In this history of American poetry, I have tried to be faithful to the sheer range and plurality of the American poetic tradition. I have also attempted to focus on both individual poets and the poetic communities to which they variously belong, and to anchor my discussion in specific, significant or symptomatic poems, and the imaginative journeys on which they take us. It is, after all, the experience of reading the single poem and encountering the voice of a singular poet that fires the reader’s imagination into life; and so it is to this that any study of poetry must eventually return, no matter how detailed or protracted its investigation may be of poetry’s social and ideological underpinnings.

“One is the Population –,” Emily Dickinson wrote in one of her most frequently quoted poems, “/ Numerous enough – / This Ecstatic Nation / Seek – it is Yourself.”¹ As in so many American poems, there is a subtle negotiation going on here between “one” and “nation,” the notion of “Yourself” and the equally compelling idea of “Population,” the community to which any self must irrevocably belong. In writing this history, I have attempted a similar, if far less adventurous, negotiation by placing my accounts of individual poets and poems in the context of dialogue. As I see it, texts exist intertextually, just as people exist interpersonally. Every poem we encounter is in conversation with other poems; every poet is engaged, whether he or she is aware of it (although they usually are), in talking back to other poets, talking with and, it may be, talking against them. This is what we mean when we refer to a poetic tradition, local, regional, national or transnational: that a work, any work, draws its strength and depth, ultimately, from being situated in a constantly changing, constantly expanding series of circles; each poetic utterance is enhanced, enriched, and given meaning by its connection to a complex if often fragile web of other poetic utterances from other times and places. Each poem, in short, is part of a greater conversation – what Mikhail Bakhtin called a great dialogue.²

In the opening chapter of this book, and in the first section of the second chapter, I expand on this idea of any poetic tradition – and, in this particular instance, the American poetic tradition – as a great, open dialogue that, strictly speaking, never reaches an end. I also suggest what I hope are other useful contexts for looking at, understanding, and appreciating American poetry. After that, the structure of this book is basically chronological and probably needs no further explanation. It might be worth adding, however, that the final chapter is longer than the others, in part because it is here I discuss, not just American poetry of the last few decades, but also Chicano/a and Latino/a poetry, Asian American poetry, and Native American poetry of the contemporary period and their antecedents. This, after all, seemed the appropriate place to emphasize both the growing importance of these poetic traditions and their specific histories, the ways in which they have added to the rich cultural mosaic that is America and American poetry.

All that remains is for me to thank the people who have helped with this book. I owe a special debt of gratitude to my friends, colleagues, and students at the University of Essex. When the Department of Literature was established at Essex by the poet and critic Donald Davie, it had a special intellectual investment in American poetry. That was signaled, among other things, by the number of distinguished American poets who taught in the Department in its first twenty or so years, among them Ted Berrigan, Ed Dorn, and Robert Lowell, and the even greater number of equally distinguished American poets who visited for shorter or longer periods to give readings and classes. That interest in American poetry attracted a large mix of lively and talented students at both undergraduate and graduate levels, many of whom have become well-known poets themselves; and although Essex – like all British universities, unfortunately – has become increasingly bureaucratized, over-managed, and less intellectually committed to the study of subjects such as poetry, the investment has still not been exhausted; the interest in poetry, the energy and the commitment are still there, and there is still a lot of exciting work being produced and discussed. I owe an immense debt both to the Department and to those in the Department who have fostered and encouraged my interest in this subject; this book would not have been possible, quite frankly, if I had worked and taught anywhere else.

I cannot mention everyone who has helped me, but it would be wrong not to mention my friend and colleague of over forty years, Herbie Butterfield, my former colleagues, the late Joe Allard, the late Francis Barker, Gordon Brotherston, the late George Dekker, Maria Cristina Fumagalli, Clive Hart, Jack Hill, Peter Hulme, Tom Raworth, the late Arthur Terry, Phil Terry, Dudley Young, and a former student who is now my colleague, Owen Robinson. I also need to thank friends at the British Academy who share my passion for poetry, among them Michael Bell, Andrew Hook, Jon Stallworthy, and Wynn Thomas, particular friends and colleagues at other universities in Great Britain and elsewhere, including Sacvan Bercovitch, Kasia Boddy, Bob Brinkmeyer, Susan Castillo, Richard Ellis, the late Kate Fullbrook, Mick Gidley, Paul Giles, Richard Godden, Jan Nordby Gretlund, Fred Hobson, Lothar Honnighausen, the late Stuart Kidd, Burt Kimmelman, Pearl McHaney, Tom McHaney, Sharon Monteith, Peter Nicholls, the late Peter Nicolaisen, Marjorie Perloff, the late Noel Polk, Michael Rothberg, Hans Skei, the late Charles Swann, Helen Taylor, Nahem Yousaf, and Waldemar Zacharasiewicz. There are also present and former doctoral students to whom I owe a particular debt, some of them poets, others now academics, and still others both, including Katya Alkhateeb, Abdul Atteh, Alaa Barhoom, Emily Barker, Michael Broek, Sophie Cansdale, John Cant, Kate Charlton-Jones, Chin-Jau Chyan, Pip Dandy, Rebecca Degler, Yamina Deramchia, Carl Dimitri, Veronique Eich, Ruth Frendo, Mike Gray, Iman Hami, Paul Harper, Roger Haydon, Teri Hill, Daniel Jupp, Hamada Kassam, Brian Marley, John Muckle, John Murphy, Chris Nawrat, Brendon Nicholls, Sawsan Qashgari, John Rabbetts, Theo Savvas, Robert Snell, James Stannard, Mick Stevens, Helen Turner, Theresa Welford, Luke Whiting, Andrew Wilson, Aoi Yamada, and Rouhollah Zarei.

These acknowledgments risk the danger of sounding like the very worst of Oscar acceptance speeches, but thanks are due, too, to Ginny, Helen, Laurie, and Sue at the Wivenhoe Bookshop for their prompt, cheerful, and endlessly patient responses to my requests for often obscure individual texts and collections. And I need especially to thank Jordan Savage for being such a supremely knowledgeable help with the preparation of the manuscript and the compilation of the index. Sincere thanks are also due to all those at Wiley Blackwell who have helped me so thoroughly, efficiently, and with such good grace with this book – and, in some cases, with several of my other books for Wiley Blackwell: Emma Bennett, Deirdre Ilkson, Bridget Jennings, and Ben Thatcher. I am also immensely grateful to Brigitte Lee Messenger who, as usual, made such a first class job of preparing the manuscript for publication.

On a more personal level, I would like to thank my family for (among many other things) tolerating my preoccupation with poetry. I would like to thank my older daughter Catharine, for her cheerfulness, enthusiasm, her good sense and sense of commitment and, not least, for providing us with a perfect son-in-law, Ricky, and two equally perfect grandsons, Izzy and Sam. I would also like to thank my older son Ben for his strength of spirit, his good humor, his reliability, and for the sheer pleasure of his company. My younger daughter Jessica I need to thank for helping me so much with the preparation of this book (without her expertise and skilled help, it would never have been finished), for her thoughtfulness, sensitivity, her intelligence and lively wit, and for always being there to talk about life and literature – and to put me right on both. My younger son Jack I also need to thank for his vitality, warmth of personality, his clarity of spirit, and for teaching me there are things that are more important than words and other ways of communicating than by speech.

Finally, and especially, there is my wife Sheona, to whom I owe an immense debt of gratitude. Her sense and sensitivity have been a constant source of strength, so have her kindness and emotional generosity; her humor and comic timing are second to none (although I sometimes try to claim, wrongly, that they are second to mine); and she has made the last twenty or more years of my life easily the best. Without her, this book would never have been written: which is why, quite naturally, it is dedicated to her.