The American Post-Modernism I.pptVIP

American Literature The American Post-Modernism (I) (1945 - 2000) American Poetry Since 1945: the Anti-tradition Experimental poetry: Experimentation is one aspect of all Modernist and Postmodernist poetry, but experimental poetry makes a special point of innovation, sometimes in the belief that current poetry is stereotyped and inadequate, but more often for its own sake. Experimentation in the arts is nothing like its counterpart in science, however, and there are no theories to correspond with observations, fit in with other theories, or broadly make sense. Even such concepts as foregrounding and defamiliarization, basic to much literary theorizing, are more taken as articles of faith than properly established. Experimental poetry can be intriguing and pleasing, but it is not poetry as commonly understood by the term, and has therefore to be judged on different grounds, most commonly those of the visual arts, which it increasingly resembles. The force behind Lowell’s mature achievement and much of contemporary poetry lies in the experimentation begun in the 1950s by a number of poets. They may be divided into five loose schools, identified by Donald Allen in his The New American Poetry (1960), the first anthology to present the work of poets who were previously neglected by the critical and academic communities. Inspired by jazz and abstract expressionist painting, most of the experimental writers are a generation younger than Lowell. They have tended to be bohemian, counter-culture intellectuals who disassociated themselves from universities and outspokenly criticized bourgeois American society. Their poetry is daring, original, and sometimes shocking. In its search for new values, it claims affinity with the archaic world of myth, legend, and traditional societies such as those of the American Indian. The forms are looser, more spontaneous, organic; they arise from the subject matter and the feeling of the poet as the poem is written, and from the natural pau