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As in the first half of the 20th century, fiction in the second half reflected the character of each decade. The late 1940s saw the aftermath of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War.
World War II offered prime material: Norman Mailer (The Naked and the Dead, 1948) and James Jones (From Here to Eternity, 1951) were two writers who used it best. Both of them employed realism verging on grim naturalism; both took pains not to glorify combat. The same was true for Irwin Shaw's The Young Lions (1948). Herman Wouk, in The Caine Mutiny (1951), also showed that human foibles were as evident in wartime as in civilian life.
Later, Joseph Heller cast World War II in satirical and absurdist terms (Catch-22, 1961), arguing that war is laced with insanity. Thomas Pynchon presented an involuted, brilliant case parodying and displacing different versions of reality (Gravity's Rainbow, 1973). Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., became one of the shining lights of the counterculture during the early 1970s following publication of Slaughterhouse-Five: or, The Children's Crusade (1969), his antiwar novel about the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, by Allied forces during World War II (which Vonnegut witnessed on the ground as a prisoner of war).
The 1940s saw the flourishing of a new contingent of writers, including poet-novelist-essayist Robert Penn Warren, dramatists Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman, and Tennessee Williams, and short story writers Katherine Anne Porter and Eudora Welty. All but Miller were from the South. All explored the fate of the individual within the family or community and focused on the balance between personal growth and responsibility to the group.
Contemporary American Poetry
By Kathryn VanSpanckeren
U.S. poetry since 1990 has been in the midst of a kaleidoscopic renaissance. In the latter half of the 20th century, there was, if not a consensus, at least a discernible shape to the poetic field, complete with well-defended positions. Well-defined schools dominated the scene, and critical discussions tended to the binary: formalism versus free verse, academic versus experimental.
Looking back, some have seen the post-World War II years as a heroic age in which American poetry broke free from constraints such as rhyme and meter and flung itself heart-first into new dimensions alongside the abstract expressionists in American painting. Others – experimentalists, multiethnic and global authors, and feminist writers among them – recall the era's blindness to issues of race and gender. These writers experience diversity as a present blessing and look forward to freedoms yet unimagined. Their contributions have made the poetry of the present a rich cornucopia with a genuinely popular base.
Among the general public, interest in poetry is at an all-time high. Poetry slams generate competitive camaraderie among beginning writers, informal writing groups provide support and critiques, and reading clubs proliferate. Writing programs flourish at all levels, brisk poetic exchanges zip over the Internet, and universities, magazines, and enterprising authors mount Web sites. American poetry at present is a vast territory of free imagination, a pot on the boil, a dynamic work in progress.
The ferment of American poetry since l990 makes the field decentralized and hard to define. Most anthologies showcase only one dimension of poetry, for example, women's writing – or groupings of ethnic writers, or poetry with a common inspiration – jazz poetry, cowboy poetry, Buddhist-influenced poems, hip-hop.
The few anthologists aspiring to represent the whole of contemporary American poetry begin with copious disclaimers and dwell on its disparate impulses: postmodernism, the expansion of the canon, ethnicities, immigration (with special mention of new voices out of South and Southeast Asia and the Middle East), the dawning of global literature, the elaboration of women's continuing contributions, the rise of Internet technology, the influence of specific teachers or writing programs or regional impulses, the ubiquitous media, and the role of the poet as the lone individual voice raised against the din of commercialism and conformity.
Poets themselves struggle to make sense of the flood of poetry. It is possible to envision a continuum, with poetry of the speaking, subjective self on one end, poetry of the world on the other, and a large middle range in which self and world merge.
Poetry of the speaking self tends to focus on vivid expression and exploration of deep, often buried, emotion. It is psychological and intense, and its settings are secondary. In the last half of the 20th century, the most influential poet of this sort was Robert Lowell, whose descents into his own psyche and his disturbed family background inspired confessional writing.
Poetry of the world, on the other hand, tends to build up meaning from narrative drive, detail, and context. It sets careful scenes. One of the most influential poets of the world was Elizabeth Bishop, generally considered the finest American woman poet of later 20th century.
Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop were life-long friends; both taught at Harvard University. Like Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson in the 19th century, Lowell and Bishop are presiding generative spirits for later poets. And although they shared a kindred vision, their approaches were polar opposites. Lowell's knotty, subjective, rhetorical poetry wrests meaning from self-presentation and heightened language, while Bishop offers, instead, detailed landscapes in a deceptively simple prosaic style. Only on rereading does her precision and depth make itself felt.
Most poets hover somewhere between the two poles. Ultimately, great poetry – whether of the self or the world – overcomes such divisions; the self and the world becoming mirrors of each other. Nevertheless, for purposes of discussion, the two may be provisionally distinguished.
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