Chapter 38 - The Uses of Authenticity

Summary

Adrienne Rich, James Wright, Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov all did some of their best and most influential work in the 1960s and in response to the changes that vexed decade brought. These four poets offer a range of versions of authenticity and at the same time show the variety of possibilities open to poets about the uses of authenticity. In the 1950s Rich wrote two books of well-received poetry. Her first book, A Change of World, published while she was still an undergraduate at Radcliffe, was chosen by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Award. Like Wright, Olson thrived on assertions of the imagination's freedom from every critical absolute, including the insistence on total liberation from the past. In 1950 Duncan published Medieval Scenes. Duncan and Levertov's letters record a long series of acts of mutual encouragement: two poets on opposite coasts, almost never meeting, engaged in an intense, affectionate, wide-ranging conversation.