Imagism was a movement in early-20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. It is considered to be the first organized modernist literary movement in the English language. Imagism is sometimes viewed as "a succession of creative moments" rather than a continuous or sustained period of development. The French academic René Taupin remarked that "it is more accurate to consider Imagism not as a doctrine, nor even as a poetic school, but as the association of a few poets who were for a certain time in agreement on a small number of important principles".
Modernist poetry in English started in the early years of the 20th century with the appearance of the Imagists. In common with many other modernists, these poets wrote in reaction to the perceived excesses of Victorian poetry, with its emphasis on traditional formalism and ornate diction. In many respects, their criticism echoes what William Wordsworth wrote in Preface to Lyrical Ballads to instigate the Romantic movement in British poetry over a century earlier, criticising the gauche and pompous school which then pervaded, and seeking to bring poetry to the layman.
Kenneth Charles Marion Rexroth (1905–1982) was an American poet, translator, and critical essayist. He is regarded as a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance, and paved the groundwork for the movement. Although he did not consider himself to be a Beat poet, and disliked the association, he was dubbed the "Father of the Beats" by Time magazine. Largely self-educated, Rexroth learned several languages and translated poems from Chinese, French, Spanish, and Japanese.
Louis Zukofsky was an American poet. He was the primary instigator and theorist of the so-called "Objectivist" poets, a short lived collective of poets who after several decades of obscurity would reemerge around 1960 and become a significant influence on subsequent generations of poets in America and abroad.
The Objectivist poets were a loose-knit group of second-generation Modernists who emerged in the 1930s. They were mainly American and were influenced by, among others, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. The basic tenets of objectivist poetics as defined by Louis Zukofsky were to treat the poem as an object, and to emphasize sincerity, intelligence, and the poet's ability to look clearly at the world. While the name of the group is similar to Ayn Rand's school of philosophy, the two movements are not affiliated.
Charles Reznikoff was an American poet best known for his long work, Testimony: The United States (1885–1915), Recitative (1934–1979). The term Objectivist was coined for him. The multi-volume Testimony was based on court records and explored the experiences of immigrants, black people and the urban and rural poor in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He followed this with Holocaust (1975), based on court testimony about Nazi death camps during World War II.
George Oppen was an American poet, best known as one of the members of the Objectivist group of poets. He abandoned poetry in the 1930s for political activism and moved to Mexico in 1950 to avoid the attentions of the House Un-American Activities Committee. He returned to poetry—and to the United States—in 1958, and received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1969.
Carl Rakosi was the last surviving member of the original group of poets who were given the rubric Objectivist. He was still publishing and performing his poetry well into his 90s.
"The British Poetry Revival" is the general name given to a loose poetry movement in Britain that took place in the 1960s and 1970s. The revival was a modernist-inspired reaction to the Movement's more conservative approach to British poetry. The poets included an older generation - Bob Cobbing, Paula Claire, Tom Raworth, Eric Mottram, Jeff Nuttall, Andrew Crozier, Lee Harwood, Allen Fisher, Iain Sinclair—and a younger generation: Paul Buck, Bill Griffiths, John Hall, John James, Gilbert Adair, Lawrence Upton, Peter Finch, Ulli Freer, Ken Edwards, Robert Gavin Hampson, Gavin Selerie, Frances Presley, Elaine Randell, Robert Sheppard Paul Evans Adrian Clarke, Clive Fencott, Maggie O'Sullivan, Cris Cheek, Tony Lopez and Denise Riley.
Michael Palmer is an American poet and translator. He attended Harvard University, where he earned a BA in French and an MA in Comparative Literature. He has worked extensively with Contemporary dance for over thirty years and has collaborated with many composers and visual artists. Palmer has lived in San Francisco since 1969.
John Kinsella is an Australian poet, novelist, critic, essayist and editor. His writing is strongly influenced by landscape, and he espouses an 'international regionalism' in his approach to place. He has also frequently worked in collaboration with other writers, artists and musicians.
Michael Davidson is an American poet.
Rachel Blau DuPlessis is an American poet and essayist, known as a feminist critic and scholar with a special interest in modernist and contemporary poetry. Her work has been widely anthologized.
Mary Oppen, was an American activist, artist, photographer, poet and writer. She published an autobiography, Meaning a Life (1978), and a book of verse, Poems and Transpositions (1980).
From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry, 1960–1990 is a poetry anthology published in 1994. It was edited by American poet and publisher Douglas Messerli – under his own imprint Sun & Moon Press – and includes poets from both the U.S. and Canada.
Burt Joseph Kimmelman is an American poet and scholar.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Douglas Dunlop Oliver was a poet, novelist, editor, and educator. The author of more than a dozen works, Oliver came into poetry not as an academic but through a career in journalism, notably in Cambridge, Paris, and Coventry, before attending the University of Essex in the 1970s. He received a B.A. (literature) in 1975 and an M.A. in 1982. Oliver subsequently lived in Brightlingsea, Paris, New York, and again Paris, usually working as a lecturer.
John Taggart is an American poet and critic.
Norman Finkelstein is an American poet and literary critic. He has written extensively about modern and postmodern poetry and about Jewish American literature. According to Tablet Magazine, Finkelstein's poetry "is simultaneously secular and religious, stately and conversational, prophetic, and circumspect."
