Chapter 50 - American Poetry at the End of the Millennium

Summary

In the last decade of the millennium, one thousand to three thousand books of new poetry came out per year over that decade. The number of U.S. graduate programs in creative writing nearly doubled between 1985 and 2005. The poet and scholar James Longenbach, in Modern Poetry After Modernism, mounted convincing attacks on accounts of postmodern American poetry, especially on breakthrough narratives, about heroic works that supposedly left older paradigms behind. This chapter shows that the stories about American poetry might begin with an ending: the last issue of the journal Antaeus. Wordsworthian models of meditative and elegiac lyric govern a plurality of the Antaeus poems. Hart Crane is a bearer of orphic modes and a cause for continued skepticism, hard to pin down as to where he stands, what he can mean: his verse seems both to summarize and to surpass American literary history.