It is conventional to assume that there was an unbreachable gulf between Robert Lowell and the experimental, “raw” poets associated with the broad avant-garde movement known as “The New American Poetry”; that he and poets like Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, Charles Olson, and their descendants operated in almost wholly separate universes. However, this chapter argues that Lowell’s relationship with these poets and their work is more extensive, complex, and messy than has often been assumed. As it demonstrates, Lowell’s famous transformation that led to the publication Life Studies was profoundly shaped by his encounter with the avant-garde tradition. Although Lowell’s division of the poetry world into two starkly opposed camps (the “cooked” and the “raw”) quickly became gospel, Lowell actually believed his own new mode to be a bold compromise between the two poles – an attempt to split the difference between "cooked" and "raw," New Critical formalism and the New American Poetry.

This chapter introduces the controversial movement known as Language poetry, one of the most significant, influential avant-garde poetry movement of the later twentieth century. It traces Language poetry’s origins and examines its theoretical, aesthetic, and political commitments. The chapter explores the fierce debates surrounding Language poetry’s rise and its institutionalization and canonization, and its outsized influence. It discusses some of the major features of Language poetics, including its radical experimentation with form and its postmodernist attitudes about the nature of language and the self. The chapter looks closely at work by a number of leading practitioners of Language poetry, including Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, and Susan Howe.

This chapter discusses the story of Black Mountain College and its history and far-reaching influence. The chapter focuses on the work of key poets associated with Black Mountain College, including Charles Olson and his landmark essay “Projective Verse,” Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Denise Levertov, and examines their characteristic formal innovations and thematic concerns, including their interest in experimentation, spontaneity, and organic form.

This chapter discusses what happens to modernism, the revolutionary movement that dominated the first half of the twentieth century, as it becomes institutionalized, and examines the movement’s legacy after 1945. It discusses how the poetry of the post-1945 period became dominated by a major schism between “academic” and “anti-academic” poetry (or, as Robert Lowell called it, the “cooked” versus the “raw”). The chapter charts the advent of the New Criticism and explains its main principles, goals, and practitioners, focuses on examples of formalist poems in the New Critical mode by Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, and James Merrill, and introduces the new, alternative forms of poetry that came to be known as “The New American Poetry.”

This chapter focuses on the New York School of poetry and traces its origins, its history, and its legacy. It discusses the importance of the avant-garde tradition and visual art, especially Abstract Expressionism, to the poets of the New York School, and examines the most important formal innovations and thematic concerns of the poets at its heart. The chapter focuses on the work of Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, and Barbara Guest, along with poets of the movement’s second generation, including Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, and Bernadette Mayer.

This chapter introduces the Beat movement and traces its origins, its history, and its legacy. The chapter examines the Beats’ most important formal innovations, thematic concerns, historic importance, and cultural influence by focusing especially on the poet at the center of the Beats, Allen Ginsberg and his controversial groundbreaking poem “Howl” and other major works. The chapter also discusses other Beat poets, including Gregory Corso and Diane Di Prima, as well as issues of gender and race in relation to the Beat movement. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the San Francisco Renaissance and focuses especially on one of the most influential poets of that movement, Jack Spicer.