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This chapter argues that Auden's extensive and largely unexplored impact on the post-war generation of American poets helped not only to define the terms by which these younger poets framed their own work and careers, but also offered a new and influential model for understanding what it meant to write poetry in America after World War II and after Modernism. In particular, Auden's redefinition of his own poetic identity following his emigration from England helped to shape American poetry in terms of what Auden called “the burden of choice”: How to select an inheritance from the myriad possibilities opened up in the wake of Modernism's shattering of notions of a unified native tradition. By framing his post-1939 poetry as “a way of happening,” Auden inaugurated a poetic vision of post-Modernist America as an open, inclusive text defined not in terms of shared ideals of national, ideological, or historical inheritance, but by the freedom, and necessity, to choose among the kaleidoscopic range of formal, cultural, or transnational poetic identities made available by the collapse of those earlier ideals.

This book explores a set of interdependent problems in the history, theory, and politics of recent Anglo-American poetry while offering a challenge and an alternative to a nearly unanimous literary–historical consensus that divides poetry into two warring camps—post-Romantic and postmodern; symbolist and constructivist; traditionalist and avant-garde. The book advocates a shift of emphasis, from “poems” as objects or occasions for experience to “poetry” as an occasion for reestablishing or revealing the most basic unit of social life and for securing the most fundamental object of moral regard. The book considers Language poetry as well as the work of William Butler Yeats, George Oppen, and Frank O'Hara—poets who seek ways to make their poetic thinking yield accounts of personhood that are at once minimal and universal.

This chapter first details W. H. Auden's arrival in New York in January 1939. His emigration from England, and his arrival in America marked a crucial moment in twentieth-century literary history, when the heir apparent to T. S. Eliot as the dominant presence in British poetry abandoned his English career and retraced Eliot's own path back across the Atlantic to start anew. The impact of that moment, and Auden's subsequent American career, are still being felt in American poetry seven decades later. The chapter then discusses his poem “Atlantis,” where he invokes the myth of the lost utopia, to illustrate what he calls “a poetic vision” of art's capacity for moral instruction, even as it recognizes its limitations.

This chapter considers the aesthetic, literary‐historical, and political meanings of the term “Afro‐modernism.” It first introduces Melvin B. Tolson's modernist epic, Harlem Gallery (1965), via the innovative blues quatrains of Harryette Mullen's Muse & Drudge (1995), explaining how both poems exemplify an embattled “Afro‐modernist” tradition. The chapter then analyzes Tolson's 1953 Libretto for the Republic of Liberia via the documentary evidence of his appointment as Liberian Poet Laureate. As a late modernist epic about an oligarchic state led by freed slaves, Libretto witnesses a crucial overlapping of the narratives of diasporic nationalism and African “local imperialism.” The chapter concludes by explaining how the poetic form of Libretto registers the schism between the modernizing statecraft of the Liberian elite and the transgressive “countermodernity” of Pan‐Africanism.

This chapter discusses Auden's influence on John Ashbery. By looking at the development of Ashbery's career through the prism of his early apprenticeship to Auden, and by taking Ashbery's claims about his own poetics seriously, it challenges some familiar critical presumptions about Ashbery, prompted by a few basic questions: What are we to make of the disparity between how Ashbery sees himself and how he is seen? What is the responsibility of critics toward authorial claims of self-knowledge and intention? Is there something to be learned by listening to this poet and his poems, rather than reading through or against them? What does it mean to read Ashbery as a self-conscious inheritor of Auden's civic tradition, rather than heir to the various Romantic traditions with which he is customarily linked? In the end, the goal is less to reject prior understandings of Ashbery than to augment and complicate them, and suggest that in doing so, we discover a poet who is even richer—both more familiar and more strange, more conventional and more radical—than we may have seen.

This book of postwar American poetry's obsession with friendship and its pleasures, limitations, and contradictions borrows its title from Ralph Waldo Emerson's “Friendship.” Emerson drives home his belief that true friendship, at its most intense and productive, is a wonderful yet confounding contradiction. This equivocal attitude about friendship and the possibilities for communion with others has reverberated throughout the history and development of American poetry. The book argues that this troubling yet generative clash between friendship and non-conformity is central to post-World War II American poetry and its development. By focusing on the work and interrelations of some of the most important and influential postmodernist American poets—the “New York School” poets Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery and their close contemporary Amiri Baraka—the book investigates the peculiar dynamics of American avant-garde poetic communities and the uneasy role of the individual within them.

Pragmatist poetics offers a conceptual vocabulary for analyzing the rhetoric, the obsessions, the tactics, and the ambivalences that operate in experimental American poetry, especially with regard to the three major themes: community, individualism, and an obsession with flux and mobility. However, unlike most other recent accounts of the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson and pragmatism on American poetry, this chapter explores how this lineage extends beyond the modernist generation. The chapter's intention here is not to attempt to define or explain the enormous wealth and complexity of pragmatism itself, but rather to explore a set of far-reaching tropes, concepts, and paradoxes embedded in American philosophy that the poets perpetuate and challenge. It is worth mentioning here that this congruence between Emerson, pragmatism, and experimental poetry, “New American Poetry” has continued to the present moment.

This chapter discusses Auden's influence on Adrienne Rich. It argues that from her early emulation through her mature repudiation of his example, Auden's place in Rich's work and thought has persisted. As both an individual influence and as a representative of an entire range of poetic concerns which she has inherited and adapted, Auden comes to stand for poetic tradition itself—the tradition that gave her birth, and through and against which she has striven to define herself. For Rich, Auden sets the poetic terms—not always positively—out of which she constructs her own poetic identity. Like poetry itself, the figure of Auden and what he represents have been, throughout her career, ineluctable.

The supreme importance of turning away—and its centrality to the definition of poetry itself—speaks volumes about Amiri Baraka's poetics and the course of his volatile, controversial career. The strenuous effort to push off from whatever has moved him, at whatever cost, is truly the soul of Baraka's work. Baraka's emphasis on “turning away” closely resembles the idea of “abandonment” so important to the brand of radical, experimental individualism that begins with Ralph Waldo Emerson and energizes the New American Poetry of Baraka and his compatriots. Baraka's relationship with the white avant-garde community is not, as most accounts have it, a simple case of a young, confused African-American poet desperately searching for his “true” voice, eventually triumphing by shedding his white friends and their way of writing and at last arriving at a more political and “blacker” art.

This chapter discusses Auden's influence on James Merrill. It suggests that Merrill looked to Auden as the guide who could instruct him and encourage him to enjoy the feast of the full range of poetic modes. Merrill would later begin that instruction, starting work on a new project that would aim to unite craft and sentiment, aesthetics and engagement, and whose vast ambition would more than encompass “what it all means, and what his neighbor feels.” That project was The Changing Light at Sandover, the poem that would rewrite Merrill's identity as a poet of epic scope and vision. The schoolmaster in Sandover's classroom and a central figure in the composition and narrative of the poem, was Auden.

Auden's death on September 29, 1973 prompted an enormous range of poetic responses from younger American poets, many of them following Auden's example as Auden had followed Yeats, both in using the poet's own language in their memorials for him and in turning the moment, and their readings of the meaning of Auden's life and work, toward their own individual artistic arguments and purposes. Indeed, no twentieth-century poet has spawned as many elegies, eulogies, and remembrances from as wide a range of practicing poets as Auden. This chapter surveys a few of these poetic farewells to Auden, from across a broad spectrum of American verse, which provide a compelling testimonial to, and concluding perspective on, his impact on an entire generation—and beyond—of American poetry. These include the work of James Schuyler, John Hollander, Richard Howard, Louis Simpson, Irving Feldman, and Derek Walcott.

This chapter begins with analysis of the critical controversy that erupted when poet John Yau criticized Eliot Weinberger’s anthology, American Poetry Since 1950: Innovators and Outsiders for its paucity of poets of color (only Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka were represented in the book). Weinberger charged Yau with only playing the ’race card’ when it was expedient and profitable. Contra Weinberger, this chapter shows that, far from shying away from the topic of race and identity, Yau has dealt with these concerns throughout his career in more oblique, often nonthematic, means. Because critics such as Weinberger tend to look only for thematic manifestations of ’Asianness,’ they have missed Yau’s more subtle, non-content-based grappling with issues of racial identity, including racial self-hatred, and his critiques of racist representations and discourses.

This book has examined a vision of poetry that icontinually turns away from and returns to group affiliations and assimilation—from the experimental poetics of Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and Amiri Baraka and their contemporaries. The postwar avant-garde New American Poetry and the various tributaries that flow from it, among them Language poetry, establish poetry as a unique forum in which to negotiate the paradoxes of affiliation, assimilation, friendship, and personal autonomy. By continuously confronting in memorable words and metaphors its philosophical, psychological, social, and poetic quandaries, post-war American poetry demonstrates that friendship is surely one of the most curious of human phenomena, one that Ralph Waldo Emerson rightly calls a “paradox in nature.” From the 19th century to the present moment, some of the most vibrant, most enduring American writing has attempted to shed light on this infinitely rich relation, this knotty oxymoron so central to cultural narratives, literature, and people's lives.

Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and Amiri Baraka are profoundly concerned with friendship as a theme and as an intellectual, poetic, and personal problem. Each poet creates a tense oscillation in his work between a complex experimental individualism—dependent on the notions of “abandonment,” aversion to conformity, and protean selfhood—and an awareness of both friendship's ineradicable importance and its limitations. This chapter examines the relationship between O'Hara and Ashbery in order to understand better how such dynamics play out in the realm of one particular—and one particularly important—poetic friendship, as well as to propose that this specific pairing could stand as a kind of synecdoche for the broader collision between friendship and radical individualism that shapes and determines innovative post-war American poetry and its writing communities.