Asking Compassion

Modern American poetry as created during the first half of the century, in many ways resembled a powerful, sophisticated machine – an aesthetic engine that took on the characteristics of the society it described. By World War II, and possibly as a result of the war, poets were beginning to chafe at being caught up in and having to follow the formal structure of modernist poetry. In particular, poets began to seek ways of returning to the more personal tone and point of view that had originally been advocated by Walt Whitman when he celebrated his own individualism.

After the War, there was a relaxing and loosening of form and tone – as if the poets, like the nation, were taking a breath. Instead of the vast poetic projects of Pound, Williams, and Stevens, the post-war poets sought a more intimate and personal response to the world, a response in which their own voice would be heard. Marking this shift was the example of Robert Lowell who went from writing intricately weighty mediations on American history, to looser, more vernacular “confessional” poems about his own lot in life.

Political artists like Ginsberg and the other “Beats” anticipated the slogan “the personal is political” by transforming their personal alienation from American society into long poetical manifestos against it. Poetry became an essential part of political language as African Americans and other minorities as well as gay and lesbian writers used verse to articulate their sense of distance from society.