This chapter provides a concise narrative of the relationship and collaboration between Robert Lowell and Ezra Pound. It traces the attempts by the young Lowell to establish Pound as a mentor and the older poet’s ambivalent responses, as well as the two poets’ occasional correspondence and thoughts about one another’s mature works. It concludes with a depiction and discussion of some late addresses that each poet made to the memory and work of the other.

This chapter examines some of the ways in which Lowell’s poetry engages with the US presidency and with the legacies of individual presidents. With the exception of John F. Kennedy, Lowell was critical of those who held office during his lifetime – and even his feelings about Kennedy were ambivalent. However, Lowell – himself from political stock – also felt an affinity with those in power. His poetry, especially in History, documents his own forays into the public world of campaigning and specifically his relationships with Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy. Through its simultaneous expressions of fascination and revulsion when it comes to the exercise of power, Lowell’s poetry also confronts some of the moral conundrums of American history. The essay concludes with a brief discussion of presidential speech-making and what this might have to do with lyric poetry.

Shelley believed that poetry transcends the moral precepts of its time to present ethical truths that are eternally valid. Yet he was also committed to the power of poetry to effect political change in its present. This chapter approaches the latent contradiction between timelessness and contemporaneity through the figure of “chameleonism.” Shelley mentions the concept in a letter about Adonais, where he suggests that poets are “a very chamæleonic race: they take the colour not only of what they feed on, but of the very leaves under which they pass.” The formulation suggests a form of inadvertent intertextuality: the poet’s work is colored by other writings whether he intends to or not. The chapter explores how Shelley’s poetry takes its color from discourses surrounding the enslavement of Africans in Britain’s overseas colonies. While Shelley was not purposefully intervening in debates around abolition or the scientific codification of “race,” his writings reflect the anti-Black ideological horizon of his time. Looking at a number of his works, including Adonais, The Cenci, Hellas, and the translation of Plato’s Symposium, the chapter also historicizes the relationship between criticism and ethics: are we entitled to judge Shelley’s racial attitudes with the standards of our time?

This chapter explores some of the new developments, trends, and movements that have characterized contemporary American poetry in the period since 2000, a period in which poetry grapples with a tumultuous, rapidly changing culture and continues to become increasingly diverse. The chapter focuses on three of the most important developments: the collapse of the old binary opposition between mainstream and experimental and the emergence of a new hybrid mode; a new openness to remix, sampling, and the use of found language and documentary materials in poetry associated with movements such as Conceptual poetry and Flarf, which can be seen, in part, as a response to the rise of the digital age and new questions about originality and appropriation it has ushered in; and a resurgence of politically engaged, formally adventurous poetry, especially by poets of color, in the era of Obama and Trump. The chapter focuses on representative poets, including Jorie Graham, Dean Young, Kenneth Goldsmith, Tracy K. Smith, Robin Coste Lewis, Claudia Rankine, Ross Gay, Danez Smith, and Terrance Hayes.