American literature: American Verse

Since the mid-19th cent. American poetry had tended to empty saccharine verse—with the startling exception of the Amherst recluse, Emily Dickinson, whose terse, precise, and enigmatic poems, published in 1890, after her death, placed her immediately in the ranks of major American poets. A revolution in poetry was announced with the founding in 1912 of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, edited by Harriet Monroe. It published the work of Ezra Pound and the proponents of imagism (see imagists)—Amy Lowell, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), John Gould Fletcher, and their English associates, all declaring against romantic poetry and in favor of the exact word.

Meanwhile, other poets moved along their own paths: Edwin Arlington Robinson, who wrote dark, brooding lines on humankind in the universe; Edgar Lee Masters, who used free verse for realistic biographies in A Spoon River Anthology (1915); his friend Vachel Lindsay, who wrote mesmerizingly rhythmical verse; Carl Sandburg, who tried to capture the speech, life, and dreams of America; and Robert Frost, who won universal recognition with his evocative and seemingly simply written verse.

Sections in this article:

• Introduction
• The Lost Generation and After
• American Verse
• Trends in American Fiction
• The Literature of a Split and a Reunited Nation
• A New Nation and a New Literature
• Colonial Literature
• Bibliography

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2024, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

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