James Wright’s style changed dramatically in the early 1960s. He abandoned his stiffly formal verse for the stripped-down, meditative lyricism of The Branch Will Not Break (1963) and Shall We Gather at the River (1968), which were more dependent on the emotional tenor of image than on metre, poetic diction, or rhyme. In books such as Figures of the Human (1964) and Rescue the Dead (1968), David Ignatow wrote brief but razor-sharp poems that made their effect through swiftness, deceptive simplicity, paradox, and personal immediacy. Another poet whose work ran the gamut from prosaic simplicity to Emersonian transcendence was A.R. Ammons. His short poems in Briefings (1971) were close to autobiographical jottings, small glimpses, and observations, but, like his longer poems, they turned the natural world into a source of vision. Like Ignatow, he made it a virtue to seem unliterary and found illumination in the pedestrian and the ordinary.
Both daily life and an exposure to French Surrealism helped inspire a group of New York poets, among them Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, and John Ashbery. Whether O’Hara was jotting down a sequence of ordinary moments or paying tribute to film stars, his poems had a breathless immediacy that was distinctive and unique. Koch’s comic voice swung effortlessly from the trivial to the fantastic. Strongly influenced by Wallace Stevens, Ashbery’s ruminative poems can seem random, discursive, and enigmatic. Avoiding poetic colour, they do their work by suggestion and association, exploring the interface between experience and perception.
Other impressive poets of the postwar years included Elizabeth Bishop, whose precise, loving attention to objects was reminiscent of her early mentor, Marianne Moore. Though she avoided the confessional mode of her friend Lowell, her sense of place, her heartbreaking decorum, and her keen powers of observation gave her work a strong personal cast. In The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), James Merrill, previously a polished lyric poet, made his mandarin style the vehicle of a lighthearted personal epic, in which he, with the help of a Ouija board, called up the shades of all his dead friends, including the poet Auden. In a prolific career highlighted by such poems as Reflections on Espionage (1976), “Blue Wine” (1979), and Powers of Thirteen (1983), John Hollander, like Merrill, displayed enormous technical virtuosity. Richard Howard imagined witty monologues and dialogues for famous people of the past in poems collected in Untitled Subjects (1969) and Two-Part Inventions (1974). Autobiographical approaches
With the autobiographical knots and parables of Reasons for Moving (1968) and Darker (1970), Mark Strand’s paradoxical language achieved a resonant simplicity. He enhanced his reputation with Dark Harbor (1993) and Blizzard of One (1998). Other strongly autobiographical poets working with subtle technique and intelligence in a variety of forms included Philip Levine, Charles Simic, Robert Pinsky, Gerald Stern, Louise Glück, and Sharon Olds. Levine’s background in working-class Detroit gave his work a unique cast, while Glück and Olds brought a terrific emotional intensity to their poems. Pinsky’s poems were collected in The Figured Wheel (1996). He became a tireless and effective advocate for poetry during his tenure as poet laureate from 1997 to 2000. With the sinuous sentences and long flowing lines of Tar (1983) and Flesh and Blood (1987), C.K. Williams perfected a narrative technique founded on distinctive voice, sharply etched emotion, and cleanly observed detail. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Repair (2000). Adrienne Rich’s work gained a burning immediacy from her lesbian feminism. The Will to Change (1971) and Diving into the Wreck (1973) were turning points for women’s poetry in the wake of the 1960s.
Rich, AdrienneAdrienne Rich, 1980.K. Kendall
That decade also enabled some older poets to become more loosely autobiographical and freshly imaginative, among them Stanley Kunitz, Robert Penn Warren, and W.S. Merwin. The 1960s invigorated gifted black poets such as Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Michael S. Harper. It formed the background for the work of the young poets of the 1980s, such as Edward Hirsch, Alan Shapiro, Jorie Graham, Cathy Song, and Rita Dove, whose sequence about her grandparents, Thomas and Beulah, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1987. Graham’s increasingly abstract and elusive work culminated in The Dream of the Unified Field (1995), selected from five previous volumes. The AIDS crisis inspired My Alexandria (1993) by Mark Doty, The Man with Night Sweats (1992) by Thom Gunn, and a superb memoir, Borrowed Time (1988), and a cycle of poems, Love Alone (1988), by the poet Paul Monette. With razor-sharp images and finely honed descriptive touches, Louisiana-born Yusef Komunyakaa emerged as an impressive African American voice in the 1990s. He wrote about his time as a soldier and war correspondent in Vietnam in Dien Cai Dau (1988) and received the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for his volume of new and selected poems Neon Vernacular (1993). His poems were collected in Pleasure Dome (2001). Billy Collins found a huge audience for his engagingly witty and conversational poetry, especially that collected in Sailing Alone Around the Room (2001), published the year he became poet laureate.
Rita Dove in front of Thomas Jefferson's home, Monticello, near Charlottesville, Virginia, 1993.Eduardo Montes-Bradley Drama Miller, Williams, and Albee
Two post-World War II playwrights established reputations comparable to Eugene O’Neill’s. Arthur Miller wrote eloquent essays defending his modern, democratic concept of tragedy; despite its abstract, allegorical quality and portentous language, Death of a Salesman" class="md-crosslink">Death of a Salesman (1949) came close to vindicating his views. Miller’s intense family dramas were rooted in the problem dramas of Henrik Ibsen and the works of the socially conscious ethnic dramatists of the 1930s, especially Clifford Odets, but Miller gave them a metaphysical turn. From All My Sons" class="md-crosslink">All My Sons (1947) to The Price (1968), his work was at its strongest when he dealt with father-son relationships, anchored in the harsh realities of the Great Depression. Yet Miller could also be an effective protest writer, as in The Crucible" class="md-crosslink">The Crucible (1953), which used the Salem witch trials to attack the witch-hunting of the McCarthy era.
Though his work was uneven, Tennessee Williams at his best was a more powerful and effective playwright than Miller. Creating stellar roles for actors, especially women, Williams brought a passionate lyricism and a tragic Southern vision to such plays as The Glass Menagerie (1944), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), and The Night of the Iguana (1961). He empathized with his characters’ dreams and illusions and with the frustrations and defeats of their lives, and he wrote about his own dreams and disappointments in his beautifully etched short fiction, from which his plays were often adapted.