Postwar poetry and criticism

Formalism

The main critical movement of 1940s-50s was Formalism that originally started as literary critical movement New Criticism in 1920s as new approach to literature. They concentrated more on the form with close reading, less on content. For them the only thing you should pay attention to is the text itself – forgetting about author´s background – everything we need to know is in the text, not outside. The main emphasize was the language which results in the analysis of metaphors, rhythm, everything that makes the language poetic. They used the special term ostranenie = defamilirazation. Otherwise they relied mainly on traditional forms and genres for which they had many opponents, in additional it was very academic, not for a common reader to enjoy.

RANDALL JARRELL (1914-1965) was famous for war poems. Collection The Lost World (1965) is about his nostalgic memories of pre-war Hollywood where he grew up.

RICHARD WILBUR (*1921) is the only optimistic post-war American poet who never criticized America. He was the most conservative formalist who used traditional poetic forms. The Beautiful Changes (1947) collection.

New Formalism/Neo-formalism of the late 20th century redrew attention to traditional forms, disappointed by popularity of free verse that started in 1960s. They wanted to go back to poetic tradition and sadly claimed that traditional approach to poetry was abandoned. They published an anthology of Neo-formalist poems Rebel Angels (1996) but they are criticised for over stylised.

The Black Mountain School

A movement against formalism was The Black Mountain School that was influenced by Anglo-American modernists. They believed poetry should be free from the formalist approach.

CHARLES OLSON (1910-1970) wrote manifesto Projective Verse (1950) in which he stated that poetry and poetic language should be free from rational pre-planned formalism, more spontaneous and the sound read aloud should reflect the breath. Maximus Poems (1953) is a poetic sequence collection, close to Pound's Cantos.

ROBERT CREELEY (1926-1905) is a lyrical minimalist who found inspiration in Williams, automatic writing of Ginsberg and jazz. He was writing very short poems, using free verse, plays with language and most of his poems are improvisations accompanied by jazz music. The best example of his style is a short poem called simply A Poem where the image of water is represented by the image of weed which store water. It is also philosophical, "a long life is not a necessary happy one." He speaks to the reader, "my friend."

ROBERT DUNCAN was shortly a teacher at the Black Mountain College but he joined the Beat Generations and became interested in political topics.

Confessional poetry

Confessional poets was a group without a common manifesto, it just consisted of poets who wrote highly subjective mainly narrative poetry (unlike lyrical the Black Mountain School). Representatives were all mentally unstable, expressing their failures and insanity with the major topic of death. The movement was initiated by Lowell's book Life Studies (1959).

ROBERT LOWELL (1917-1977) was originally of Formalist background but after he became a teacher of creative writing and he started to experience minor mental disorders, he turned to subjective poetry, hoping it would help him to keep sanity.

He wrote a successful collection Lord Weary´s Castle but his mental health continued to fail him and in the poem Skunk Hour he realized it is not the whole world that is wrong but him. However, unlike his students Plath and Saxton, he did not commit suicide.

SYLVIA PLATH (1932-1963) was of family with German origin. Her father was very strict and when he died, his death drastically changed Plath's life. In her most famous poem Daddy she is trying to cope with the change, presenting her father as a fascist and even a vampire and herself as Jew and even a gipsy who was being suffocated under the reign of "German" father. In the very last line of the poem, she expresses that writing it liberated her: "daddy, you bastard, I'm through."

To escape the rest of the family for her mother was also oppressive, she went to England where she met Ted Hughes to whom she got married. She suffered depressions so she used poetry as a therapy to find balance. Her first poetic collection The Colossus (1960) was published in London. She was not officially ill, just a bit depressed but tried demonstrational suicides and in fifth try she managed but “it was not her fault since a baby-sitter for her children was late!” Ariel (1965), the second book of her poems was published after her death.

ANNE SAXTON (1928-1974) originally worked as a model but after giving birth problems aroused. She was diagnosed with clinical depression, suicidal tendencies so she spent a lot of time in mental hospitals. Poetry was recommended to her by doctors as a form of therapy. She is less autobiographical than Plath as she partly used her experience of mental hospitals and transformed it into poetry with more universal themes.

Her collection To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960) is a reflection of her stay in the best mental hospital in America but to make it more universal, she created a synonym for all mental hospitals. Live or Die (1966) won her a Pulitzer Prize.

Poem Ringing the Bells. directly reflects her stay in Bedlam mental hospital. She describes music lessons they are having but she is reluctant to join because she does not see any point in it. She wants to do something meaningful, not just time-filler. There are no open notions of her own madness, she just describes the boring routine and it is, in fact, that boring routine that is drawing her mad. The poem as a circulation form, you can repeat it over and over again just as routine.

Poem Wanting to Die depicts her suicidal moods. She does not understand why she is having such moods, she claims "I have nothing against life" but she also admits that suicide is tempting for her, "suicides have a special language." She describes her unsuccessful attempts and that she will attempt it again in future.

JOHN BERRYMAN (1914-1972) was a teacher and another depressed poet who was even searching for tragic events and complications. His famous collection Dream Songs (1969) used automatic writing, expressing boredom, drugs and his alter ego.

The poem Dream Song 14 is about his boredom. He is bored by people, by literature and by life itself. He describes it as lack of “inner resources.”

Jewish-American poetry

Jewish-American poetry was written in Yiddish, Hebrew and England trying to search for new American identity and new poetics.

CHARLES REZNIKOFF (1894-1976) was the first really influential Jewish-American poet. He joined the modernist movement Objectivism and was influenced by Pound's Imagism. However, he came up with his own new type of poetry he calls found poetry based on rearrangements of words that are takes from other sources (news, interviews, other books) and reframed as poetry by changing spacing of altering the text. He aimed to present these stories as near as possible to the original, stripping it of authorial personality. His aim is to present concrete images without subjective comments or abstract references.

The great monument of this kind of poetry is his long poem Testimony which was initially a prose retelling of stories that he discovered while working on court records. He omitted the judgments, focusing on the stories only, turning them into an extended found poem. He follow with another work Holocaust (1975) based on court testimony about Nazi death camps.

San Francisco Renaissance

After the WW2, San Francisco started a new avant-garde called San Francisco Renaissance that later emerged into the Beat Generation but they originally referred back to poetical influence of Whitman and they were not connected to mainstream poetry. Its aim was to attack formalism and bring poetry back to common readers since formalist poets were academic teachers.

They did not share any program but authors mosty reacted to the WW2 and publishing restriction of 1950s with censorship of archaist left-winged ideas. They had to publish their wok in their own publishing house The City Light.

ROBERT DUNCAN (1919-1988) began writing poetry as a teenager when a high school teacher encouraged his creative endeavours. He took an active role in emerging arts movements and the development of Picasso’s modernism and American surrealism. In 1947 he met Charles Olson, the founder of Black Mountain College, and was invited to teach there. During that time, Duncan published his collection The Opening of the Field and was influenced Olson’s theory of projective verse and open forms with the purpose to promote the “poet’s breath” rather than traditional rules of meter and rhyme. Duncan took that theory even further, presenting poems to which the poet might bring whatever they please. In the end, he created a unique style outside all movements.

His poem Achilles’ Song goes back to antiquity. The speaker is an ancient hero Achilles who admits he knows only what the Sea tells him, personifying the Sea as Her. The Sea tells the hero to come back to his homeland from Troy with a soothing voice. The hero recalls that his mother promised him a boat on which he could roam the Sea and which would take his soul home.

GARY SNYDER (*1930) was already born in San Francisco. He writes very ecologically oriented poetry and he is currently teaching poetry at university. He spent a long time in monasteries practicing Zen Buddhism that is used in his poetry together with the influence of native American culture. Collections: Mountains and Rivers Without End, Turtle Island. He promoted deep ecology, environmentally-oriented poetry.

LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI (*1919) was of Italian origin but he discovered his roots later in life because his parents changed their surname to blend more into America. Because of that, Ferlinghetti promoted pluralism that different cultures enrich American culture. He opened a bookstore and a publishing company in San Francisco called City Lights, which was openly publishing the Beat poets and promoting non-mainstream poetry. City Lights became known as the heart of the Beat movement and poets were gathering there. Ferlinghetti himself was a poet, named the first poet laureate of San Francisco. Collection: San Francisco Poems.

In his poem The World is a Beautiful Place he initially praises that it is worth to be born, even though from now and then it is not that fun because “even in heaven they don’t sing all the time.” Then accounts all the bad things that happen all over the world and the tone is very critical – starvation, people dying, bombing, segregation – however, which people do not mind “if it isn’t you.” Then the tone changes again into positive, the speaker recalls that simple plain living can be beautiful, finding it in most ordinary things.

To the Oracle at Delphi features a modern American who stands before an ancient Oracle. The American’s culture long passed from “the dark of ancient Europa” and the Oracle stares at that person as if he “was America itself, the new Empire vaster than in ancient days with its electronic highway, carrying its corporate monoculture around the world,” with English becoming even more widespread than Latin. The speaker asks Oracle to tell “how to save us from ourselves and how to survive our won rulers” who threatens democracy in the gap between the rich and the poor. The speaker asks the Oracle to “give us new myths to live by.”

KENNETH REXROTH (1905-1982) was orphaned and expelled from high school. Upon moving to San Francisco in 1927, he published his first poems In What Hour (1940) performed with jazz musicians and aimed to rescue poetry from its supposed downslide into formalism. The Phoenix and the Tortoise (1944) expressed the admiration for nature, ecology and anti-war sentiment.

He organised weekly salon to support struggling writers and artists and laid the ground for what become the San Francisco Renaissance. In 1955, he organised the legendary Six Gallery reading at which Allen Ginsberg introduced his poem Howl. Nonetheless, Rexroth was not wholly supportive of the dramatic rise in popularity of the Beat Generation and was displeased when he became known as the father of the Beats.

His poem Vitamins and Roughage features a decay in apparent Best Era. It discusses how rich class of California is losing intellectual value in comparison to the spiritual beatnik society. After painting the beauty of “daughters of California,” he describes the rich class humanist belief as “reluctant” and portrays their actions as barbarous “drive into their skulls with tennis balls.”

THE BEAT GENERATION was officially founded by two students of Columbia University Allen Ginsberg and LUCIEN CARR in 1944. They were determined to find new vision in literature, believed that anyone can become a poet without special knowledge. Then they were joined by John Kerouac and as the group was growing fast, later accepted NEAL CASSADY (1926-1968, lover of Ginsberg and Kerouac) and Gregory Corso.

They rejected conformism and emphasised openness to varieties of experience that is beyond of middle-class normality, explored jazz, bohemian life, drug use, liberal sexuality and non-western religions. They rejected academic attitude to poetry, opposing Formalism, and felt that poetry should be brought back to the streets and read by common readers, not only students and academics.

ALLEN GINSBERG (1926-1997) had an enormous tolerance for madness and neurosis since his mother’s mental health was questionable. At university, he became a friend with William Burroughs, Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac. The group led Ginsberg to a New Vision in which he defined true art as ultimately self-expressive. Around that time Ginsberg has what he referred to as “Blade vision,” an auditory hallucination of William Blake reading his poems. He claimed that no drugs were involved but later used drugs in an attempt to recapture the experience.

In 1954, he moved to San Francisco and his mentor William Carlow Williams introduced him to the key figures of poetry scene. With the help of Rexroth, he made the first public reading of his poem Howl in 1955 at Gallery Six, a poem which gave world-wide attention for him. Shortly after Howl and Other Poems was published by City Lights, it was banned for obscenity. The work overcame censorship trials and became one of the most widely read poems of the century. In 1970s Ginsberg studied under guru and zen masters, was involved in protests against the Vietnam War, and promoted free speech, gay rights, liberation from censorship, decriminalisation of laws against marijuana and rose ecological consciousness.

He even visited Prague which he reflected in the poem King of May (originally Kral Majales) and he remembers Prague university students with kindness. He believed in unlimited freedom of speech and that poetry is the best place for it. For him, the art should be individual, unrepressed, not avoiding taboo subjects. He got acquainted with Timothy Leary and promoted LSD to enlarge consciousness to be more spiritual to write. Later he helped the Beat Generation to be transformed into hippie movement and coined the phrase "flower power."

In his poem America, he is very critical of America's policy and attitudes in society, starting with the statement: "America, I've given you all and no I'm nothing." He asks when the wars will end and curses atom bombs. Then he asks why libraries are full of tears, criticises machinery and says he stopped reading newspapers because it is full of news about murders. He declares openly that he is not sorry for his left-winged political idealism, reads Marx and he will smoke marijuana every chance he gets. He even admits that he is not Christian ("I won't say the Lord's Prayer") because he has his own belief ("mystical visions and cosmic vibrations"). He goes to imagine he is America himself and imagines changes he would make: "It occurs to me that I am America, I am talking to myself again." He sarcastically states that America in reality does not want to go to war, "it's them bad Russians" who are at fault. He ends the poem with the warning: "America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set." He does not want to be a part of that kind of America.

GREGORY CORSO (1930-1991) was after Kerouac the second of the Beats to be published, despite being the youngest. City Lights published his collection The Vestal Lady and Other Poems (1955)

Poems: Bomb (concrete poem, arranged in the shape of mushroom cloud). Elegiac Feelings American (of recently dead Kerouac), Marriage (humorous meditation on the institution).

JACK KEROUAC and WILLIAM BURROUGHS were novelist => Postwar American fiction.