Word: poetes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...English poetry, freed it from excessive strictures of meter, rhetoric and prosody. One of his earliest converts was T. S. Eliot, who sensed the dilemma of modern, urban and areligious man, and whose dry, ironic style and endless rhythmic ways of weaving contemporary sounds are echoed in virtually every poet's work today...
...Eliot's generation, Robert Frost seemed a throwback; yet, while he adhered to established forms, he commanded a deceptively simple vision of man's vanities, his heart and his land. More experimental, and less accessible, were William Carlos Williams, a true avant-garde poet and master of the spare, stripped-down image, and Wallace Stevens, a pointillist of light, color and all intangible things. Marianne Moore, now 79, constructs unique mosaics from conversations, newspaper clippings and even scientific tracts...
...Auden and Allen Tate were both, in Auden's word, "colonizers" of the terrain that Pound and Eliot discovered. Theodore Roethke was already a major poet when he died in 1963 at 55. The late Dylan Thomas, with his crosscountry sweep of public performances, helped carry poetry into the floodlit arena. So did the beats. Of them, only Allen Ginsberg retains any influence, perhaps less for his poems than for his relentlessly acted role as the bewhiskered prophet of four-letter words, homosexuality, pot, and general din. Still, in their better moments, the beats, now fitfully imitated...
Lowell's friend, Poet Elizabeth Bishop, says that confessional poetry "is really something new in the world. There have been diaries that were frank-and generally intended to be read after the poet's death. Now the idea is that we live in a horrible and terrifying world, and the worst moments of horrible and terrifying lives are an allegory of the world." Speaking of some of Lowell's confessional imitators, she adds: "The tendency is to overdo the morbidity. You just wish they'd keep some of these things to themselves...
...modern languages, an abolitionist, Ambassador to Spain and the Court of St. James's, author of The Bigelow Papers, and of course poet and perfervid hymn writer ("By the light of burning martyrs, Jesus' bleeding feet I track"). From yet another family branch came Amy Lowell (1874-1925), who wrote passable "imagist" verse, smoked cigars, and drove a claret-colored limousine. "To my family," says Robert Lowell, "James was the Ambassador to England, not a writer. Amy seemed a bit peculiar to them. She was never a welcome subject in our household...