far and began to write underthe shadow of the first generation modernists.

The modernism of Pound, Eliot, H. D., Moore,Williams, Stevens, and Stein is international in a basicway: Four of these seven poets chose to live in and writefrom Europe. Eliot became a British citizen. After WorldWar I, Pound returned to the United States only oncewillingly, for a short visit, and then for a second timeunder duress, after his arrest for treason during World

FOREWORD vii

War II. Stein is forever linked to Paris in the popularimagination, although she made an extended celebritytour of the United States in 193435, and H. D. madeonly two brief visits to the United States after she tookup residence in Europe, the first shortly after WorldWar I and the second in the late 1950s. But evenWilliams, Stevens, and Moore, all of whom chose to livein the United States, maintained a distinctly interna-tional perspective. All three lived in or near New YorkCity, the main point of communication betweenAmerica and Europe. Stevens, although he never wentto Europe, read widely in French poetry and culturalcommentary, while Williams, who spent a year inEurope during the 1920s, was powerfully influenced bysuch European literary/artistic movements as cubismand surrealism. And most significantly, all seven of mymajor international modernists shared with Europeanmodernist painters (Picasso, Matisse, Braque, et al.),composers (Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Webern, et al.),and writers (Joyce, Proust, Mann, Apollinaire, Valry,Rilke, et al.) a determination to interrogate the mostfundamental principles of their art forms. A range offormal vocabularies that had endured since theRenaissance all came into question during this period:in painting, the illusion of three-dimensional space,constructed through the application of the laws ofperspective; in music, the diatonic scale with its atten-dant harmonies; in fiction, the linear narrative and thecontrolling authorial point of view; and in poetry, themetrical line and the unitary lyric voice. The sevenAmerican poets that I have identified as exemplars ofinternational modernism are very different from eachother in some important ways: Williamss insistence onthe American ground contrasts with the condescen-sion toward all things American that we sometimes seein Pound, Eliot, and H. D., while H. D.s continuingloyalty to the romantic tradition contrasts with theostensible antiromanticism of Pound and Eliot, et al.But these writers were bound together not only by (inmost cases) a network of personal associations to whichthey were often deeply loyal but also by a desire to con-struct alternatives to the traditional formal vocabulariesthat had defined poetry for their predecessors, andthey made it new (it here being poetry itself) in waysthat continue to inspire poets of the 21st century.

Today the standard classroom anthologies devotemore space to the exponents of international mod-ernism than to any other group of 20th-centuryAmerican poets, and all of them receive maximumspace in this encyclopedia. However, the esteem thatthese poets enjoy today is largely retrospective, as dur-ing their lifetimes other poets often had larger audi-ences and received more respect from critics. The mostacclaimed American poet throughout much of the 20thcentury was Robert Frost, who also lived during thesecond decade of the century for a time in London,where he brushed up against Pound. But Frostreturned to America and with Edwin ArlingtonRobinson defined a New England alternative to inter-national modernism. Frost borrowed the title of hisfirst book from Longfellow, and neither Frost norRobinson saw any need to reject the traditional poeticforms or the lyric voice characteristic of the Englishpoetic tradition. Despite the dark undercurrents intheir vision of the world, both Frost and Robinsonenjoyed during their lifetimes an audience markedlylarger than the audiences of the modernists. No lesspopular was another native New Englander, Edna St.Vincent Millay, who also saw no need to reject eitherthe metrical line or the lyric voice. Meanwhile, in theyears during and after World War I, a group of Chicagopoets sought to define a populist alternative both tothe radical experimentalism of the international mod-ernists and to the formal decorum of the New Englandpoets. Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters bothemployed a loose free verse modeled primarily onWhitmans, while Vachel Lindsay sought to revive atradition of performance poetry. Looking out to thePacific from his home in Carmel, California, RobinsonJeffers also adapted the long, cadenced Whitman linein his search for a poetic idiom that could do justice tothe vast and still largely empty expanses of the westernlandscape. His poetry has remained an importantinfluence on later West Coast poets such as WilliamEverson, Kenneth Rexroth, and Gary Snyder.

In the late 1920s and 1930s, a group of southernpoets, often grouped under the self-chosen labels ofFugitives or Agrarians; also affirmed a self-consciouslyregional alternative to international modernism, andtheir example became an important force in American

viii FOREWORD

poetry. John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and RobertPenn Warren all identified with Eliots social and cul-tural conservatism and intermittently adopted his iron-ic, high-Mandarin tone, but they retreated from the rad-ical formal experimentalism of Pound, Williams, andMoorean experimental impulse also evident in theEliot of The Waste Land, although this impulse fades inhis later work. The southern Agrarians all taught in col-leges or universities and wrote criticism as well as poet-ry. (Warren also wrote a series of successful novels.) Inalliance with influential critics such as Cleanth Brooksand with other poet/critics, including Kenneth Burkeand R. P. Blackmur, the Agrarians became the foundersof a movement generally known as the New Criticism,which sought new ways of addressing a public thatfound poetry more and more opaque. Living in theWest but in dialogue with the southern Agrarians, thepoet/critics Yvor Winters and J. V. Cunningham alsorejected what they saw as a surrender to chaos in thepoetry of the high modernists. Tate and Winters wereboth friends of Hart Crane, whose spectacular but ulti-mately disastrous career became for them an example ofthe dangers of modernist excess. As poets, Ransom,Tate, Warren, Blackmur, Winters, and Cunningham nolonger command much attention: all six receive onlyshort entries in this encyclopedia. However, they arehistorically significant insofar as they established a tra-dition of what has sometimes been called (usually deri-sively) academic poetry: a relatively decorous, oftenformally traditional poetry written by men and womenwho have spent significant time in the classroom. Suchpoetry tends to be relatively closed both in its formsand in its cultural attitudes, as it seeks to build in art arefuge from which the poet can contemplate the variousdisorders of modern life.

The tradition defined by Ransom, Tate, and Warrenpasses directly to Robert Lowell, who went to KenyonCollege to study with Tate and Ransom. While there,Lowell became friends with Randall Jarrell, and togeth-er Lowell and Jarrell became the center of another cru-cial group of young poets who were, like the Pound cir-cle in an earlier generation, bound together by bonds ofpersonal friendship as well as a common aesthetic thatthey seem to have arrived at through exchanges amongthemselves. Eventually this new grouping reached out to

include Delmore Schwartz, Elizabeth Bishop, and JohnBerryman, along with Lowell and Jarrell. The membersof this circle, in addition to certain other poets whoshared many of their aspirations (for example, TheodoreRoethke, Richard Wilbur, and W. D. Snodgrass), were,during the 1950s and 1960s, widely regarded as themost significant poets of the period. Many of these poetsfollowed the example of poets such as Frost, Ransom,and the enormously influential British expatriate W. H.Auden in cultivating an expertise in traditional poeticforms and meters; and the metrical subtleties of Bishop,Berryman, Wilbur, Snodgrass, and Lowell (at least in hisearlier work) are often dazzling. Lowell, Berryman, andSnodgrass share a self-lacerating irony that is sometimestaken to be characteristic of the whole group, but onceagain differences are as important as similarities. NeitherJarrell nor Bishop is primarily an ironic poet. Rather,Jarrells poetry displays a remarkable capacity for empa-thetic identification with other people, while Bishopsgeographic imagination is unique. Most of these poetswere, like Ransom and Warren before them, at leastintermittently academics, although again Bishop is anexception. As academic appointments carried thesepoets about the country, regional affiliations herebecame less significant. However, Lowell and Bishopwere distinctly New England poets, while Roethke stoodwithin an identifiable lineage of midwestern poets (hissuccessors have included, for example, James Wrightand Robert Bly), and Jarrell and Berryman both hadsouthern roots. Many influential critics (Helen Vendler,for example) continue to regard the lineage defined bythese poets as the mainstream of American poetry, ajudgment also reflected in such widely used anthologiesas J. D. McClatchys Vintage Book of ContemporaryAmerican Poetry. At the start of the 21st century, further-more, many still-active poets continue to write within apoetic mode that passes from Eliot (with the qualifica-tions noted above) and Ransom through Lowell, Jarrell,and their associates: for example, Frank Bidart, AlfredCorn, Mark Doty, Stephen Dobyns, Edward Hirsch, andmany others.

The southern Fugitive poet/critics and their heirsrecognized that universities were becoming positionsof power in American society, offering poets the possi-bility of both a secure livelihood and a new kind of

FOREWORD ix

public visibility, based not on the volume of their booksales (in the postwar period, Frost and Ginsberg wereprobably the only significant American poets to earnenough to live on from the sale of their books) but ona charismatic classroom style and triumphant readingtours. However, the dominance of the academic poetsfrom the 1930s to the 1950s was challenged from thebeginning by other writers who rejected the tacit con-servatismwhether political or aesthetic or bothofthe mainstream academic poets. In the 1930s a groupof left-wing poets grouped loosely around theCommunist Party, including Tom McGrath, KennethFearing, Muriel Rukeyser, and Walter Lowenfels,offered an alternative to the social conservatism of Eliotand his various followers, southern Agrarian or other-wise, while Trotskyites such as John Wheelwright andanarchists such as Kenneth Rexroth and KennethPatchen sought to define the possibility of an anti-Stalinist left. While the specific aura of doctrinairepolitical commitment becomes rarer after World WarII, some later poetsfor example, Philip Levine andC. K. Williamshave sought to preserve the engage-ment with working-class experience represented bypoets like McGrath and Fearing. In the 1930s, most ofthe left-wing poets listed above (Wheelwright was anexception) were content to write within a Whitman-esque poetic mode, a readily accessible and oftenassertively colloquial free verse idiom. But anothergroup of poets emerged in the 1930s who combinedpolitical radicalism with formal experimentation in thetradition of the modernists. These were the so-calledobjectivist poets: Charles Reznikoff, Louis Zukofsky,Carl Rakosi, George Oppen, Lorine Niedecker, and theBritish poet Basil Bunting. In much the same way asPound was at the center of the modernists, Zukofskywas the nodal point of the objectivists: All were linkedto him by personal friendship, even though Oppenand Niedecker, for example, apparently never met, andRakosi and Oppen did not meet until late in their lives.All the objectivists were sympathetic to the politicalleft, and Rakosi and Oppen both joined theCommunist Party for a time. But at the same time, theobjectivist poetsinspired by the example of the mod-ernists, especially Pound and Williamsalso stimulat-ed one another to pursue a rigorous testing of language

and its relationship to the perceived world. Reznikoffremained throughout his life loyal to Pounds imagistaesthetic, while Zukofsky became a close friend of bothPound and Williams and initiated a strenuous polemicon behalf of their work as well as the work of Mooreand (later in his life) Stevens. Oppen owed a manifestand freely acknowledged debt to both Pound andWilliams; Niedecker, too, distilled her aesthetic fromthe modernists via her close friend Zukofsky; whileStevens and Eliot exercised a palpable influence onRakosi. The anticommunist hysteria of the postwaryears pushed all of the left poets into the shadows, butstarting in the 1960s, poets such as Rukeyser,Zukofsky, and Oppen have been increasingly recog-nized as major American poets.

In the postwar years, the imperial ambitions of theSoviet Union and the manifestly repressive nature ofSoviet society made communism an increasingly unat-tractive alternative, but a large group of American poetscontinued to question the inherent perfection both ofcommodity capitalism as a form of social organizationand of the lyric ego as a mode of poetic expression.Beginning in 1951, one important such group cametogether around Cid Cormans Origin magazine, whichgave an initial airing to the work of Charles Olson,Robert Creeley, William Bronk, Larry Eigner, TheodoreEnslin, and others. Olson and Creeley quickly estab-lished themselves at the center of an overlapping poeticnetwork, the so-called Black Mountain group, anotherone of those affinity groups, bound together both bypersonal friendship and aesthetic commitments, whichhave so often set the direction of American poetry. TheBlack Mountain group numbered among its membersPaul Blackburn, Denise Levertov, Joel Oppenheimer,Edward Dorn, Jonathan Williams, and Robert Duncan,all of whom either taught or studied at Black MountainCollege, where Olson served as rector in the early1950s, or were linked to the Black Mountain Review, edit-ed by Creeley in the mid-1950s. Duncan served as a linkbetween Black Mountain and an already established SanFrancisco nexus that included Robin Blaser, Jack Spicer,and Helen Adam; and this link was solidified whenCreeley moved to San Francisco after Black MountainCollege closed in 1957. In the mid-1950s, San Franciscoalso become the home base of the Beat poets, notably

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Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Diane diPrima, Michael McClure, John Wieners, and LawrenceFerlinghetti, who published the early work of many ofthese poets through his City Lights Press. KennethRexroth briefly served as the impresario of this SanFrancisco poetry scene, which also included somenatives of the West Coast, such as Gary Snyder, PhilipWhalen, and Joanne Kyger, all of whom looked to theBuddhist traditions of India and Japan for spiritual andaesthetic guidance. Relationships among the various SanFrancisco groups were not always harmonious, butamong them they created an extraordinarily vital poeticworld in the 1950s, with reverberations down to the endof the century.

If Duncan and Creeley served as liaisons betweenBlack Mountain and the San Francisco Renaissance,Paul Blackburn played a similar role with an emergingNew York School of poets that included Frank OHara,John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, James Schuyler, TedBerrigan, Kenneth Koch, and, for a time, Amiri Baraka(then Leroi Jones). The New York School (and onceagain most of these poets were personal friends as wellas literary allies) shared a distinctive aesthetic, groundedin a witty subversion of all romantic posturing, an empa-thy with abstract expressionism in the visual arts(OHara and Ashbery were both art critics as well aspoets), a delight in the vagaries of American pop culture,and a forthright affirmation of alternative sexual identi-ties. In 1960 an intrepid editor, Donald Allen, venturedto link the East and West Coasts into a movement thathe saw as dedicated to the creation of a New AmericanPoetry, and the publication of his anthology under thattitle represents a decisive moment in our literary histo-ry. The 1960s challenged all the certainties of Americanlife: The Civil Rights movement called into question thedegree to which America offered equal justice to its owncitizens; the movement against the Vietnam War chal-lenged the assumption that our nation self-evidentlyembodied freedom to all the peoples of the world; andthe womens movement questioned power relationshipswithin not only the workplace but even the home. Atthe threshold of the decade of what has sometimes beencalled the Third American Revolution (the Second wasthe Civil War), the Allen anthology defined a clear alter-native to the social and aesthetic conservatism of the

academic poets: a free-wheeling, process-based poeticsthat saw the poem not as articulation of already-estab-lished truths but as an exploration into untracked terri-tories. (I write poetry, Duncan said memorably, tofind out what I am going to say.) During the 1960sother new movements sympathetic to the aesthetic ofthe New American poetry also emerged, including theethnopoetics of Jerome Rothenberg and ArmandSchwerner and the talk-poetry of David Antin; all thesepoets were initially based in the New York area.

Then the last years of the 1960s saw the emergenceof a younger group of poets who continued to identifywith the Pound/Williams/Olson/Creeley lineage (orsometimes with a Stein/Pound/Williams/Creeley/Ashbery lineage), but who contended that their prede-cessors had not gone far enough in the interrogation oflanguage as a self-perpetuating ideological system.Thus the self-labeled Language poets set about adeconstruction of meaning itself. Once again SanFrancisco and New York served as the twin centers ofthis new avant garde: Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, BobPerelman, Barrett Watten, Carla Harryman, KathleenFraser, Rae Armantrout, and others were all, at leastinitially, based on the West Coast, while CharlesBernstein, Fanny and Susan Howe, Bruce Andrews,Bernadette Mayer, Joan Retallack, and others have rep-resented the East Coast wing of the Language poetrymovement. Sillimans 1986 anthology In the AmericanTree sought to bring together the East and West Coastsof the Language poetry movement, in much the sameway that Allens The New American Poetry broughttogether the two coasts a generation earlier. The latestbicoastal vision of American poetry, like Allens, mightbe faulted for leaving out everything between thecoasts. Further, the poets that anthologists have soughtto constrain within such categories as the NewAmerican poetry or Language poetry repeatedlyinsist on going their own ways. That John Ashbery wasonce part of the New York School seems, for exam-ple, less and less germane as a key to the understand-ing of his work, while classifying Susan Howe as aLanguage poet doesnt tell us much about the visionof American history that her work unfolds. Still, to theend of the century, the poets of a lineage defined by theAllen and Silliman anthologies have continued to offer

FOREWORD xi

themselves as an avant-garde, united by an adversarialcultural stance and questioning all a priori assumptionsabout what a poem should be and do. Meanwhile, andperhaps partly in response to the increasingly uncom-promising tone of the manifestos issued by theLanguage poets, a counter-avant-garde often labeledNew Formalism has produced a body of poetry andtheory that returns to traditional forms and strives torebalance poetry in favor of meter and rhyme.Representative New Formalists include Dana Gioia,Mark Jarman, and Robert McDowell.

Much academic discussion of 20th-centuryAmerican poetry has centered on the clash between, onthe one hand, the mainstream poets, who have tend-ed to receive most of the prestigious literary prizes and,until recently at least, to dominate the anthologies and,on the other hand, the insurgent poets of what wemight now think of, with a full recognition that the spe-cific names here are a bit arbitrary, as the Pound/Zukofsky/Olson/Hejinian/Bernstein lineage. Each ofthese lineages has also found forceful critical spokesper-sons, notably Helen Vendler for the mainstream poetsand Marjorie Perloff for the tradition that extends fromPound to the Language poets. However, the years sinceWorld War II have also seen a broad challenge to bothof these lineages. Both the mainstream and the avant-garde traditions have defined themselves primarilythrough their contrasting approaches to poetic form,but a third group of poets has placed primary emphasison content rather than form, as they have sought to givepoetic expression to the experiences of social groupsthat had previously been effectively silenced. As sooften in American life, African Americans, the nationslargest and most brutally dispossessed minority, havebeen in the forefront of this effort to give voice to thevoiceless. African-American poetry has often borrowedforms and modes from the poetic possibilities afloat inthe culture as a whole. Thus the early 20th-centuryAfrican-American poets Claude McKay, James WeldonJohnson, and Countee Cullen generally worked withintraditional poetic forms. But with Melvin Tolson andLangston Hughes, African-American poetry also beganto explore the new poetic possibilities opened up by themodernists, and in the last half of the century, African-American writing opened into a broad range of poetic

modes, from Barakas projectivist early verse, writtenin dialogue with Olson and OHara, through the Beatidiom of Bob Kaufman and the beautifully modulatedlyric voices of Robert Hayden and Rita Dove, to the epicaspirations of Derek Walcott, Gwendolyn Brooks, andJay Wright. The names listed here represent but a smallsample of the rich heritage of African-American poetry.This body of poetry has made an active contribution tothe ongoing project of African-American self-definition,while at the same time the imaginative scope of thispoetry has demanded a fundamental reconception ofthe American poetic heritage itself.

The corpus of African-American poetry hadbecome, by the end of the century, sufficiently largeand various to qualify as a distinct poetic tradition,within an American literature increasingly defined notby its presumed unity but by its diversity. In thisrespect, African-American poetry has become the pro-totype of other ethnically defined poetries. PerhapsAfrican-American literature moved ahead of other eth-nic literatures in part because English early became thecommon language of black Americans. Slave ownersdeliberately broke up African-language communitiesbecause they feared the slaves would use their Africanlanguages to plot rebellion. Remnants of African lan-guages did, however, linger on in Black English andhave thence found their way into much African-American poetry. In contrast, many Native Americanlanguages survived as active means of communicationinto the 20th century, and only relatively late in thecentury did a body of Native American poetry inEnglish crystallize to define an alternative poetic tradi-tion. By the end of the century, however, such writersas Simon Ortiz, Leslie Marmon Silko, Linda Hogan,Joy Harjo, and Sherman Alexie had begun to chart thelineaments of a Native American poetic tradition. Thistradition overlaps at times with a Hispanic-Americanpoetic lineage. The situation of the Hispanic-Americanpoet, who may choose to reject English itself in favorof the rich heritage of Spanish and Latin American lit-erature, is perhaps even more ambiguous than that ofthe Native American poet. However, a significantgroup of poets has written out of this position as mem-bers of an Hispanic linguistic community (and thereare in fact several different such communities in the

xii FOREWORD

United States, from the Chicano/Chicana world of theSouthwest to the Nuyorican world of New York City)surrounded and often overwhelmed by an English-speaking world: for example, Rafael Campo, AlbertoRios, Martin Espada, Lorna Dee Cervantes, JudithOrtiz Cofer, and Jimmy Santiago Baca.

The emergence of an explicit ethnic consciousnessamong African-American, Native American, andHispanic-American writers has also encouraged arenewed ethnic self-consciousness among other groups.In particular, the last decades of the century saw a wide-spread recognition of a distinctively Jewish-Americantradition within our literature. It has come to seem noaccident, for example, that almost all of the objectivistpoets of the 1930s generation shared a Jewish heritage.The political radicalism of these poets was in part afunction of their ethnicity, as immigrant Jews brought atradition of socialist and communist theory and prac-tice to the United States. And when George Oppen pas-sionately insists that The self is no mystery, the mysteryis / That there is something for us to stand on, hisvision of the relationship between the perceiving sub-ject and a larger mystery may owe something to theJewish heritage. Furthermore, the objectivists combi-nation of a deep skepticism about language and animpassioned commitment to Truth has been carriedforward by a group of younger poets who are also large-ly Jewish: This Neo-objectivist group might include, forexample, Hugh Seidman, Michael Heller, ArmandSchwerner, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and even the editorof this encyclopedia, Burt Kimmelman, who has mod-estly omitted any entry on his own poetry. A recogni-tion of the role that ethnicity played in the work of theobjectivist and neo-objectivist poets also allows us tobring these poets into dialogue with Jewish Americanpoets writing in more rhetorical and incantatory poeticidioms, such as Muriel Rukeyser, Allen Ginsberg, AllenGrossman, or even Adrienne Rich.

However, in many ways the most dynamic literarymovement of the late 20th centurya movement thathas now carried forward into the 21st centuryhasbeen a newly self-conscious and self-assertive traditionof womens writing. Throughout the 20th century,women made up the primary audience for poetry, andbeginning in the 1960s women readers increasingly

demanded a poetry that would speak out of and to theirown distinctive experiences as women. By centurys end,the womens movement that erupted in the 1960s hadpermanently transformed the politics not only of theworkplace and of the household but also of the poetrycommunity. The voices of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton(both too early silenced by suicide) became models (inpart cautionary) for a generation of young women writ-ers, while Adrienne Rich offered a more positive, evenheroic model: The voices of women, she and her fol-lowers and admirers insisted, were different, and theywould be heard. The new womens writing that found itsway into print beginning in the 1960s covers animmense formal range, from the Language poetries ofLyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino, Beverly Dahlen, KathleenFraser, or Joan Retallack, through the neo-objectivism ofRachel Blau DuPlessis, to the more traditional poeticmodes of Sandra Gilbert, Marilyn Hacker, or CarolynKizer. At the same time as these new poetic voices foundtheir way into print, scholars and poet/critics began torecover a whole galaxy of women poets who had beenmore or less buried by a male-dominated literary estab-lishment: If writers like H. D., Mina Loy, and LorineNiedecker have finally assumed their rightful placeswithin the literary canon, we must thank primarily thework of a remarkable generation of women scholars.Further, poets such as Gwendolyn Brooks, LucilleClifton, Nikki Giovanni, June Jordan, Rita Dove, andAudre Lorde have been increasingly recognized not onlyas black poets but also as women poets, sharing a broadrange of experiences and concerns with all women poetsamong their contemporaries. At the same time, the workof feminist critics has allowed us to read in new waysalready canonical writers such as Gertrude Stein,Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop. This quiet rev-olution effected by women poets and scholar since the1960s might remind us that both American poetry itselfand the ways we conceptualize our poetic traditionremain, as we enter the 21st century, still dynamic, fluid,in processopen to new possibilities, as our society as awhole must be, too, if we are to survive the new century.

Burton Hatlen, DirectorNational Poetry Foundation

University of Maine

FOREWORD xiii

Make it new, the poet and sometime evangelist of theliterary avant garde Ezra Pound insisted, as the 20thcentury was under way. Literature is news that staysnews was another of his formulations meant to exhortpoets to find their own path, to break ground, to put aliterary tradition in its proper perspective. Eras do notneatly begin and end on time; the fact of a new centu-ry, as told by a calendar, does not necessarily changehow people think and feel. Even so, in January 1900Americans must have felt excitement at the thought ofa new kind of life ahead of them (calendars do lendmeaning, after all). For Pound, as well as for otherartists and intellectuals, it was easy to imagine thattheir new century was to be one of great promise. Theobject of Pounds imperatives was poetry, but, whetherhe meant it or not, he was also putting a broadernational impulse into words.

In the early 19th century Alexis de Tocqueville hadremarked upon American individualism, noting howcentral it was to the growth of the new nation he wasvisiting. That element in the American character comesto the fore in the poetry of the United States duringwhat came to be thought of as modern times. RichardGray describes 20th-century American poetry as oneof radical experiment, the personal address and fre-quently eccentric innovation (15). Of course, in thelast century there were poets whom readers would notconsider to have been experimentalRobert Frost andEdwin Arlington Robinson, for instanceyet even

they seem to speak to us from out of the depths oftheir solitude; even the distanced, hieratic tone of aJohn Crowe Ransom or the elaborate patternings of aMarianne Moore cannot disguise the fact that they tooare engaged in a lonely confrontation with the real,Gray continues (15). American poetry of the last cen-tury embodied the sense of the particular, of the hereand now, of what are markedly Americanas opposedto Britishconcerns and language. For the first time,Louis Untermeyer announced in his 1919 anthologyThe New Era in American Poetry, a great part ofAmerican letters is actually American. We have had, ofcourse, music, art and literature in this country before.But it has not been, as a rule, a native growth; it hasmerely been transplanted and produced here (3).When considered as a body of work, the newAmerican poetry was idiosyncratic, not afraid of inno-vation. Moreover, especially as the century progressedand more voices other than those of principally whiteAnglo-Saxon males became audible, American poetryevolved and reflected Americas diversity. I containmultitudes, Walt Whitman sang in the 19th century,many years ahead of his time.

In 1913 Pound turned to Whitman, saying in hispoem A Pact, It was you that broke the new wood, /Now it is time for carving. A number of decades later,Charles Olson echoed Pound in The Kingfishers(1949) when he maintained, What does not change /is the will to change. There is such a thing as a pecu-

DC

INTRODUCTION

xiv

liarly American desire to start over, Ed Folsom asserts;this impulse made twentieth-century [American]poets reticent about constructing a tradition as a back-drop for their work (16). Rather, these poets had toinvent a new kind of wheel in a process that has con-tinued up to the present. Decades after Olson com-posed The Kingfishers, Adrienne Rich wrote of whatshe called The Dream of a Common Language(Origins and History of Consciousness [1978]). As JayParini points out (quoting Rich), the dream is deeplyfeminist, involving womens struggle to name theworld. (x) In Transcendental Etude (1978), Richspoke of the beginning of a whole new poetry. Tobe sure, ultimately the struggle was not only taken upby women. From the start, Parini continues, poetry inthe United States has been this dream of a commonlanguage (x).

What makes common that language Rich andParini celebrate? Is it that women as well as men haveaccess to it? More elementally, is it a language thatmolds the foundation for a uniquely American identi-ty? By the end of the 20th century, a commonAmerican language had indeed come into being inpoetry as well as in the larger American culture, spo-ken by a panoply of voices and in a seemingly endlessvariety of poetic forms, which, collectively, make up auniquely American sensibility. When the centurybegan there was only an inkling of such a language. In1919 Untermeyer wrote, [T]here is still an undeniablebeauty in the ancient myths, but to most of the livingpoets it is a frayed and moth-eaten beauty. Their eyesdo not fail to catch the glamor of the old tales, but theyturn with creative desire to more recent and less shop-worn loveliness (10).

No period in the life of any nation brought forth asmany points of view and poetic oddnesses as did theAmerican 20th century. Whatever would lie ahead, itcan be said that during this eraan era of both greatturmoil and achievementAmerican poetry collec-tively stood as a distinctive testament to human aspi-ration, to human struggle and salutary accomplish-ment, and to a condition that is especially American interms of outlook. The American trait of prizing theindividual and adventure, the new and the diverse, wasa potential fully realized in what came to be known as

the American Century. As Parini has observed, 20th-century American poetry had a love affair with theimage, not least of all because of the influence of theimagist and, later, the objectivist poets. Commentingon that, he says, even when there is an overarchingnarrative, imagery tends to be central and the poetryexhibits an overriding concern with concreteness(xx). The breadth and multiplicity of 20th-centuryAmerican poetry are evident in its use of images, in thevery fact of their proliferation. The American languagestarts with and is embodied by things.

In the United States to be open to the new is toembrace the particulars of experience. A poem typicalof this sensibility is Pounds In a Station of the Metro(1913), with its snapshot suddenness, as Jed Rasulahas put it (98). William Carlos Williams intoned, noideas but in things. His poem The Red Wheelbarrow(1923), Roger Mitchell has argued, shows that Williamsnot only trusted the unadorned image to reveal beau-ty and truth but also, more fundamentally, to revealunadorned reality itself (30). Perhaps Williams,among all modernist poets, was the most radical inhis drive to start over; he was willing to turn his backon all existing ideas of culture and tradition (31). Stillwhile someone like Williams was first and foremost anoriginator, he and others, such as Pound, Olson, andRich, adhered to a basic understanding of what it meantto be American. This understanding, which transcend-ed any particularity of image, prosodic form, or evenvoice, came to be fully articulated during Williamsslifetime. Together, these and many other poets forgedan American identity at the heart of which lies the freshand the various.

Beyond the insular world of poetry, the United Statesin the early 20th century found itself in the throes ofinvention. Twentieth-century America is normallythought of as a time and place of modernity, and, in fact,the literary movement of modernism began withAmerican formulations and endured, increasingly atten-uated, as the century evolved. It is interesting to note,however, looking back from the vantage point of the21st century, how much of the material and intellectualworld normally associated with modern living wasalready in place by 1900. At the start of the 20th centu-ry, the ratio in the United States between agricultural

INTRODUCTION xv

workers and factory workers was shifting dramatically.At the same time there was a flood of immigrants. Cities,the incubators of high culture, were growing quickly.Skyscrapers, which actualized the metaphor of reachingupward to the heavens or, alternately, to the stars, werealready being constructed. Over distances, people couldcommunicate by telephone. In 1900 the U.S. per capitaincome (about $570) was the highest in the world; therewere nearly a thousand colleges and universities andmore than 2,000 American daily newspapers, whichconstituted half of all the newspapers being publishedanywhere. In that year work began on New York Citysrapid transit subway system, the photostatic copyingmachine was invented, the Brownie camera was beingmarketed, and the paper clip was patented. Change wasrampant and startling. In 1901 Guglielmo Marconi sentthe first transatlantic wireless message. In 1906 a StanleySteamer automobile attained a speed of 127 miles perhour. In 1911 the first transcontinental airplane flighttook place. An olderand surerworld was quicklyfading away; the world of surprise had arrived. HenryAdams wrote in 1900 that his historical neck [wasbeing] broken by the irruption of forces totally new(382, cf. Gray 30). Life was becoming more complicat-ed. Adams felt that the child born in 1900 would . . .be born into a new world which would not be a unitybut a multiple (457, cf. Gray 30).

While discoveries in science, especially in physicsand biology, in the later years of the 20th centuryrevealed vast landscapes of possibility that inevitablywould become the substance of poetry, these discoverieswere also presaged in the centurys early years. The ideathat the universe is comprised of 12 dimensions, forexample, as is held by string theory, represents a depar-ture from classical physics, a science that still holds greatsway over everyday languagepoems, in contrast, workto reshape language and meaning one by one. This riftin the laws of nature as they were propounded by SirIsaac Newton, in the late 17th and early 18th centuries,appeared with Albert Einsteins theories of relativity(1905, 1916), then Werner Heisenbergs uncertaintyprinciple (1927). Tangibility, objectivity, and subjectivi-ty were to be understood in new ways; predictabilitycame to be conditional. This transformation lay at theheart of, for instance, William Bronks conclusion to his

poem How Indeterminacy Determines Us (1962):Sight / is inward and sees itself, hearing, touch, / areinward. What do we know of an outer world? Thepoint of view evoked here is a great leap away fromRobert Brownings Gods in His Heaven/ Alls rightwith the world (Pippa Passes [1841]).

While communication technologies, such as televi-sion and the Internet, have transformed society inmany ways, their effectsthe dramatically social andpsychological changes they have provokedare notfundamentally different from those created by the tele-phone and the wireless radio early in the century. Yetlanding on the Moon and sending exploratory space-ships to the ends of the solar system have ultimatelychallenged definitions of what it means to be a humanbeing; life beyond Earth can currently be contemplat-ed. Still this way of thinking was ushered in by the firstairplane flights. Transformation continues within aworld predicated on transformation. The virtual reali-ty created by computing, which causes a rethinking ofindividual identity and boundaries of the selfleadingto the rise of cyberpoetrycalls into question thosesame limits that were challenged by the transformativenature of viewing motion picture shows in the earlypart of the 20th century. What is important to see inthese developments is that the last century discoveredhow to understand a radically new world, one notanticipated beforehand and not resembling anythingthat had come before, and the century producedunique methods of expressing this new awareness.

It was not so much that American poetry evolvedin the 20th century in conjunction with a modernsociety. Rather, it was a task of that poetry to examineand express the meaning of this new way of theworld. In terms of the arts (with the possible excep-tion of painting), the 19th century seemed not to pos-sess the sense of what was soon to arrive. Even thepoetry of Whitman and other key protomodern liter-ary figures of the prior centuryincluding EmilyDickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe,and Herman Melvilledid not comprehend the aes-thetic and cerebral concerns that were to arise. The20th-century American poet was writing a poetry ina fully realized American languageno longerEuropean in its castabout a United States that by

xvi INTRODUCTION

1900 was becoming a world power. By the timePound had told poets, Make it new, the 20th centu-ry was already unfolding its unique character thatwas, in great measure, due to intellectual realizationsthen revolutionary, which would fundamentally alterthe conception of the world. In 1900 the ancientMinoan palace at Knossos was discovered, as wasradon, the gamma ray, and quantum energy, and thethird law of thermodynamics was postulated. In thissame year Sigmund Freud published his influentialopus The Interpretation of Dreamswithout which thework of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath (as readers seeher in lines like At twenty I tried to die / And getback, back, back to you, from her 1962 poemDaddy) or any confessional poet could not havebeen written.

This was also the year that Theodore Dreisers novelSister Carrie was published and that Giacomo Puccinisopera Tosca was first performed. And in 1901 BookerT. Washingtons autobiography Up from Slavery becamea bestseller, and Pablo Picasso began painting worksthat are now famously categorized as belonging to hisblue period. In 1902 Joseph Conrad published hisnovel Heart of Darkness, while the opera tenor EnricoCaruso made his first gramophone recordings. In 1903Wassily Kandinsky inaugurated abstract painting withthe showing of his Blue Rider. In arts and letters break-throughs were occurring year after year. The year 1913was especially noteworthy: Willa Cather published hernovel O Pioneers!, D. H. Lawrence published his novelSons and Lovers, and Frost published his first collectionof verse, A Boys Will. And in that same year Cecil B.DeMille produced the feature-length Hollywood film,The Squaw Man; a Parisian opera audience rioted inreaction to a performance of Igor Stravinskys far-reaching musical work The Rite of Spring; andManhattan hosted the New York Armory Show, a trans-forming event for a poet like Williams, who wasamazed at the modern art he was able to view there,including Marcel Duchamps painting Nude Descendinga Staircase. Without these and other artistic innova-tions, would Williams have otherwise postulated, as hedid subsequently, that a poem was a machine made ofwords, and would the machine aesthetic havegained ground in American poetry?

Well before America was to enter World War Iaglobal conflict that left society profoundly disillu-sioned about a human beings capacity for destructionand degradation (as is reflected in Robert Gravessmonumental book Goodbye to All That [1929])American society was being transformed materially,intellectually, and aesthetically. Invention of the selfand of the world in which the self resided are conceptsthat have always been central to American culture,beliefs epitomized by the American Revolution.Invention in American poetry was a key to how socie-ty was to evolve in the 20th century. Something essen-tial changed in poetry as the new century was pro-gressing. This development was to be spurred by cata-clysmic eventsthe world wars and other militaryconflicts, the sociopolitical upheavals of the 1930s,and of the 1950s and 1960s, the landing of Americanson the Moonand yet at bottom the stunning diversi-ty and originality of so much of 20th-centuryAmerican poetry is the result of the will to carve out aterritory all of ones own. The American poet in the20th century required that style and substance bespeakan individualityas if the poet made up the rules notonly of writing but of life. Hence the work of the 20thcentury exhibited a dazzling array of metrics and prosepoetry and as many explorations of the individual psy-che and of world events that mark off this century asqualitatively different from all of its predecessors. If theEuropean Middle Ages can be said to have been a timewhen poets adhered to tradition and emulated whathad come before, the 20th-century United States canbe called its direct opposite. In this way Whitman wasprescient. He looked ahead to a time when originalitywould be so widespread as to be taken for granted, andhe sought an American tongue and a free verse poeticline. Racial and ethnic diversity are part of the equationthat gave rise to this collection of poetries; America isthe great social experiment. Nevertheless, it is the driveto stand alone that lies at heart of what has caused theingenuity and range of this vast body of verse.

There were many schools and trends over the yearsbetween 1900 and 2000imagism, the New Yorkschool, Language poetry, to name but three.Remarkably, not only were there these various coales-cences of energy, attention, and vision among

INTRODUCTION xvii

American poets, but there were also a great many poetswho did not fit easily or at all within these groupings.The 20th-century poet went her or his own way and byso doing reshaped the literary canon and the idea ofwhat is beautiful or compelling. This process occurreddaily as poetry burgeoned onto the page and into thecafs, galleries, theaters, and other venues that haveserved as the bases for other social and aestheticgroupings. The example of Allen Ginsberg in 1955breaking ground with his reading of his long poemHowl at San Franciscos Six Gallery, which signaled theemergence of the San Francisco Renaissance, is one ofmany instances of this poetic dynamic that is not pecu-liarly American in its substance but is distinctlyAmerican in its spirit. American poetry in the 20thcentury was a protracted revolution in letters and,more broadly, in society. The poetry has been over-written by the movies, television, and the Internet.Although the news of this revolt is no longer printedmuch in newspapers or broadcast electronically, therevolution itself survivesindeed, it flourishesbecause of the souls need for meaningful language thatarises out of the human labor to shape language.

A great many poets took Pounds urgings to heart,and others followed his dicta even when they were notconscious of the fact that they had been formalized andenunciated by Pound. This happened despite hisrepugnant political and social ideas, because, poetical-ly, he spoke for his time. As its poetries attest,American arts and culture broke free decisively fromEurope in the 20th century and came into its own.There was the need and urge to institutionalize in poet-ry a distinctly American idiom, to write, as Williamstitled one of his books, In the American Grain (1925).That was in the early part of the century. By the latecentury American language in poetry had reached itsfullness and explored the human condition as well asthe condition of language itself with an unparalleleddepth and variety. This volume records important andrepresentative articulations of 20th-century Americanexperience and speech.

I have striven to make this book comprehensive;yet, in its treatment of recent poets and poems, anddespite the fact that the volume contains commentaryon a disproportionate number of them, it still leaves

out certain figures, as is inevitable in a project of thissize. Time has helped to determine which poets from,for instance, the period of high modernism should beincluded in a literary companion such as this is.When it came to deciding who from the 1970s or, say,the 1990spostmodern poetsshould be included,the decision-making process was far more difficult,however. To err on the side of caution, this booktends toward inclusion (although, inevitably, adeserving poet may be left out, the result of imperfecthuman endeavor or the constraints of space). All themajor poetic movements of the 20th century are dis-cussed herein, certainly all the major poets, as well asmany of the most pivotal and influential poems of thecentury. Some poets get more attention than theyhave received thus far. To cite one of several possibleexamples of this editorial discretion, the late mod-ernist, African-American poet Melvin Tolson is dis-cussed at length, and his epic poem Harlem Gallery isexamined, alongside the obviously necessary entrieson such African-American poets as GwendolynBrooks and Langston Hughes, as well as their respec-tive poems (The Bean Eaters and We Real Cool, AMontage of a Dream Deferred and The Negro Speaksof Rivers, respectively). Similarly while Rich is dis-cussed at length (as are her poems Diving into theWreck and Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law), thereis also an entry on lesser-known feminist poet RachelBlau DuPlessis (and another on her serial poemDrafts). Going further, this volume includes an exten-sive entry entitled Female Voice, FemaleLanguageone of nearly 500 entries, among whichare such topics as ars poeticas, long and serialpoetry, prosody and free verse, and war and anti-war poetry. The book concludes with a glossary ofterms, such as, for example, iambic pentameter, to aidthe novice reader, and a bibliography for those whowould desire further commentary.

The United States is uniquely heterogeneous; so isits poetry. This country has often hosted a social van-guard, and this fact also has been reflected in its poet-ry (and in its other arts). The country dominated theworld economically and militarily in the last centurythis, too, has been reflected in the poetry of the era,often as praise and, at times, vituperation. This

xviii INTRODUCTION

uniquely social, economic, political, intellectual, andaesthetic experiment in the 20th century took root in adynamic nation, one that is arguably unprecedented.Its poetry justifies such a claim.

Burt KimmelmanNewark, New Jersey

BIBLIOGRAPHYAdams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams. Boston:

Houghton Mifflin, 1946.Folsom, Ed. Introduction: Recircuiting the American Past.

to A Profile of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, edited byJack Myers and David Wojahn. Carbondale: SouthernIllinois University Press, 1991, pp. 124.

Mitchell, Roger. Modernism Comes to American Poetry:19081920. In A Profile of Twentieth-Century AmericanPoetry, edited by Jack Myers and David Wojahn.Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991,pp. 2553.

Gray, Richard. American Poetry of the Twentieth Century. NewYork: Longman, 1990.

Parini, Jay. The Columbia History of American Poetry. NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1993.

Rasula, Jed. The American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects,19401990. Urbana, Ill.: National Council of Teachers ofEnglish, 1996.

Untermeyer, Louis. Introduction to The New Era in AmericanPoetry, edited by Untermeyer. New York: Henry Holt andCompany, 1919, pp. 314.

INTRODUCTION xix

A LOUIS ZUKOFSKY (19311974, 1978)Among the most ambitious and demanding of Ameri-can long poems (see LONG AND SERIAL POETRY), the com-position of A represents a major bridge from the highmodernist epics of T. S. ELIOT, Ezra POUND, and JamesJoyce to a language-oriented postmodern poetry. Thetitle of Zukofskys masterworkthe first, shortest, andpossibly most ubiquitous word in the English lan-guage, tellingly highlighted with quotation marksindicates an attention to discrete and seeminglyinsignificant detail that avoids heroic postures or sub-ject matter and focuses on the nuances of linguisticpossibilities. As Zukofsky remarked: a case can bemade out for the poet giving some of his life to the useof the words the and a: both of which are weightedwith as much epos and historical destiny as one mancan perhaps resolve (Prepositions 10). During the 46years of its composition and irregular publication insections, A received little recognition, but after WorldWar II younger poets, such as Robert CREELEY andRonald JOHNSON, discovered the poem as a majordevelopment of experimental MODERNISM in contrast tothe dominant conservative modernism exemplified bythe work and influence of Eliot. Subsequently, A hasbeen an exemplary model and resource for many poetsof the LANGUAGE SCHOOL.

Zukofsky began A at a remarkably early stage in hiscareer. By 1928, at age 24, he had composed the firstfour sections, or movements, and would work inter-mittently on the poem until 1974. At the outset Zukof-

sky decided the work would have 24 movements, butinstead of subordinating them to overarching formal orthematic patterns, he allowed each movement todevelop its own distinct form and content. The formaldiversity of the poem is immense, including move-ments with a variety of complicated predeterminedforms as well as looser collage structures assembled outof fragments from diverse textual sources. Zukofskysinterest in rigorous formal models is reflected in hisattraction to mathematics and scientific thought, andthe major intellectual presences in A tend to bedemandingly formalistic, with such figures as Aristotle,Spinoza, and Bach contributing both philosophical andformal ideas to the poem. The poems opening, A /Round of fiddles playing Bach, announces both thestructural and thematic centrality of music, adhering toa basic tenet of his OBJECTIVIST poetics: thinking withthe things as they exist, and of directing them along aline of melody (Prepositions 12). A explores a broadrange of intricate musical effects that are distinct frommore conventional melodic expectations in poetry.Through sound and cadence, Zukofsky hoped to giveabstract ideas a sense of density and substance.

The first six movements bear a striking resemblanceto the ideogrammic or collage method of Pounds THECANTOS, but their themes and perspective reflect thepoets working-class and leftist sympathies. A-7 marksa decisive turn toward an increasingly dense and for-mally intricate verse that is self-consciously artificial.The movement consists of seven sonnets in which the

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poet meditates on and transforms seven sawhorseswhich each form the letter A) into wordsthe poemitself. The movements written up through the 1930s,A-1 to -10 (excepting the second half of A-9), probethe possibilities of how the modernist poet might alignherself or himself with the workers revolution, culmi-nating in A-10s bitter reaction to the triumph of fas-cism in Europe. The extraordinary A-9 is a pivotaldouble-movement, each half written a decade apart oneither side of World War II and mirroring exactly theintricate canzone form of the medieval Italian poetGuido Cavalcanti, down to the complex internal andterminal rhyme scheme. Whereas the first half takes itscontent from Marx on the degradation of value undercapitalism, the latter half adapts material from SpinozasEthics on the theme of love: The revolutionary hopes ofthe prewar movements give way in the cold war to aconcentration on the domestic concerns that will dom-inate the rest of the poem. The trinity of the poet, hiswife, Celia (married in 1939), and son Paul (born1943) becomes the microcosm in which Zukofsky real-izes his utopia despite public neglect and the socialupheavals of the 1950s and 1960s.

The later movements of A become increasinglydiverse and daring in their formal experimentation, aswell as demanding on readers. The tumultuous eventsof the 1960s frequently come into the poem: The assas-sination of President John F. Kennedy figures promi-nently in A-15; the Civil Rights movement, VietnamWar, and other news events appear in A-14 and -18;and sardonic allusions to the space race occur through-out. However, more often than not conventional mean-ing is submerged in the sound and play of the language.A-15 opens with a famous homophonic translationfrom Hebrew of a passage from the Book of Job thattranslates the sound rather than merely the sense of theoriginal text. Zukofsky also deploys this techniqueextensively in A-21, a complete transliteration ofPlautuss comedy Rudens. A-22 and -23 are each athousand lines of virtually impenetrable verbal texturethat compresses an enormous amount of reading onnatural and literary history, respectively. These sectionspush to an extreme Zukofskys effort to create a poeticlanguage that embodies a maximum of sight, sound,and intellection (Prepositions 171), a language that

suggests multiple meanings yet is stubbornly resistantto any definitive sense. Zukofsky countered the chargeof obscurity by insisting: why deny what youve not /tried: read, not into, it (A 528).

The massive concluding movement of A wasappropriately composed by Celia, who constructed acompendium of the poets work in five voices: The firstconsists of the musical score of Handels HarpsichordPieces, which is counterpointed with selections fromZukofskys criticism, drama, fiction, and poetry (fromA itself). As a final curiosity, there is an index, includ-ing entries for a, an, and the, as well as topics andnames that suggest alternative readings of the poem.

BIBLIOGRAPHYAhearn, Barry. Zukofskys A: An Introduction. Berkeley: Uni-

versity of California Press, 1983.Scroggins, Mark. Louis Zukofsky and the Poetry of Knowledge.

Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998.Terrell, Carroll F., ed. Louis Zukofsky: Man and Poet. Orono,

Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1979.Zukofsky, Louis. Prepositions +: The Collected Critical Essays.

Hanover, N.H: University Press of New England, 2000.

Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM Beginningin New York in the late 1930s and influential until thelate 1950s, abstract expressionism was the first majorinternational art movement to originate in the UnitedStates. In painting, it combined cubism, fauvism,abstraction, expressionism, and SURREALISM. In poetry, asin painting, the style is marked by spontaneity, gesture,focus on process rather than product, invitation of acci-dent, and collaboration. Its influence on Americanpoetry is not limited to a single group of poets, althoughthe ideas, works, and events that gave rise to abstractexpressionism are closely associated with the NEW YORKSCHOOL, a group of overlapping and acquainted poets,critics, and painters. Of the New York school poets,James SCHUYLER and John ASHBERY wrote early art criti-cism of action painting, another name for the artmovement. Frank OHARA worked as a curator at theMuseum of Modern Art (MOMA), but he modeled forand collaborated with more figural painters associatedwith the expressionists, including Fairfield Porter and

2 ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

Larry Rivers. The poetry of Ashbery, Kenneth KOCH, andBarbara GUEST displays surrealisms influence on expres-sionism; indeed, Koch and Ashbery translated surrealistworks. OHaras book LUNCH POEMS was part of LawrenceFERLINGHETTIs City Lights Pocket Poets series, which ismore closely associated with the BEATs. The Beats sharedabstract expressionisms interest in spontaneity.

Abstract expressionist painters, including RobertMotherwell, taught at BLACK MOUNTAIN College.Painters, such as Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, andpainter and critic Elaine de Kooning, studied there. Thepoet Robert CREELEY, also on the Black Mountain faculty,continued to collaborate with visual artists; CharlesOLSONs theories of breath and gesture in his essay Pro-jective Verse draw on abstract expressionist ideas.

SAN FRANCISCO RENAISSANCE poets also share a rela-tionship to abstract expressionism: Robert DUNCANthrough Black Mountain, and Jack SPICER throughteaching at the California School of Fine Arts (now theSan Francisco Art Institute), where abstract expres-sionist painters, including Mark Rothko, also taught.

Various abstract expressionist purposes and stylescontinue to cross-pollinate: Some POETRY ANTHOLOGIEScombine abstract expressionisminfluenced poeticsunder the term postmodernism. Critics generally con-sider there to be three generations of New York schoolpoets. The second generation of New York schoolpoets includes such varied poets as Ann LAUTERBACH,David LEHMAN, and Alice NOTLEY, as well as others asso-ciated with New Yorks Poetry Project (see POETRY INSTI-TUTIONS), which, while unique, nevertheless representsa variety of Black Mountain, Beat, and New Yorkschool aesthetics. The third generation consists ofpoets who have studied at the Poetry Project.

Abstract expressionism in poetry is marked byextreme abstraction of form. Lines, even when thework is written in verse form, are broken by gesture,syntax, or musical movement. A colloquial tonereflecting an American idiom builds toward formingthematic unity, completing a rhythm, or developing orcreating a return, a minimal version of the LYRICepiphany. Koch and Ashberys delirious sestina collab-orations retain the envoy, the concluding stanza, albeita ridiculous one; OHaras Why I Am Not a Painterand The Day Lady Died build toward the last sen-

tence; and Schuylers Morning of the Poem estab-lishes its unity through an extremely natural repetitionand variation. The origins of the poetry are markedlyconceptual, based on an idea for a poem; phenomeno-logical, based on an attempt to capture experience; orcollaborative, either with an artist working in anothermedium or with another poet. Poems are identifiedwith experience rather than description. Invitation ofoccasion and tolerance of experiment set the stage forLanguage poetrys application of the experience of lan-guage and reflection of process to critique art for artssake. In poetry, abstract expressionisms extendedconsideration of the pictorial plane and the artisticprocesswhere gesture and field replace the use ofarrangement of objects or images to create depthbecomes an open, minimal, or discovered form, usesthe page as a canvas, considers the way language han-dling changes content, and queries the unitary I.

BIBLIOGRAPHYHoover, Paul. Introduction to Postmodern American Poetry: A

Norton Anthology, edited by Hoover. New York: Norton,1994, pp. xxvxxxix.

Landauer, Susan. The San Francisco School of Abstract Expres-sionism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

Leja, Michael. Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivityand Painting in the 1940s. New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 1993.

Catherine Daly

ACKERMAN, DIANE (1948 ) Author of16 books, Diane Ackerman is perhaps best known forher natural histories and creative nonfiction, mostfamously, A Natural History of the Senses (1990). Nev-ertheless she considers herself a poet first and contin-ues to write dazzling collections of verse, six in all.Perhaps following Henry David Thoreaus dictum thatbefore one can write one must live, she has filled herlife with rich experience and far-flung adventures, eachone culminating in a book. Consequently, her poetrydisplays a striking breadth of subject matter (scientificstudy of planets, deep-sea diving, piloting airplanes,gaucho wrangling, Arctic and jungle explorations, andso on). Hers is an accessible, usually free-verse poetry,written in the first person with NARRATIVE elements,

ACKERMAN, DIANE 3

imaginatively realized in brilliant, often exotic imagery,and demonstrating a careful attention to rhythm andthe sounds of words.

Born in Waukegan, Illinois, Ackerman received aB.A. from Pennsylvania State University and an M.F.A.,M.A., and Ph.D. from Cornell University, where shestudied with A. R. AMMONS and the physicist CarlSagan. She has won the Academy of American PoetsLavan Award (1985) and grants from the NationalEndowment for the Arts (1986 and 1976) and theRockefeller Foundation (1974).

In her first collection, The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral(1976), Ackerman began her lifelong mixing of scienceand art; with Sagan as technical advisor, she createdscientifically accurate poems about the planets(Richards 5). Her second collection, Wife of Light(1978), continued this interest in science and beganher poetry of geographic adventure. Lady Faustus(1983) broadened her search for experience as a sen-suisther term for one who rejoices in sensory expe-riencerecreating adventures in undersea diving,night flying, and sexuality. In Christmas on the Reef,when her guide indicates with a sweep of his hand thatwe have the tide within our bodies, she writes, Myeyes watered . . . and for a moment, the wombs darktropic . . . lit my thought. Most recently, in I Praise MyDestroyer (1998), Ackermans poetry unflinchinglyconfronts death and suffering while still holding to anedge from which it can praise. From the haunting elegyfor Sagan, We Die, to the final sequence CantoVaqueros, the voice ranges far and affirms this lifewhere wonder / was my job. Perhaps responding tothe dissolution of death with a rage for order, thepoetry explores these subjects with form, as in the vil-lanelle Elegy: My own sorrow starts / small as China,then bulges to an Orient. In a century of poetry whosedominant tone was irony, Ackerman has held fast to agenuine poetry of wonder.

BIBLIOGRAPHYRichards, Linda. Interview. At Play With Diane Ackerman.

January Magazine (online) (August 1999), pp. 111.Veslany, Kathleen. A Conversation with Diane Ackerman.

Creative Nonfiction 6 (July/August 1996): 4152.

Michael Sowder

ADAM, HELEN (19091993) Helen Adamwas a central figure in the SAN FRANCISCO RENAISSANCE,best known for her ballads of the supernatural. RobertDUNCAN described her ballads as the missing link[that] opened the door to the full heritage of the for-bidden romantics (435). Seemingly anachronistic, theeerie power of Adams ballads stands in sharp contrastto the cerebral sophistication of the late MODERNISMdominant at the midcentury, and her work greatlyappealed to younger poets seeking a sense of poetrysprimordial power.

Growing up in Scotland, Adam published her firstbook of ballads, The Elfin Pedlar, at age 14. She came tothe United States in 1939 with her sister and lifelongcompanion, Pat, initially living in New York City, buteventually moving to San Francisco in 1953. There shebecame associated with the BEATs, and especially withthe poets who gathered around Duncan and JackSPICER. Adam was renowned for her readings, which shesang. Her published volumes included illustrations, fre-quently her own surrealistically inspired collages (seeSURREALISM). A major event in the poetry scene of theperiod was the 1961 premiere of her ballad opera, SanFranciscos Burning, which was later revived in NewYork, where Helen and Pat settled in 1964.

While Adam experimented with a range of forms,her central preoccupation remained the narrative bal-lad; she expertly developed many formal variationswithout straying far from the essentials of her roman-tic models. Although she most often reworked 19th-century folk and gothic material, Adam also wroteupdated ballads depicting the darker side of contem-porary urban life. She had an intimate knowledge ofthe occult, which particularly manifests itself by show-ing women as agents of forbidden power. Her balladsdepict desire as an insatiable force that lies largely hid-den in conventional life due to repression and fear, butwhich impinges on the everyday and can burst forth asan overwhelming passion or seduction. As withWilliam Blakes Songs (178994), which are an impor-tant precursor, the combination of frightening fablespresented in a fairy-tale or childlike manner give herwork a sinister charm.

Adams best-known poem is probably I Love MyLove (1958). A newly wed husband finds himself

4 ADAM, HELEN

increasingly entangled by his wifes diabolical hair,driving him to murder her; the hair springs up fromher grave, singing, I love my love with a capital T. Mylove is Tender and True. / Ha! Ha!, hunts down thehusband, and strangles him. This poem demonstratesAdams characteristic strengths: the combination ofhorror and humor with the trancelike repetitions of theballad form, the unselfconscious directness of the NAR-RATIVE presentation, the witch-wife manifesting thehusbands fear of passion and the irrational, and thevengeful return of the repressed.

BIBLIOGRAPHYDavidson, Michael. The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and

Community at Mid-Century. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1989, pp. 179187.

Duncan, Robert. Biographical Notes. In The New AmericanPoetry, edited by Donald M. Allen. New York: GrovePress, 1960.

Finkelstein, Norman M. The Utopian Moment in Contempo-rary American Poetry. 2d ed. Lewisburg, Penn.: BucknellUniversity Press, 1993, pp. 8290.

Prevallet, Kristin. The Reluctant Pixie Poole (A Recoveryof Helen Adams San Francisco Years), Electronic PoetryCenter. Available online. URL: http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/prevallet/adam.html. Downloaded March26, 2003.

Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas

AFTER LORCA JACK SPICER (1957) AfterLorca, according to Peter Gizzi, offers a template forreading [Jack] SPICERs other books (183); it works asan ARS POETICA that introduces serial composition andwhat is usually called dictation as theme andmethod in the poets career (see LONG AND SERIALPOETRY) . Its attention to language, community, andpoetic tradition were significant to both Spicers con-temporaries in the SAN FRANCISCO RENAISSANCE (partic-ularly Robin BLASER and Robert DUNCAN) and to thelater LANGUAGE SCHOOL. The book also demonstrates aparadoxically solemn and irreverent attention to tradi-tion. While Spicers poetry exists within elevated tra-ditions (the text names a number of poets asinfluences, including William Blake, Helen ADAM,Marianne MOORE, and William Butler Yeats), it simul-taneously critiques the very notion of tradition. After

Lorca purports to be a translation of the poetry of Fed-erico Garca Lorca (18991936), but, in actuality, ittakes Lorcas poetry, particularly his interest in spiri-tual mediums, as an often radical jumping-off point.Furthermore Spicers use of source materials (in theform of poetries quoted or alluded to within AfterLorca) situates him alongside 20th-century writersranging from Ezra POUND and William Carlos WILLIAMSto Susan HOWE.

The poems description of tradition as generationsof different poets in different countries patiently tellingthe same story, writing the same poem indirectlyaddresses Spicers idea of poetic dictation. For Spicerdictation is a quasi-mystical writing practice in whichthe poet, like a radio, receives the poem from an out-side source (in Spicers case, purportedly from Mar-tians). At the base of the throat is a little machine /Which makes us able to say anything, he explains inAfter Lorcas Friday the 13th section. Here the poetsvoice is dissolved into a poem that exceeds the poetsown subjective control.

After Lorca contains perhaps Spicers most famouscommentary on language in poetry, articulated as adesire to make poems out of real objects, to make ofthe poem a collage of the real. Spicer wants to trans-fer the immediate object, the immediate emotion to thepoem. The poems themselves are essentially lyrical,though this lyricism is marked by line breaks that fre-quently respond not to sound or to breath (asdescribed in Charles OLSONs essay Projective Verse)but to meaning; Spicers line break often works toheighten a words ambiguity, particularly when com-bined with an often erratic use of punctuation: Icrawled into bed with sorrow that night / Couldnttouch his fingers. The word sorrow fluctuates betweenbeing the emotion that informs the speakers actionand the lover with whom the speaker is in bed; it issimilarly unclear whether I or night itself fails inthe caress. Meanings ambiguity heightens the effecthere, producing the emotion described. According toBlaser, it is in After Lorca that the reader first noticesthe presence of this disturbance characteristic ofSpicers work, in which all elements of order and res-olution draw to themselves a fragmentation of mean-ing (308).

AFTER LORCA 5

BIBLIOGRAPHYBlaser, Robin. The Practice of Outside. In The Collected

Books of Jack Spicer, edited by Blaser. Santa Rosa, Calif.:Black Sparrow Press, 1996, pp. 270329.

Gizzi, Peter. Jack Spicer and the Practice of Reading. InThe House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of JackSpicer. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England,1998, pp. 173225.

Nathan Austin

AI (FLORENCE OGAWA ANTHONY)(1947 ) Ais work has been important for itsexplorations of the dramatic monologue, as well as fortesting the limits and possibilities of poetic NARRATIVE.Her most significant influence is Galway KINNELL,though her work has been frequently compared withthat of the poet Norman Dubie. Her fidelity to narra-tive has produced a widely accessible and popularpoetry. Her writing, however, offers a sustained cri-tique of narrative representation, giving voice dispas-sionately to both the silenced and the iconographic.

Ai was born in 1947 to a Japanese father and a black,Choctaw, Irish and German mother (Ai 1). She receiveda B.A. in Japanese from the University of Arizona and anM.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Califor-nia, Irvine. Her first book, Cruelty, was published in1973, and six other books have followed: Killing Floor(1979), Sin (1986), Fate (1991), Vice (1999), which wonthe National Book Award (1999), and Dread (2003). Shehas been the recipient of numerous grants, includingthose from the National Endowment for the Arts and theIngram Merrill Foundation.

Ai has spoken against the the tyranny of CONFES-SIONAL POETRYthe notion that every thing every onewrites has to be taken from the self and has suggested,instead, that she wants to take the narrative personapoem as far as [she] can, and [she has] never been oneto do things by halves (Ai 3). Her writing seeks to makeapparent the erotic and disturbing desires that sustainAmerican cultures fascination with the cult of personal-ity: She writes with the voice of John F. Kennedy, anabused daughter, James Dean, J. Edgar Hoover, a pedo-philic priest, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and others. Of thelatter she writes: To me the ideological high wire / is forfools to balance on with their illusions. A more suitable

alternative is to leap into the void. These lines suggestsomething of the mocking ambivalence that character-izes Ais work as it aims both to transcend and critiquethe political. Her attention to the violence of the every-day and of the monumental also produces a poetry thatchallenges the distinctions to be made between the two.Although this writings ability to give voice to the voice-less has implications for both identity politics and cul-tural revisionism, it actually questions the assumptionsof each. Ais tracing of the limitations of self, her mark-ing of the boundary between the transcendent and theabject, places notions of identity, articulation, and self-knowledge under pressure.

BIBLIOGRAPHYAi. Interview with Lawrence Kearney and Michael Cud-

dihy. In American Poetry Observed, edited by Joe DavidBellamy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984,pp. 16.

Ingram, Claudia. Writing the Crises: The Deployment ofAbjection in Ais Dramatic Monologues. Lit: Literature,Interpretation, Theory 8.2 (1997): 173191.

Wilson, Rob. The Will to Transcendence in ContemporaryAmerican Poet Ai. Canadian Review of American Studies17.4 (1986): 437448.

Nicky Marsh

AIKEN, CONRAD (18891973) ConradAiken was a central figure in the 20th-century explo-ration of human consciousness through poetry. Work-ing within a modernist context and influenced by amodernist preoccupation with the subjective mind(see MODERNISM), he developed a reputation as a poet,critic, novelist, and writer of fine short fiction. In hisemphasis on natural imagery, he is influenced by 19th-century romantics, such as William Wordsworth andRalph Waldo Emerson. In his exploration of the mind,he shares affinities with his contemporaries, such asT. S. ELIOT and Ezra POUND, whom he introduced in 1913.

Aiken was born in Savannah, Georgia. After his par-ents deathhis father killed his mother, then commit-ted suicidehe moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts,to live with an uncle; he was educated at MiddlesexSchool, in Concord, and later at Harvard University. Incollege, he associated with contemporaries, such asStuart Chase, E. E. CUMMINGS, Walter Lippman, and,

6 AI

most notably, Eliot. Throughout his career he won thePulitzer Prize (1930), the National Book Award(1954), and the Bollingen Prize in poetry (1956),among other accomplishments.

Aiken published more than 30 volumes of poetry,short stories, novels, and criticism, all of whichinvolve a strong introspective and autobiographicalelement. His poetry experiments with musical varia-tion as a poetic device; as a structural principle, thiscomes into fruition in the six symphonies publishedbetween 1916 and 1925 (including The Jig of Forslin,House of Dust, The Charnel Rose, Senlin, The Pilgrimageof Festus, The Divine Pilgrim, and Changing Mind). Inthese symphonies, his interest in the LONG POEMemerged in a highly developed manner. Lines fromThe Pilgrimage of Festus (1923), such as Beautifuldarkener of hearts, weaver of silence and BeautifulWoman! Golden woman whose heart is silence!,involve a rhythmic echoing, variation, and repetitionthat is musical in nature and contemporary in influ-ence, drawing from composers, such as GustavMahler, Arnold Schoenberg, and Igor Stravinsky. Inall of the verse symphonies, Aiken places his thematicemphasis on the human mind, its identity, and theflux and dynamism of its interaction with physicalreality.

During the 1930s, Aiken composed the Preludes,the works for which he is most remembered. In Pre-ludes for Memnon: or, Preludes to Attitude (1931), herecords the movement of human awareness and men-tal perception. The focus is on finite memory, and thecentral locale is the individual human consciousness:Winter for a moment takes the mind; the snow / Fallspast the arclight. . . . Winter is there, outside, is here inme. Aiken pursued these themes in later books, suchas Landscape West of Eden (1934), The Soldier: A Poem(1944), Skylight One: Fifteen Poems (1949), and Sheep-fold Hill: Fifteen Poems (1958). Increasingly Aiken hascome to be considered as one of the most perceptivepoets of the modern experience.

BIBLIOGRAPHYMartin, Jay. Conrad Aiken: A Life of His Art. Princeton, N.J.:

Princeton University Press, 1962.Peterson, Houston. The Melody of Chaos. New York: Long-

mans, Green, 1931.

Stallman, R. W. Annotated Checklist on Conrad Aiken: AC