POETRY IN THE USA AFTER WWII

World War II saw the emergence of a new generation of poets, many of whom were
influenced by Wallace Stevens and Richard Eberhart. They wrote poetry that sprang from
experience of active service and also, they formed a generation of poets that in contrast to the
preceding generation often wrote in traditional verse forms.

After the war, a number of new poets and poetic movements emerged, such as the
Confessional movement, a style of poetry that has been described as poetry of the personal or
‘I’, focusing on extreme movements of individual experience, the psyche, and personal trauma,
including previously and occasionally still taboo matters such as mental illness, sexuality, and
suicide. This movement was to have a strong influence on later poets like Sylvia Plath.

It was emerged another movement: The Beat Generation: The central elements of this culture
are the rejection of standard narrative values, making spiritual quest, the exploration of
American and Eastern religions, the rejection of materialism, explicit portrayals of the human
condition, experimentation with psychedelic drugs and sexual liberation and exploration. The
members of this generation such as Allen Ginsberg, developed a reputation as new bohemian
hedonists, who celebrated non-conformity and spontaneous creativity. In other words, they
reflected, sometimes in an extreme form, the more open, relaxed and searching society of the
1950s-1960s, the Beats pushed the boundaries of the American idiom in the direction of
demotic speech perhaps further than any other group.

Around the same time, another specific movement was the so-called Black Mountain Poets,
under the leadership of Charles Olson. These poets were exploring the possibilities of open
form but in a much more programmatic way than the Beats. They based their approach to
poetry on Olson’s essay Projective Verse, in which he called for a form based on the line, a line
based on human breath and a mode of writing based on perceptions juxtaposed so that one
perception leads directly to another.