American poetry, the poetry of the United States, arose first as efforts by colonists to add their voices to English poetry in the 17th century, well before the constitutional unification of the thirteen colonies (although before this, a strong oral tradition often likened to poetry existed among Native American societies). Unsurprisingly, most of the early colonists' work relied on contemporary British models of poetic form, diction, and theme. However, in the 19th century, a distinctive American idiom began to emerge. By the later part of that century, when Walt Whitman was winning an enthusiastic audience abroad, poets from the United States had begun to take their place at the forefront of the English-language avant-garde.
This position was strengthened early in the 20th century to the extent that Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot were perhaps the most influential modernist English-language poets in the period during World War I. By the 1960s, the young poets of the British Poetry Revival looked to their American contemporaries and predecessors as models for the kind of poetry they wanted to write. Toward 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 and other cultural groupings.
Read more about American Poetry: Poetry in The Colonies, Postcolonial Poetry, Whitman and Dickinson, Modernism and After, World War II and After, American Poetry Today
Other articles related to "american, poetry, american poetry, americans":
... Major has edited several anthologies, most recently Calling the Wind 20th Century African-American Short Stories (1993) and The Garden Thrives 20th Century African-Amer ... in the following anthologies The Norton Anthology of American Literature, The Norton Anthology of African-American Literature, Postmodern Poetry in America 1950 to the Present ... Fiction Children of The Night, American Made, Calling the Wind, The Avant Garde Today An International Anthology, Statements, Statements 2, The Sound of Writing, Pushcart XV, Breaking Ice, 19 Necromancers ...
... The Hope of Liberty, the first book by an African American poet in more than 50 years and the first by an African American from the South contains 23 poems, including three on the author's feelings about having ...
... Allison Hedge Coke, editor – To Topos/Oregon State University Ahani Indigenous American Poetry Julia Kasdorf and Michael Tyrell, editors, Broken Land Poems of Brooklyn, anthology (New York University) David ... Daniel Tobin, editor, The Book of Irish American Poetry From the Eighteenth Century to the Present, University of Notre Dame Press Natasha Trethewey ...
... The Best American Poetry 2007, a volume in The Best American Poetry series, was edited by poet Heather McHugh, guest editor, who made the final selections, and David Lehman ... This book is the 20th volume in the most popular annual poetry anthology in the United States ...
... The last forty years in United States poetry have seen the emergence of a number of groups, schools, and trends, whose lasting importance has, necessarily, yet to be ... Performance poetry also emerged from the Beat and hippie happenings, the talk-poems of David Antin (born in 1932), and ritual events performed by Rothenberg, to become a serious poetic stance which ... This mirrored a general growth of interest in poetry by African Americans including Gwendolyn Brooks (born in 1917), Maya Angelou (born in 1928), Ishmael Reed (born in 1938),Vim Karénin, Nikki Giovanni (born in ...
Famous quotes containing the words poetry and/or american:
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Disney World has acquired by now something of the air of a national shrine. American parents who don’t take their children there sense obscurely that they have failed in some fundamental way, like Muslims who never made it to Mecca.”
—Simon Hoggart (b. 1946)