A Generation of Great Poets

There is pretty much only one textbook dedicated to the full range of contemporary American poetry. This isn't shocking. It isn't the sexiest academic subject. But recently I was surprised to discover that the textbook I used as an undergraduate in the '80s was still in print and remains about the only available textbook, and unlike most textbooks, no one had bothered to revise or update it since 1989.

Granted, the distinction between an anthology and a textbook is a matter of opinion. But based on its $96 list price, an amount no one would pay for a book he wasn't forced to buy, The Longman Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry clearly falls on the side of a college text. Though it was first published in the Reagan Administration in many ways it is not out of date. Grouping poets by decade of birth, the poets at its center were those born in the 1920s. There are a dozen poets born in the decade before this included in Longman and a dozen in the decade after, but 20 poets are selected from the generation born between 1920-1929.

By 1989 when the Longman Anthology (Revised Edition) was published, the dominance of this generation was already a long-standing fact. A decade earlier, The Harvard Guide to Contemporary Writing, concluded with an essay, "Dissident Poets," that focused mostly on the same poets covered by the Longman Anthology. At the center, the Harvard Guide declares, are the "establishment poets" who include James Merrill, Anthony Hecht, Richard Howard and Richard Wilbur. As is the nature of guides, the essay divvies up and classifies the poets, too. There are the confessional poets like Anne Sexton; and the New York poets who include Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery; geography being a good organizing principal there are also the Minnesota poets who include James Wright and Robert Bly; the Harvard Guide also singles out the work of W. S. Merwin and other existential poets; also, the nascent feminism in poets like Adrienne Rich is applauded; obviously the beat writers like Allen Ginsberg are explored as well.

But unlike previous generations that could be classified more easily along these lines, even the Harvard Guide can only go so far trying to organize the poets born in the '20s. The essay also notes a number of poets like James Dickey, A. R. Ammons, Louis Simpson and Galway Kinell who "march to their own drummers." I would add to this list John Haines, Edgar Bowers and Mona Van Duyn. (Then there is the amazing Amy Clampitt who is not included in the Harvard Guide because she did not publish her first book until 1983—when she was 63.)

Part of the reason is that this is the generation who had members leading on all sides in the poetry wars in the 1970s and 1980s. Things were so fractured in terms of free verse vs. formal verse, political poetry vs. artistic poetry and various other schisms great and small that among the poets and critics of this generation it was near inconceivable for one person to be able to appreciate them all as a group or to even see them as one.

"Few are the contemporary critics or poets who can express admiration for, say, Frank O'Hara without feeling compelled to disparage the achievement of, say, Richard Wilbur," the Harvard Guide intones. That spirit of acrimony is perhaps no longer true (notice that J.D. McClatchy's selections include both the formal meters of Wilbur's verse alongside a collection of Frank O'Hara's more ecstatic and looser poems). But to an amazing extent the poets born in the '20s (the youngest of whom would now be around 76 years old) remain the defining poetic generation to this day, holding the spotlight.

Last month, for example, The Best American Poetry 2005 anthology was published and once again this same group of poets, as they have in years past, dominates. And, though time will inevitably change this, it may take longer than the lives of the poets. Of those born in the '20s, four of the 13 poets included in The Best American Poetry 2005 are deceased. (And, while two—Donald Justice and Anthony Hecht—died this past year, the other two were beating out all living poets with work written years ago as A.R. Ammons died in 2001 and Charles Bukowski in 1994.)

So why have these poets dominated American poetry like no other generation in history? The short answer is that they are the greatest and most gifted generation of poets in American history. But obviously there are political, cultural and technical reasons, too. In the post-World War II era, when these poets started, poetry was at a pinnacle of prestige. According to Dana Gioia, the current chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts and a well-known poet and critic, "The best critical minds in mid-century were writing about poetry and now very few leading critics are writing about poetry." Also the generation before them (John Berryman, Delmore Schwartz, Robert Lowell) had mostly flamed out early, leaving these young poets as the beneficiaries of this short-lived critical attention. These poets also matured during the cultural upheaval of the '60s, which opened topics and ideas that had previously been verboten in verse. The counterculture also made stars out of Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich and Anne Sexton. Then, most importantly, the institutionalization of writing programs in the '80s allowed this generation of poets to have unprecedented influence on what came after.

Sometimes this influence happens in traditional form through a younger poet's admiration and emulation of the older poet's work. But often for this generation of poets, influence could also be amazingly direct and have little to do with poetic technique. Richard Howard (born in 1929) in his poetry has displayed a genius for syllabic forms and erudite dramatic monologues that place him among an elite in his skill as a practitioner. And, unsurprisingly, because of the technical requirements, his poetry has influenced few disciples. But that does not prevent him from having tremendous influence among younger poets; for decades now, Howard has been a kingmaker. Last month, when Howard was replaced as poetry editor of the Paris Review, the journal discovered a five-year backlog of poems that Howard had accepted, many, the New York Observer alleged, by former students. James Merrill (an heir to the Merrill/Lynch fortune), before his death in 1995 exerted tremendous influence through his wealth by being among the most generous poetry patrons America has ever seen.

But Merrill in particular was also influential through his verse. In fact, if there is one poet that I could push who exemplifies the best of this amazing generation it is Merrill. To the general reader, despite his famous family and his outsized talents, James Merrill may not be as familiar as Ginsberg or Rich. But Merrill combined a facility for language, an ear for meter, and formal ingenuity to create poems filled with the sort of intelligence and wit more familiar to British writers like Byron, Pope and, of course, Auden.

A truly multinational and cosmopolitan poet—one poem with a German epigraph recalls being raised in New York by a French governess—Merrill makes references that can be hard to follow. "The Victor Dog," for example, mentions within two stanzas jazz great Bix Beiderbecke, 17th-century composer Dietrich Buxtehude, conductor Pierre Boulez and acid rock. But amazingly, one never feels that Merrill is pedantic. In short, Merrill is never boring. This may be partly because of his ability to create friction by incorporating elements of autobiography into his endlessly elegant style. In "Up and Down," for example, the poet considers telling his mother that he is gay after she presents him with an emerald ring:

" ... For when you marry. For your bride. It's yours."

A den of greenest light, it grows, shrinks, glows,

Hermetic stanza bedded in the prose

of the last thirty semiprecious years.

I do not tell her, it would sound theatrical,

Indeed, this green room's mine, my very life.

We are each other's; there will be no wife;

The little feet that patter here are metrical."

At his best, Merrill uses all of his pyrotechnics and intellectual heft to thread feeling through thought into poetry. Of course, James Merrill is just my favorite. Merrill, himself, was a great admirer of W. S. Merwin, whose focus on simplicity and clarity could not be more different in approach, style or effect.

Poetry—hard to classify, hard to discuss and hard to read—will lure few who will take the time, either with the complexities of Merrill or the simplicities of Merwin. But as Gioia notes, these poets born in the '20s were simply a uniquely gifted generation. Gioia offers this observation:

"People should search it out (the work of these poets). Surprisingly, in 2005 we do not honor this generation enough. This was one of the most extraordinary generations in the history of American literature. Many of the major poets are still alive and working and yet I see too few people reading or studying their work, although they have been widely acknowledged during their careers.

They deserve more attention than they currently get."