Table Of ContentT H E FA C T S O N F I L E
COMPANION TO
20th-CENTURY
AMERICAN
POETRY
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EDITED BY BURT KIMMELMAN
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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CONTENTS
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS v
FOREWORD vi
INTRODUCTION xiv
A-TO-Z ENTRIES 1
APPENDIXES
I. GLOSSARY 539
II. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 542
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS 547
INDEX 550
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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This volume is the result of the efforts of a good many Christopher Funkhouser, and Nikki Stiller, contributed
people who have my deepest gratitude, some of whom essays to this book. I am also profoundly thankful for
I may neglect to mention here, fallible memory being the intelligence and time Norbert Elliot, Tom Fink, and
what it is. I am beholden to Mickey Pearlman, who con- Sherry Kearns (who also contributed essays), as well as
tacted me and urged me to offer my services to Facts Jeff Soloway, donated to the writing of the book’s intro-
On File; to Anne Savarese, former Facts On File editor, duction. And I am grateful to Burton Hatlen for his
who worked with me to conceive this project and set it wonderful foreword to the book. I must also thank the
in motion; to Jeff Soloway, senior editor at Facts On many contributors to this volume, whose knowledge,
File, whose patience, care, and acuity have been indis- wit, and graceful writing will surely make it a success.
pensable; and to Jessica Allen, whose perspicacity in Lastly, I am, as always, most thankful for the good
copyediting has been more than one could have hoped natured love and support of my wife, Diane Simmons,
for. I must also thank my colleagues at New Jersey and our daugther, Jane Kimmelman, without whom
Institute of Technology for their encouragement and none of this would have been possible.
understanding and, in some cases, their participation—
especially Robert E. Lynch and Norbert Elliot, who, —Burt Kimmelman
along with Doris Zames Fleischer, Robert S. Friedman,
v
FOREWORD
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20TH-CENTURY AMERICAN participated in the dominant political mood of the
POETRY: SOME GUIDEPOSTS moment, but more often, especially in the imperial
epoch extending from World War II to the present,
As Burt Kimmelman emphasizes in his eloquent intro- the poets have fiercely questioned beliefs and atti-
duction to this volume, all of the poems, poets, and lit- tudes that most other Americans have apparently
erary movements described in the pages that follow accepted as simply “common sense,” so that the poet-
share a common “Americanness.” Yet the very essence ry community has seemed at times the most insis-
of “Americanness” is diversity, the many in the one and tently skeptical and critical of the various American
the one in the many, as Walt Whitman, grandfather of countercultures. (Robert Creeley, at the start of the
all American bards, insisted: “I hear America singing,/ 21st century one of the last surviving members of a
The variedcarols I hear” (emphasis mine). Thus it may generation of major poets that emerged in the 1950s,
be useful to attempt a chart of the various kinds of was recently heard to ask, “How is it that I don’t
“Americanness” at work in the poetry written in this know anyonewho supports the policies of George W.
country during the last 100 years. The chartings that I Bush?”) Yet regional differences have often been no
will here propose are chronological as well as regional less important than the historical shifts that have
and ideological, for the sense of what it means to be an occurred over the course of the 20th century, for New
American, and specifically an American poet, has shift- York is not California, and New England is not the
ed over time. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Southwest. We must also recognize radically different
United States made its first tentative forays toward aesthetic commitments that have sometimes united,
becoming an imperial power, but most Americans still sometimes separated poets across both historical
thought of themselves as a people apart, purified by epochs and cultural regions. And in the late decades
immersion in a New World Eden. With World War I of the 20th century, the very notion that we can
the United States became a significant player on an define a single American identity has been challenged
international stage, but the interwar years saw a by poets seeking to speak for a range of previously
renewed sense of American uniqueness, often summed marginalized communities defined by ethnicity, gen-
up in the label isolationism.Then World War II and the der, and/or sexual preference.
ensuing decades saw a full-blown efflorescence of a “On or about December 1910, human nature
distinctively American variety of imperialism, as the changed,” Virginia Woolf famously declared, and we
nation set out to become the arbiter of the destiny of may date the birth of 20th-century American poetry to
the planet. Our poets have sometimes enthusiastically the same pivotal moment. Among the tiny group of
vi
FOREWORD vii
American poets whose careers carried across from the If to my list of the five poets grouped around Pound
19th into the 20th centuries, only three poets survive we add Wallace Stevens and Gertrude Stein, we have a
to find a place in this encyclopedia: Edwin Arlington galaxy of major poets who collectively define the most
Robinson, Adelaide Crapsey, and Jeanne Robert Foster. influential poetic movement of the 20th century, inter-
Aging anthologies and histories of American literature national modernism. Pound showed no interest in
preserve a few other names—William Vaughan Moody, Stevens’s poetry, but Williams came to know Stevens in
Trumbull Stickney, George Santayana. However, in New York City during the World War I years, when
1905 the young Ezra Pound, H. D., and William both were members of a group of artists and writers
Carlos Williams—Pound and Williams were students that met regularly at the home of Walter Arensberg, a
at the University of Pennsylvania, and H. D was a wealthy art patron. Moore also moved on the fringes of
friend of both—formed perhaps the first important lit- the Arensberg group, and she, too, came to know and
erary fellowship of the new century. Although Pound admire Stevens’s work at this time. In his role as editor
and Williams did not come to know and admire of Othersmagazine during the war years, Williams pub-
Marianne Moore until later, Moore and H. D. were at lished Stevens’s poetry, while in the 1920s Moore
least aware of one another during the year they spent solicited some of his poems for publication in The Dial.
as fellow students at Bryn Mawr, so we may add Moore And in the 1930s Stevens contributed a preface to
to form a unique quartet of “Philadelphia modernists.” Williams’s first Collected Poems. Thus we can perhaps
Around this nexus of personal relationships a new create a subgroup of New York–area modernists
poetic movement would crystallize, although each of encompassing Williams, Moore, and Stevens. Stein was
the poets in question would arrive at a unique person- never a close friend of any of the poets mentioned thus
al voice. In 1905 Pound and Williams were already far and an outspoken critic of some of them, although
writing poetry, but in a distinctly 19th-century idiom: Williams visited her in Paris and admired her work. But
They were, in a phrase from Pound’s 1921 poem while she was not part of the network of personal rela-
“Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” in search of “the sublime in tionships that linked our other poets, she is a crucial
the old sense.” But by 1910 Pound was in London, figure in this story, as the most important mediator
acutely aware of new poetic possibilities emerging on between Parisian modernism—cubism, fauvism, etc.—
the continent. In a series of essays published in 1913 and American writers, artists, and composers. Conrad
under the collective title The Approach to Paris, he Aiken, a friend of Eliot’s from Harvard, also perhaps
directed American poets toward a serious reading of belongs in this list of major modernists, but to most
poets such as Jules Laforgue, Tristan Corbiere, and, observers he has come to seem a lesser figure. Some
above all, Arthur Rimbaud, whose work of the 1870s critics would add to the list Mina Loy, a British expatri-
pointed the way toward a poetics of radical disjunc- ate who arrived in New York during the World War I
tion and indeterminacy. By 1913 H. D. had also years and there met Williams and possibly Stevens and
moved to London, and in that year Pound presented Moore. Laura Riding (Jackson), E. E. Cummings, and
her poetry as the model of imagisme, a literary move- Hart Crane also belong on any list of major American
ment consciously modeled on the various aesthetic modernist poets, but they were somewhat younger than
“isms” emanating from Paris: symbolisme, unanisme, the poets mentioned thus far and began to write under
etc., with cubism a first cousin in the visual arts. Then the shadow of the first generation modernists.
a year or so later, T. S. Eliot, who had already written The modernism of Pound, Eliot, H. D., Moore,
portions of “Portrait of a Lady” and “The Love Song of Williams, Stevens, and Stein is “international” in a basic
J. Alfred Prufrock” while a student at Harvard, arrived way: Four of these seven poets chose to live in and write
in London and quickly became a central figure in the from Europe. Eliot became a British citizen. After World
Pound circle. (Williams detested Eliot’s poetry, and War I, Pound returned to the United States only once
Eliot was indifferent to Williams’s, but they had Pound willingly, for a short visit, and then for a second time
in common.) under duress, after his arrest for treason during World
viii FOREWORD
War II. Stein is forever linked to Paris in the popular Today the standard classroom anthologies devote
imagination, although she made an extended celebrity more space to the exponents of international mod-
tour of the United States in 1934–35, and H. D. made ernism than to any other group of 20th-century
only two brief visits to the United States after she took American poets, and all of them receive maximum
up residence in Europe, the first shortly after World space in this encyclopedia. However, the esteem that
War I and the second in the late 1950s. But even these poets enjoy today is largely retrospective, as dur-
Williams, Stevens, and Moore, all of whom chose to live ing their lifetimes other poets often had larger audi-
in the United States, maintained a distinctly interna- ences and received more respect from critics. The most
tional perspective. All three lived in or near New York acclaimed American poet throughout much of the 20th
City, the main point of communication between century was Robert Frost, who also lived during the
America and Europe. Stevens, although he never went second decade of the century for a time in London,
to Europe, read widely in French poetry and cultural where he brushed up against Pound. But Frost
commentary, while Williams, who spent a year in returned to America and with Edwin Arlington
Europe during the 1920s, was powerfully influenced by Robinson defined a New England alternative to inter-
such European literary/artistic movements as cubism national modernism. Frost borrowed the title of his
and surrealism. And most significantly, all seven of my first book from Longfellow, and neither Frost nor
major international modernists shared with European Robinson saw any need to reject the traditional poetic
modernist painters (Picasso, Matisse, Braque, et al.), forms or the lyric voice characteristic of the English
composers (Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Webern, et al.), poetic tradition. Despite the dark undercurrents in
and writers (Joyce, Proust, Mann, Apollinaire, Valéry, their vision of the world, both Frost and Robinson
Rilke, et al.) a determination to interrogate the most enjoyed during their lifetimes an audience markedly
fundamental principles of their art forms. A range of larger than the audiences of the modernists. No less
formal vocabularies that had endured since the popular was another native New Englander, Edna St.
Renaissance all came into question during this period: Vincent Millay, who also saw no need to reject either
in painting, the illusion of three-dimensional space, the metrical line or the lyric voice. Meanwhile, in the
constructed through the application of the “laws” of years during and after World War I, a group of Chicago
perspective; in music, the diatonic scale with its atten- poets sought to define a populist alternative both to
dant harmonies; in fiction, the linear narrative and the the radical experimentalism of the international mod-
controlling authorial point of view; and in poetry, the ernists and to the formal decorum of the New England
metrical line and the unitary lyric voice. The seven poets. Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters both
American poets that I have identified as exemplars of employed a loose free verse modeled primarily on
international modernism are very different from each Whitman’s, while Vachel Lindsay sought to revive a
other in some important ways: Williams’s insistence on tradition of performance poetry. Looking out to the
the “American ground” contrasts with the condescen- Pacific from his home in Carmel, California, Robinson
sion toward all things American that we sometimes see Jeffers also adapted the long, cadenced Whitman line
in Pound, Eliot, and H. D., while H. D.’s continuing in his search for a poetic idiom that could do justice to
loyalty to the romantic tradition contrasts with the the vast and still largely empty expanses of the western
ostensible antiromanticism of Pound and Eliot, et al. landscape. His poetry has remained an important
But these writers were bound together not only by (in influence on later West Coast poets such as William
most cases) a network of personal associations to which Everson, Kenneth Rexroth, and Gary Snyder.
they were often deeply loyal but also by a desire to con- In the late 1920s and 1930s, a group of southern
struct alternatives to the traditional formal vocabularies poets, often grouped under the self-chosen labels of
that had defined “poetry” for their predecessors, and Fugitives or Agrarians; also affirmed a self-consciously
they “made it new” (“it” here being poetry itself) in ways regional alternative to international modernism, and
that continue to inspire poets of the 21st century. their example became an important force in American
FOREWORD ix
poetry. John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert include Delmore Schwartz, Elizabeth Bishop, and John
Penn Warren all identified with Eliot’s social and cul- Berryman, along with Lowell and Jarrell. The members
tural conservatism and intermittently adopted his iron- of this circle, in addition to certain other poets who
ic, high-Mandarin tone, but they retreated from the rad- shared many of their aspirations (for example, Theodore
ical formal experimentalism of Pound, Williams, and Roethke, Richard Wilbur, and W. D. Snodgrass), were,
Moore—an experimental impulse also evident in the during the 1950s and 1960s, widely regarded as the
Eliot of The Waste Land,although this impulse fades in most significant poets of the period. Many of these poets
his later work. The southern Agrarians all taught in col- followed the example of poets such as Frost, Ransom,
leges or universities and wrote criticism as well as poet- and the enormously influential British expatriate W. H.
ry. (Warren also wrote a series of successful novels.) In Auden in cultivating an expertise in traditional poetic
alliance with influential critics such as Cleanth Brooks forms and meters; and the metrical subtleties of Bishop,
and with other poet/critics, including Kenneth Burke Berryman, Wilbur, Snodgrass, and Lowell (at least in his
and R. P. Blackmur, the Agrarians became the founders earlier work) are often dazzling. Lowell, Berryman, and
of a movement generally known as the New Criticism, Snodgrass share a self-lacerating irony that is sometimes
which sought new ways of addressing a public that taken to be characteristic of the whole group, but once
found poetry more and more opaque. Living in the again differences are as important as similarities. Neither
West but in dialogue with the southern Agrarians, the Jarrell nor Bishop is primarily an ironic poet. Rather,
poet/critics Yvor Winters and J. V. Cunningham also Jarrell’s poetry displays a remarkable capacity for empa-
rejected what they saw as a surrender to chaos in the thetic identification with other people, while Bishop’s
poetry of the high modernists. Tate and Winters were geographic imagination is unique. Most of these poets
both friends of Hart Crane, whose spectacular but ulti- were, like Ransom and Warren before them, at least
mately disastrous career became for them an example of intermittently academics, although again Bishop is an
the dangers of modernist excess. As poets, Ransom, exception. As academic appointments carried these
Tate, Warren, Blackmur, Winters, and Cunningham no poets about the country, regional affiliations here
longer command much attention: all six receive only became less significant. However, Lowell and Bishop
short entries in this encyclopedia. However, they are were distinctly New England poets, while Roethke stood
historically significant insofar as they established a tra- within an identifiable lineage of midwestern poets (his
dition of what has sometimes been called (usually deri- successors have included, for example, James Wright
sively) “academic” poetry: a relatively decorous, often and Robert Bly), and Jarrell and Berryman both had
formally traditional poetry written by men and women southern roots. Many influential critics (Helen Vendler,
who have spent significant time in the classroom. Such for example) continue to regard the lineage defined by
poetry tends to be relatively “closed” both in its forms these poets as the “mainstream” of American poetry, a
and in its cultural attitudes, as it seeks to build in art a judgment also reflected in such widely used anthologies
refuge from which the poet can contemplate the various as J. D. McClatchy’s Vintage Book of Contemporary
disorders of modern life. American Poetry.At the start of the 21st century, further-
The tradition defined by Ransom, Tate, and Warren more, many still-active poets continue to write within a
passes directly to Robert Lowell, who went to Kenyon poetic mode that passes from Eliot (with the qualifica-
College to study with Tate and Ransom. While there, tions noted above) and Ransom through Lowell, Jarrell,
Lowell became friends with Randall Jarrell, and togeth- and their associates: for example, Frank Bidart, Alfred
er Lowell and Jarrell became the center of another cru- Corn, Mark Doty, Stephen Dobyns, Edward Hirsch, and
cial group of young poets who were, like the Pound cir- many others.
cle in an earlier generation, bound together by bonds of The southern Fugitive poet/critics and their heirs
personal friendship as well as a common aesthetic that recognized that universities were becoming positions
they seem to have arrived at through exchanges among of power in American society, offering poets the possi-
themselves. Eventually this new grouping reached out to bility of both a secure livelihood and a new kind of
