What They Get Away With in Lit'ratyoor

Hi Kyle,

I'm not sure that the Rahv essay has many fervent believers at this point, but you and I have talked about a similar issue in the politics around various strains of modern and contemporary poetry particularly in the US.

The split in that realm is often characterized by two mid-20th century anthologies: "New Poets of England and America" edited by Donald Hall & Robert Pack, which included US writers like Donald Finkel, John Hollander, Donald Justice, Robert Lowell,James Merrill, Howard Nemerov, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, Louis Simpson, WD Snodgrass, and Richard Wilbur etc; and Donald Allen's "The New American Poetry" which included Robert Creeley, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Barbara Guest, Leroi Jones, Denise Levertov, Michael McClure, Frank O'Hara, Charles Olson, Gary Snyder, Jack Spicer, Lew Welch, etc.

Both groups sort of trace their lineage back through Ezra Pound (just as many composers, both uptown & downtown, might consider Ives as a precursor), but to oversimplify a great deal, the poets in the first group might emphasize TS Eliot as another ancestor from that period, while those in the second anthology might put more emphasis on William Carlos Williams or Gertrude Stein.

This second group of writers had many of the same problems that downtown composers have traditionally had: difficulties getting and keeping academic teaching positions in the field (many of those who were able to get tenure worked in fields other than English and/or writing programs); difficulties getting published by the mainstream magazines and book companies, etc.

Every aspect of this split isn't exactly parallel, but there's a lot of similarities in the late 20th century development of the poetry and new music worlds in the US.