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 the poets associated with the so-called “Middle Generation,” a transitional group of writers who were younger than the modernists but older than the poets of the New American poetry discussed in Chapters 1–4. It addresses how the poets of this cohort struggled with the long shadow of their modernist predecessors and addresses their struggles with alcoholism, personal crises, and mental illness. The chapter charts their move away from the New Critical formalist mode that reigned at mid-century toward a looser, more personal mode, which eventually gave rise to Confessional poetry. Focusing especially on Elizabeth Bishop (who distanced herself from Confessionalism), Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton, this chapter discusses the major stylistic and thematic features of Confessionalism, controversies surrounding this movement, and its profound influence on contemporary poetry.

This chapter focuses on the movement known as Deep Image poetry and traces the origins of this tendency and explores its key characteristics. The chapter discusses Deep Image poetry’s debts to Spanish and Latin American surrealism and other sources and focuses on the work of Robert Bly and, especially, James Wright, in order to sketch out the major features of Deep Image poetics, including its use of images drawn from the unconscious and moments of sudden epiphany.

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.