Emerson advocated that "the form of poetry should be created according to the content of poetry". However, looking at the history of American poetry, people will find that American poetry shows a creative tendency completely opposite to Emerson's view, that is, the content of poetry is determined according to the form of poetry. Emerson encouraged American poets to reach a transcendental level in thought and poetry content as much as possible. However, even his followers and poets Whitman and Dickinson, whose writing style is closest to his, gave up this theory of poetry creation. American poets constantly create striking new forms to express their poetic images. After World War II, American poetry reflected this trend, which ran counter to Emerson's thought. In the history of western poetry, only American poets are so self-deceiving and insist on the so-called formal division of poetry creation. In the history of poetry, this almost absurd dispute between "closed formalism" and "open formalism" actually represents the confrontation between the spiritual realm and ideological views of the two poets. The closed school believes that the form of poetry should strictly follow the rules; And this formal norm is a fixed rule that has nothing to do with real life experience. Openists believe that free poetry and full self-confidence can express the chaos in real life more effectively. Today, however, when we look back at the opposing factions, we find that they have one thing in common, that is, they are deeply worried about the chaos in real life.
Around 1945, important poets appeared in American poetry: Robert Pan Warren, Richard eberhard, Theodore Rotteck, elizabeth bishop, robert lowell, John Bhajman, Delmore jarrell, Richard Wilbur, Charles Olson and Robert Duncan. Their predecessors were a group of talented American poets, such as Edwin Arlington, Robinson, Frost, Pound, Eliot, Moore, Williams, Stevens, Ransom, jeffers and three later poets: Cummings, Hart Crane and allen tate. Due to the great achievements of these poets born in the last 20 years of the19th century in American poetry, almost all the poets born in the first 20 years of the 20th century were eclipsed. The great achievements of the predecessors often dwarf those of the younger generation. Therefore, the most influential contemporary American poets born in the 1920s were also influenced by the sacrifices and feelings of Roske, Bhajman, jarrell and Lowell.
Among the American poets born at the end of 19, we can clearly distinguish two schools of style: one school, represented by Bryant, Poe, Longfellow, Simrod and Lanier, inherited the poetic tradition of Spencer and Milton in England and carried forward the romantic writing style; The other school can be called Native American Romanticism, including Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville and Dickinson. However, both English romanticism and American native romanticism are intertwined in Robinson and Frost's poems.
19 15 and later, a Whitman-style innovation school came into being. Whitman's direct influence is not obvious in the poems of edgar lee masters, Wedge Lindsay and carl sandburg, but it is also faintly visible. These poets are deeply loved by the public, and the washed American English they use in their poetry creation absorbs some elements of the new development of American quasi-folk music. Even in the poems of Pound, Williams and even Eliot, the influence of Whitman's poetic style is very obvious, far exceeding the influence of European poetry admired by Eliot, Pound and their followers. Although Stevens, like Bryant, Poe and Longfellow, mainly learned English poetic forms from Wordsworth, Keats and Tennyson, his works still embody a more elusive Whitman style, which is completely free from formal constraints.
Stevens' poetry has a far-reaching influence, but his real successor, John Ashberry, did not emerge until the late 1960s and early 1970s. Ashberry's lyric works, such as Spring Dream and Three Poems, show that he abandoned surrealism and improvisation. The long sentences and obscure generalizations used in his representative works show the style characteristics of Stevens and Whitman. Most American poets after World War II were influenced by Eliot. For example, in the mid-1960s, Mervyn began to explore a new primitivism, and wrote Living Targets and Lice, using fragmented sentences to imply the disintegration of society. Eliot called this phenomenon the misfortune and inevitability of history. However, there is no lack of Whitman's soothing sentiment in Mervyn's poems. Although Eliot himself publicly declared that Whitman's name should be erased from the acceptable tradition of English poetry, Whitman's soothing mood constitutes a basic feature of Eliot's Waste Land and Quartet.
These examples show that transcendentalism has revived in American poetry in recent years. Transcendentalism has always been the mainstream of American poetry creation, but it was once abandoned. A generation of poets, represented by Roscoe, Lowell and Wilbur, initially imitated Eliot and Auden's teaching, returned to a closed creative form and gave up the innovation of poetic metrical form. However, in the 1950s, these three poets and some young poets after them, such as Ashbury, Mervyn, James Dickey, James Merrill, Anthony Heckert, james wright, Louis Simpson, Richard Howard and Holland, found in their own practice that both the so-called closed form and the open form were actually one-sided. Later budding poets, such as Gary Sindel, A.R. Amons, Golve Kinnell and mark strand, are rarely bound by formal norms, so they can concentrate on the expression of content more freely. These young poets have gone beyond the pursuit of a certain cross-cultural modern expression, claiming from the beginning that they are the inheritors of Emerson and Whitman's traditions.
Among the "closed" poets, Auden had a deeper influence on contemporary poets than Eliot. Auden's style was clearly reflected in Meryl, Howard Mao Mu and Wilbur's later poems, and had a decisive influence on Holland's early poems and all jarrell's poems. The successors of Auden's poetic style in the United States are different from those in Britain: they not only use Auden's unique irony to reflect the conflict between man and self, but also use this irony to express the conflict between man and nature more strongly. This change in theme will certainly affect the choice of details. At this point, Wilbur is very representative. No matter his early or later poems, they are almost identical in form. However, in this stable form, the poet changed the strong metaphysical thought expressed in his early poems.
We should note that Wordsworth and Whitman's subjective expressionism is very important in contemporary American poetry. Confessional poetry is an American school of poetry under the background of subjective expressionism, and its representatives are W·D· Snodgrass, Sylvia Plath and Ann sexton. The author of the confession poem is Lowell. His early works are like imitations of metaphysical poems of his pioneers edward tylor and allen tate. In the poem A Study of Life, Lowell described his life in detail in the style of free verse initiated by Williams. In his later poems, Lowell continued to use this theme and described his life in more detail in the form of diaries and five-step sonnets. Lowell is the standard-bearer of American confessional poetry. Although he never bossed around and claimed to be a leader in this poetry movement, he is well-deserved as the successor of Eliot's tradition of belief poetry (or belief crisis poetry).
Critics often compare Lowell's confessional poems with Bhajman's later poems. In fact, Bajiman was mainly influenced by Pound. His Song of Dreams meets Pound's standard that the theme and rhythm of poetry should be concise, and the practice of describing personal attitude with expressionism instead of blunt imagism is exactly what Pound advocates.
Iris Murdoch believes that imagism is actually an absurd variant of late romanticism: although personality is reduced to a minimum, it cannot be completely erased, so it always implies self-expression. In Eliot's words, "not fade away, the Ego Personality in Imagist Poetry." Pound realized this when he started writing his self-exploration poem "Chapters". Almost all his followers chose the same path. Olson, Duncan and Robert Creary, the main poets of the Black Hills Poetry School, are considered to be Pound's most loyal followers. Olson's epic is written in pound-style meter.
The poet's statement shows that there is a vague but profound spiritual connection among Williams, Pound, Olson and later Ginsburg. Ginsburg, Gregory Kaulsson, Lawrence Ferringer, William Iverson and some young poets who became famous in the mid-1950s are sometimes called the San Francisco Renaissance Poetry School by critics. At this time, the works of the beat poet and Duncan can also be accepted by this school. Because the Beat poets are the best, they have published poems in the journals sponsored by Fellinger, so they have become the largest branch of this school and deserve comment. In a sense, the Beat Poet is the orthodox successor of Whitman. They have Whitman's broad vision, democratic belief, frank description of sex and eulogizing the avenue. However, in their works, Whitman's "myth" became "mystery". Many poems written by Ginsburg in the late 1950s and early 1960s reflect Williams' ability to create concise images. Williams himself thinks that the most radical Whitman style in Ginsburg's poetry has something in common with his own poetic style. However, Williams' poetic style is very different from Whitman's in at least one respect-Williams tends to solidify any image he adopts so as to think alone, instead of gathering in other images to analyze its meaning. Williams, the most loyal follower of this style, should push Dennis Leftov.
Williams has always believed that poetry is an observation of things. The colloquial words advocated by Pound made this view more vivid, which inspired marianne moore and later elizabeth bishop. The two poets have one thing in common, that is, they don't brag about their status and talent. The syllable poems created by Moore narrowed the differences between prose and poetry in expressing life, and highlighted the * * * effect of mental stress on various senses. Bishop's works also show similar characteristics to Moore's poems, but they are not so strict and extreme in form and concept, but show a certain degree of looseness and relaxation. It is often said that Bishop's poems show an "excessive accuracy". In fact, this "excessive accuracy" itself, as a strict requirement, is a corrective measure to the extreme tendency in the modernist poetry tradition.
Another force against modernist poetry is the new york School of Poetry, represented by Frank O 'Hara, Kenneth Koch, James skyler and Ashberry. Their works reproduce the comedy opera of American silent films and a local surrealist style. O 'Hara's Second Avenue is an example of a new type of poetry created by this school of poetry. This kind of poetry does not belong to modern urban poetry, and will eventually run counter to the pre-Wordsworth poetry style.
The proliferation of poetry schools and creative methods will inevitably lead to difficulties in poetry appreciation. It should be said that there are two major innovations in contemporary American poetry. At one time, Pound, Frost and other poets flatly abandoned the language style of English poetry in the era of King George V (1910-1936); On the other hand, Williams re-introduced the free verse style of inflection sentences that have been out of date since Milton, thus creating various hazy effects. When we know these facts, we find that all kinds of arguments between and within self-proclaimed poets are nonsense in nine cases out of ten. It can be considered that the most influential and distinctive poetry in the late 1960s and early 1970s embodies a transcendental tendency that blends various local poetic styles, and it is an American neo-romantic poetry with obvious expressionism and severe colors. Above, we reviewed the creative path of some contemporary American poets and summarized their main characteristics. However, it is difficult for us to sum up their personal artistic career. Simpson, for example, once imitated the style of robert bly and the poets in the Midwest, but his most energetic poems just got rid of their basic creative characteristics. Ashberry is sometimes simply classified as the new york School of Poetry, but his poetic style is actually similar to that of skyler, and he is imaginative with other poets such as Murrill, Wright, Heckert, Amons, Mervyn, Holland, alfin Furman, Kinnell and strand. Because these poets don't want to fall into the convention of confessional school, they pay attention to avoid using too many details of news reports in their poems, and at the same time adopt the policy of creating forms according to the content.
In short, what is the significance of the form of poetry to American poets? All American poets who aspire to be outstanding understand that they started late in poetry and are latecomers, and they are all worried that they can only become second-rate characters.
Contemporary American poets all show a kind of anxiety, that is, on the one hand, they have to create forms according to the content, on the other hand, they are afraid that their new content can not provide new forms. This is what G Hartman called "uneasiness in demand", that is, things that can be used may run out. These poets, who have matured in the 1970s and may become the mainstream of American poetry, may be exactly what Stevens called "the last bunch of flowers in a huge shadow". This huge shadow is Emerson.