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 considers Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, and Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems in light of the various difficulties they pose to readers interested in thinking of them in formal and also in generic terms (however broadly construed). I suggest that each of them might be understood as individual attempts to resist intellectual, critical, and hermeneutic recourse to any such generalization per se. A salient feature of these “modernist” “American” “long poems” consists in a variable but tenacious schedule of negations: of literary conventions, of readerly expectations, of internal consistencies, and, ultimately, of any sense of an ending whatsoever. I reflect upon the implications of negation and excess when discussing “long poems” by three straight, white male poets, especially in a context as institutional as a Cambridge History.

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 examines how contemporary poetry is responding to the cognitive, representational and ethical questions of the Anthropocene. Rather than focusing on work that extends the traditions of nature poetry, it examines an alternative legacy: that of post-war ‘open-field’ poetics as developed by writers such as William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley and Charles Olson. Through techniques such as the decentring of the lyric persona, collage and spatial composition, as well as emphasis on the poem as a field of energies and exchanges, open-field poetics provokes a rethinking of relations between figure and ground, subject and object, human and non-human entities. After outlining ‘open-field’ poetics and its implications for ecological thinking, the chapter discusses poems by three contemporary writers – Ed Roberson, Evelyn Reilly and Stephen Collis. These poets rework open-field poetics in the context of ecological crisis.

This chapter explores avant-garde literary communities at mid-century, and explains the relationship between the Beats, Black Mountain College, the San Francisco Renaissance, and the New York School.