poetry

Modern themes and styles of poetry have been part of the american repertoire since the early part of the 20th century, especially in the work of TS Elliot and Ezra Pound. Their works were difficult, emotionally restrained, full of non-american allusions, and often inaccessible. After World War II, new poetric voices developed that were more exuberant and much more american in inspiration and language. The poets who wrote after the war were often drew upon the work of William Carlos Williams and returned to the legacy of Walt \whitman, which was democratic in identification and free form in style. These poets provided post war poetry with a uniquely american voice.

The Beatnik, or Beat, poets of the 1950s notoriously followes in Whitman`s tradition. They addopted a radical ethic that included drugs, sex, art and the freedom of the road. Jack Kerouack captured this vision in On The Road (1957), a quintessential book about Kerouac`s adventures wandering across the United States. The most significant poet in the group was Allen Ginsberg, whoose sexually explicit poem Howl (1956) became the subject of a court battle after it was initially banned as obscene. The Beat poets spanned the country, but adopted San Francisco as their special outpost. The city continued to serve as an important arena for poetry and unconventional ideas,especially at the City Lights Bookstone co-owned writer and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Other modernist poets included Gwendolyn Brooks , who retreated from the conventional forms of her early poetry to write about anger and protest among african americans,and Adrienne Rich, who wrote poetry focused on women`s rights, needs and desires.

Because it is open to expressive forms and innovative speech, modern poetry is able to convey the deep personla anguish experienced by several of the most prominent poets of the postwar period, aong them Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Anne Sexton and John Berryman. Sometimes called confessional poets, they used poetry to express nightmarish images of self-destruction. As in paintind, removing limits and conventions on form permitted an almost infinite capacity for conveing mood, feeling, pain and inspiration. This personal poetry also brought american poetry closer to the european modernist tradition of emotional anguish and madness. Robert Frost, probably the most famous and beloved of modern american poets, wrote evocative and deeply felt poetry that conveyed some of these same qualities within a conventional pattern of meter and rhyme.

Another tradition of modern poetry moved toward playful engagement with language and the creative process. This tradition was most completely embodied in the brilliant poetry of Wallace Stevens, whose work dealt withthe role of creative imagination. This tradition was later developed in the seemingly simple and prosaic poetry of John Ashbery, who created unconventional works that were the posibilities of emotional expressionand reflected an emphasis on the creative process. The idea of exploration and pleasure trough unexpected associations and new ways of viewing reality connected poetry to the modernism of the visual arts.