American poetry
American poetry refers to the poetry of the United States. It arose first as efforts by American colonists to add their voices to English poetry in the 17th century, well before the constitutional unification of the Thirteen Colonies. Most of the early colonists' work was similar to contemporary English models of poetic form, diction, and theme. However, in the 19th century, an American idiom began to emerge. By the later part of that century, poets like Walt Whitman were winning an enthusiastic audience abroad and had joined the English-language avant-garde.
Much of the American poetry published between 1910 and 1945 remains lost in the pages of small circulation political periodicals, particularly the ones on the far left, destroyed by librarians during the 1950s McCarthy era. Modernist poets like Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot are often cited as creative and influential English-language poets of the first half of the 20th century. African American and women poets were published and read widely in the same period but were often somewhat prejudicially marginalized. By the 1960s, the Beat Movement and Black Mountain poets had developed new models for poetry and their contemporaries influenced the British Poetry Revival. Towards the end of the millennium, consideration of American poetry had diversified, as scholars placed an increased emphasis on poetry by women, African Americans, Hispanics, Chicanos, Native Americans, and other ethnic groups. Louise Glück and Bob Dylan have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Poetry in the colonies
As England's contact with the Americas increased after the 1490s, English explorers sometimes included verse with their descriptions of the New World up through 1650, the year of Anne Bradstreet's "The Tenth Muse", which was written in America and printed and distributed in London by her brother-in-law, Rev. John Woodbridge. There are 14 such writers who might be termed American poets. Early examples include a 1616 "testimonial poem" on the "sterling and warlike" character of Captain John Smith and Rev. William Morrell's 1625 "Nova Anglia" or "New England", which is a rhymed catalog of everything from American weather to his glimpses of Native American women. Then in May 1627, Thomas Morton of Merrymount – a Devon-born West Country outdoorsman, attorney at law, man of letters and colonial adventurer – raised a maypole to celebrate and foster success at his fur-trading settlement and nailed a "Poem" and "Song". These were published in book form along with other examples of Morton's American poetry in "New English Canaan" ; and based on the criteria of "First," "American" and "Poetry," they make Morton America's first poet in English.Image:Phillis Wheatley frontispiece.jpg|thumb|upright=.9|Phillis Wheatley, a slave, wrote poetry during the colonial period.
One of the first recorded poets of the Thirteen Colonies was Anne Bradstreet, who remains one of the early known women poets who wrote in English. The poems she published during her lifetime address religious and political themes. She also wrote tender evocations of home, family life and of her love for her husband, many of which remained unpublished until the 20th century.
Edward Taylor wrote poems expounding Puritan virtues in a highly wrought metaphysical style that can be seen as typical of the early colonial period.
This narrow focus on the Puritan ethic was, understandably, the dominant note of most of the poetry written in the colonies during the 17th and early 18th centuries. The earliest "secular" poetry published in New England was by Samuel Danforth in his "almanacks" for 1647–1649, published at Cambridge; these included "puzzle poems" as well as poems on caterpillars, pigeons, earthquakes, and hurricanes. Of course, being a Puritan minister as well as a poet, Danforth never ventured far from a spiritual message.
A distinctly American lyric voice of the colonial period was Phillis Wheatley, a slave whose book "Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral," was published in 1773. She was one of the best-known poets of her day, at least in the colonies, and her poems were typical of New England culture at the time, meditating on religious and classical ideas.
The 18th century saw an increasing emphasis on America as fit subject matter for its poets. This trend is most evident in the works of Philip Freneau, who is notable for the unusually sympathetic attitude to Native Americans shown in his writings, which had been interpreted as being reflective of his skepticism toward American culture. This late colonial-era poetry follows the means and methods of Pope and Gray in the era of Blake and Burns.. Rebecca Hammond Lard, has been described as "the first poet in Indiana".
On the whole, the development of poetry in the American colonies mirrors the development of the colonies themselves. The early poetry is dominated by the need to preserve the integrity of the Puritan ideals that created the settlement in the first place. As the colonists grew in confidence, the poetry they wrote increasingly reflected their drive towards independence. This shift in subject matter was not reflected in the mode of writing which tended to be conservative, to say the least. This can be seen as a product of the physical remove at which American poets operated from the center of English-language poetic developments in London.
Postcolonial poetry
The first significant poet of the independent United States was William Cullen Bryant, whose great contribution was to write rhapsodic poems on the grandeur of prairies and forests. However, the first internationally acclaimed poet was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow who nearly surpassed Alfred, Lord Tennyson in international popularity, and, alongside William Cullen Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., formed the Fireside Poets. The Fireside Poets were a group of 19th-century American poets from New England. The name "Fireside Poets" is derived from that popularity: their general adherence to poetic convention made their body of work particularly suitable for being memorized and recited in school and at home, where it was a source of entertainment for families gathered around the fire. The poets' primary subjects were the domestic life, mythology, and politics of the United States, in which several of the poets were directly involved.Other notable poets to emerge in the early and middle 19th century include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, Sidney Lanier, and James Whitcomb Riley. As might be expected, the works of all these writers are united by a common search for a distinctive American voice to distinguish them from their British counterparts. To this end, they explored the landscape and traditions of their native country as materials for their poetry.
The most significant example of this tendency may be The Song of Hiawatha by Longfellow. This poem uses Native American tales collected by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, who was superintendent of Indian affairs for Michigan from 1836 to 1841. Longfellow imitated the meter of the Finnish epic poem Kalevala, possibly to avoid British models. The resulting poem, while a popular success, did not provide a model for future U.S. poets.
As time went on, the influence of the transcendentalism of the poet/philosophers Emerson and Thoreau increasingly influenced American poetry. Transcendentalism was the distinctly American strain of English Romanticism that began with William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Emerson, arguably one of the founders of transcendentalism, had visited England as a young man to meet these two English poets, as well as Thomas Carlyle. While Romanticism transitioned into Victorianism in post-reform England, it became energetic in America from the 1830s through to the Civil War.
Edgar Allan Poe was a unique poet during this time, brooding over themes of the macabre and dark, connecting his poetry and aesthetic vision to his philosophical, psychological, moral, and cosmological theories. In the 20th century, American poet William Carlos Williams said of Poe that "in him American literature is anchored, in him alone, on solid ground."
Whitman and Dickinson
The final emergence of a truly indigenous English-language poetry in the United States was the work of two poets, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. On the surface, these two poets could not have been less alike. Whitman's long lines, derived from the metric of the King James Version of the Bible, and his democratic inclusiveness stand in stark contrast with Dickinson's concentrated phrases and short lines and stanzas, derived from Protestant hymnals.What links them is their common connection to Emerson, and the daring originality of their visions. These two poets can be said to represent the birth of two major American poetic idioms—the free metric and direct emotional expression of Whitman, and the gnomic obscurity and irony of Dickinson—both of which would profoundly stamp the American poetry of the 20th century.
The development of these idioms, as well as conservative reactions against them, can be traced through the works of poets such as Edwin Arlington Robinson, Stephen Crane, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Frost, in particular, is a commanding figure, who aligned strict poetic meter, particularly blank verse and terser lyrical forms, with a "vurry Amur'k'n" idiom. He successfully revitalized a rural tradition with many English antecedents from his beloved Golden Treasury and produced an oeuvre of major importance, rivaling or even excelling in achievement that of the key modernists and making him, within the full sweep of traditional modern English-language verse, a peer of Hardy and Yeats. But from Whitman and Dickinson the outlines of a distinctively new organic poetic tradition, less indebted to English formalism than Frost's work, were clear to see, and they would come to full fruition in the 1910s and 1920s. As Colin Falck noted, "To the Whitmanian heritage of cadenced free verse she brings the greater reflective tightness of Robinson Jeffers."