American poets American poetry

American poets
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 (although a strong oral tradition often likened to poetry already existed among Native American societies).^[1] 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.^[2] Modernist poets like Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot (who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948) are often cited as creative and influential English-language poets of the first half of the 20th century.^[3] African American and women poets were published and read widely in the same period but were often somewhat prejudicially marginalized. By the 1960's, 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 is the only contemporary American writer writing primarily poetry who has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, while Bob Dylan, a folk-rock songwriter and poet, has been awarded the same prize.
Poetry in the colonies[edit]
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 (most likely in Ipswich, Massachusetts or North Andover, Massachusetts) and printed and distributed in London by her brother-in-law, Rev. John Woodbridge. There are 14 such writers whom might be termed American poets (they had been to America and to different degrees, written poems or verses about the place). Early examples include a 1616 "testimonial poem" on the "sterling and warlike" character of Captain John Smith (in Barbour, ed. "Works") 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.^[4] 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" (one a densely literary manifesto on how European and Native people came together there and must keep doing so for a successful America; the other a light "drinking song" also full of deeper American implications). These were published in book form along with other examples of Morton's American poetry in "New English Canaan" (1637); and based on the criteria of "First," "American" and "Poetry," they make Morton (and not Anne Bradstreet) America's first poet in English.^[5]


Phillis Wheatley, a slave, wrote poetry during the colonial period.
One of the first recorded poets of the Thirteen Colonies was Anne Bradstreet (1612 – 1672), who remains one of the early known women poets who wrote in English.^[6] 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 (1645–1729) wrote poems expounding Puritan virtues in a highly wrought metaphysical style that can be seen as typical of the early colonial period.^[7]
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,^[8] 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.^[9][10]
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 (1752–1832), 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.^[11] However, as might be expected from what was essentially provincial writing, this late colonial-era poetry is generally somewhat old-fashioned in form and syntax, deploying the means and methods of Pope and Gray in the era of Blake and Burns. The work of Rebecca Hammond Lard (1772–1855), although quite old, still apply to life in today's world. She writes about nature, not only the nature of environment, but the nature of humans.^[12]
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.^{[citation needed]}
Postcolonial poetry[edit]


Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1873.
The first significant poet of the independent United States was William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878), 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 (1807–1882) 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.,^[13] formed the