“Schools” of American Poetry Since 1945
(see also NAAL, Volume E, pages 2637-2651)
Confessional Poetry: A term applied to a group of contemporary poets whose poetry features a public and sometimes painful display of private, personal matters. In confessional poetry, the poet often seems to address the audience directly, without the intervention of a persona.
Beat Generation: A group of American poets and novelists of the 1950s and 1960s in romantic rebellion against what they conceived of as the American culture. They expressed their revolt through literary works of loose structure and slang diction. To prevailing “establishment” values, they opposed an anti-intellectual freedom, often associated with religious ecstasy, visionary states, or the effect of drugs. The group’s ideology included some measure of primitivism, orientalism, experimentation, eccentricity, and reliance upon inspiration from modern jazz (bebop especially) and from such earlier visionaries as William Blake and Walt Whitman.
San Francisco Renaissance: The phrase refers to the literary ferment in the San Francisco Bay area between 1955 and 1965. The most public manifestation of this era was the Beat movement as it was played out on North Beach and made widely known through Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” (1956) and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), but there were many other strands, all of which contributed to a romantic revival. . . . the San Francisco Renaissance revived Emersonian ideals of individual vision and natural divinity and combined them with Whitman vitalism and communality. Reacting against the New Critical aesthetics of personal detachment and formal complexity then prevalent, poets of the San Francisco Renaissance treated the poem as an expressive vehicle, whose unmediated rhetoric and direct diction would reach the reader by more than semantic means. The evolution of public poetry readings contributed to this aesthetic, taking the poem off the page and putting it into the public sphere. . . . Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore and publishing firm provided the first literary venues, and bars and gallery spaces provided public spaces for readings. The media attention on the Beats brought a new, populist audience to literature. While the media projection of bohemian lifestyles often distorted history and overlooked the movement’s literary contributions, the San Francisco Renaissance contributed to the vitality of literature and served as a major event in the evolution of postmodern poetry.
Reform / Protest Poets:
Black Mountain School: A label applied to certain writers . . . associated with Black Mountain College, an experimental school in North Carolina. They published the Black Mountain Review, which was highly influential in the “projective verse” movement. The school itself was a bold experiment in aesthetic education, which included architecture and the graphic arts as well as literature; in its idealism and spirit, the school resembled the “Brook Farm” enterprise.
New York School: A group of American poets who flourished between 1950 and 1970, distinguished by urbanity, wit, learning, spontaneity, and exuberance. Led by Frank O’Hara, these poets exploited certain interests and sympathies: the culture of France, modern painting (surrealism and abstract expressionism in particular), jazz, Hollywood movies, and city life.
Deep Image: Images from the subconscious, dream, hallucinations, or fantasies are called “deep images” by certain writers, among them Robert Bly. The deep, underground, or subterranean image, as the terms suggest, argues with “Imagist” fervor for the image in general as the central motivation in a poem and for a specific sort of image in particular: not merely an ornament or conceit but a figure conforming to Freud’s notion that dream language puts image and quantity in the places of idea and quality. Any palpable image can take on “deep” characteristics, depending on the setting and situation.
For Further Reading: The following major literature reference works for American literature are available at ARCC and most public libraries: