American Postwar Poetry - theory
THE SAN FRANCISCO RENAISSANCE AND THE BEAT GENERATION
San Francisco Renaissance is a term for writers and artists in the Bay Area at the end of World War II. It was not a single movement, but rather groups of many different communities that migrated to San Francisco during the postwar era seeking out the remnants of bohemian culture in America of the twenties. The poets refused both formalism and modernism, but they did not share any aesthetic program. Most of them however reacted to the second world war and restrictions of the fifties. Most of them were influenced by Whitman and their poetry is very often confessional and connected with the San Francisco region. As they were not part of the mainstream poetry, they started their own publishing house, The City Lights.
Some of the major writers involved in the San Francisco Renaissance included KENNETH REXROTH,WILLIAM EVERSON,ROBIN BLASER, and MICHAEL MCCLURE. The last one, ROBERT DUNCAN is more associated with the Blackmountain School of CHARLES OLSEN, but he introduced many of the central figures of the San Francisco Renaissance to each other while teaching poetry workshops at San Francisco State College. This loosely bound group often gathered in Rexroth's home where they were discussing poetry and politics.
LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI was born in Yonkers, New York, in 1919. After spending his early childhood in France, he received his B.A. from the University of North Carolina, an M.A. from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne. During World War II he served in the US Naval Reserve and was sent to Nagasaki shortly after it was bombed. He married in 1951 and has one daughter and one son.
In 1953, Ferlinghetti and Peter Martin began to publish City Lights magazine. They also opened the City Lights Books Shop in San Francisco to help support the magazine. In 1955, they launched City Light Publishing, a book-publishing venture. City Lights became known as the heart of the "Beat" movement, which included writers such as KENNETH REXROTH, GARY SNYDER, ALLEN GINSBERG, and JACK KEROUAC.
Ferlinghetti is the author of more than thirty books of poetry, including Americus, Book I (New Directions, 2004), San Francisco Poems (2002), Who Are We Now? (1976), The Secret Meaning of Things (1969), and A Coney Island of the Mind (1958). He has translated the work of a number of poets including Nicanor Parra, Jacques Prevert, and Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Like the "Lost Generation" of the 1920s, the American "Beat Generation" of the 1950s names both a literary current and a broader cultural phenomenon or mood. Rejecting the conformism and stress on "normality" of the Truman and Eisenhower years, the Beats emphasized an openness to varieties of experience beyond the limits of middle-class society; they explored the cultural "underground" of bebop jazz, drug use, "polymorphous perverse" sexuality, and non-Western religions. What could be loosely described as the underlying philosophy was visionary enlightenment, Zen Buddhism. The Beat Generation were centred around the artist colonies of North Beach (San Francisco), Venice West (Los Angeles) and Greenwich Village (New York City). They rejected the prevailing academic attitude to poetry, feeling that poetry should be brought to the people. Readings would take place in the Coexistence Bagel Shop and Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, often to the accompaniment of Jazz. A common theme that linked them all together was a rejection of the prevailing American middle-class values, the purposelessness of modern society and the need for withdrawal and protest.
MAJOR WRITERS: ALLEN GINSBERG – The Howl JACK KEROUAC – On the Road
OTHER POETIC MOVEMENTS FORMALISM
Major emphasis is on form rather than content. These poets were opposed to modernist innovations.
1940s and 1950s
HOWARD NEMEROV, RICHARD WILBUR, RANDALL JARRELL
CONFESSIONAL POETRY
ROBERT LOWELL (1917–1977) His first and second books, Land of Unlikeness (1944) and Lord Weary's Castle (1947were influenced by his conversion from Episcopalianism to Catholicism and explored the dark side of America's Puritanism. Lowell was politically active, opposing the Second World War and the war in Vietnam. He suffered from manic depression, for which he was repeatedly hospitalized.
Partly due to his frequent breakdowns, and partly due to the influence of the Beat generation poets, Lowell began to write more directly from personal experience as in his collection Life Studies (1959).
SYLVIA PLATH (1932–1963) When Sylvia was eight years old, her father died as a result of complications from diabetes. She studying with Robert Lowell. Her first collection of poems, Colossus, was published in 1960 in England, and two years later in the United States. Sge suffered from depressions, the result was her most famous book, Ariel.
In 1963, Plath published a semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar.
Although only Colossus was published while she was alive, her husband, British poet Ted Hughes published three other volumes of her work posthumously, including The Collected Poems, which was the recipient of the 1982 Pulitzer Prize. She was the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize after death.
ANNE SEXTON (1928-1974) In 1954 she was diagnosed with depression, suffered her first mental breakdown, and spent much of her time in a neuropsychiatric hospital. She started writing poetry as a therapy. Her major themes included menstruation, abortion, and drug addiction.
BLACK MOUNTAIN SCHOOL
The Black Mountain School cantered around Black Mountain in North Carolina, where
poets CHARLES OLSON, ROBERT DUNCAN, and ROBERT CREELEY taught in the early 1950s.
The Black Mountain School is linked with Charles Olson's theory of “projective verse,”
which insisted on an open form based on the spontaneity of the breath pause in speech and
the typewriter line in writing. Robert Creeley (1926–2005), who writes with a terse, minimalist style, was one of the major Black Mountain poets.
