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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 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 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 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.

Postwar New American poets and their successors, the Language Writers, insisted that their poetry was capable of intellectual inquiry. After giving examples of their claims for poetry, the chapter sets out the book’s methodological assumptions. Literary theory has struggled to represent adequately the interrelations between science and poetry because it has not engaged with the epistemological claims of the sciences. Yet science is part of the DNA of modern literary theory. One major theme of the book is how poets attempted to develop new poetic epistemologies. Science envy has been attributed to the early-twentieth-century modernist poets, but the book argues that the picture is more complex in the postwar era. Many disciplines employed methods and concepts from physics, seeing this not as physics envy but as intellectual opportunity. The book then maps out schematically the different kinds of responses made by postwar American poets of all kinds to the sciences. It goes on to show how some of these responses had antecedents among modernist predecessors. Archibald MacLeish’s poem “Einstein” is discussed in detail because of its representative character. The importance of William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound for later poets is discussed.

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 two most widely known African American poets before the 20th century were Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Paul Laurence Dunbar. Harper was an accomplished elocutionist and Emerson's “Self-Reliance” and other lyceum circuit lectures are now classic texts of American literature. Dunbar's performances were of a quite different nature. He was opinionated and outspoken on social and political issues and his readings were straightforward recitals of his poems, which were written in dialect and standard traditional stanzaic forms. However, Harper' practice was aimed at the harmonious alignment of head and heart. The invention of a characteristic voice was needed to carry Harper's message and to bridge the cultural distance between Standard English and black dialect.

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.

The appropriation of Dante by Cordelia Ray, a late nineteenth-century African American author whose thinking about race, civic activism, and freedom was refracted through her reading of the medieval poet, provides an interesting example of how the creative encounter with an earlier author can affect one's sense of identity — national and otherwise. Ray used the medieval poet to shed light on her understanding of American values, in particular on how the United States, which had fallen short of its promise of equality for all citizens before the law, was struggling to correct that injustice in her lifetime. When she published her poem ‘Dante’ in 1885 and when she emended it sometime before its republication in 1910, it was becoming clear that legal recourse might be the most salutary way to overcome the racial divide in the aftermath of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Her interpretation of Dante, the poet and the man, reflects this understanding.

This chapter looks at American poet Rita Dove's new volume of dance poems American Smooth. It explains that it was a specific hardship that led Dove to her current dancing obsession and to the subsequent use of dance in her writing. It examines how a poet replicates the distinctive measure of a specific dance and describes how Dove's poems mimic various dance steps.

This chapter criticizes the works of American poet and translator Ben Belitt. It discusses Belitt's sense of place and suggests that fully half of his poems depict a landscape or action within an external scene. It explains that his style as a translator have its respective analogues in his style as a landscaper. It contends that to describe Belitt as a poet is to place him outside the predominant tendencies of English and American poetry and within a major Continental and South American one.

This chapter analyses American poets' new collection, Louise Glück's The Seven Ages and Jorie Graham's Never. Glück has remained faithful simultaneously to individuality and ordinary experience and this double goal affects her subjects and the size of her poems. Graham has always been inclined toward the epistemological dilemmas plumbed and articulated by the English Romantics and in her new volume she revisits Wordsworthian scenes of childhood to develop her ongoing lyrical autobiography with reference to what the Romantics called spots of time.

This chapter criticizes American poet Donald Justice book Collected Poems. It explains that Justice spoke more fluently on behalf of nostalgia as a primary human emotion than any other poet of his generation and that tracing how that nostalgia works and has changed over time is one means of calculating the changes in Justice's art. This chapter argues that the last line of Justice's last poem in Collected Poems requires the readers to realize that suffering does exist and cannot be wished away, and that some kind of recompense for it will be allotted.

This chapter discusses Americans poets A. R. Ammons' Bosh and Flapdoodle and John Ashbery's Where Shall I Wander. It suggests that both works are filled with black humor, nostalgia, regret, anticipation, and wonder. It argues that both poets have mastered the American dialect, especially its slang, and neither shies away from plain goofiness, nor does Ammons shy away from bad puns.

This chapter criticizes the works of American poet Irving Feldman. It suggests that Feldman can be considered a poet comedian and a multifaceted performer extraordinaire and explains that the development of his poetry over more than four decades roughly parallels the changes of fashion in American poetry. It argues that though Feldman is connected to some of the styles and truisms of post-modern thought, he remains solidly rooted in many traditions of the 19th century.

This chapter assesses the American neo-surreal as an influential strand of prose poetry, adapting ideas that originated with the surrealists to challenge assumptions about how the world should be understood, and prose-poetic narratives ought to be read. The term “neo-surrealism” does not have to be restrictive but may be used as a way of opening up an understanding of certain key features of prose poetry internationally. And while American prose poets are certainly not the first to experiment with surrealism, many contemporary American prose poets demonstrate a particular interest in absurdism and neo-surrealism. As a result, neo-surrealism is arguably best exemplified by American prose poets — in terms of the number of writers employing such techniques and the quality of neo-surrealistic works being written. Notwithstanding its contemporaneity, the neo-surrealistic strand of prose poetry maintains a clear — if sometimes lateral — connection to the strange and often dreamlike works produced by nineteenth-century French prose poets such as Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud.

This chapter examines the works of American poet Elizabeth Bishop. Many critics have categorized her as either an epigone of Marianne Moore or another in the line of female imagists but her best poems show her to be an epistemological poet in the tradition of William Wordsworth and S. T Coleridge. This chapter argues that Bishop's poems pose essential questions about the relationship between experience and knowledge, between what is empirically ascertainable and what must be deducted or inferred.