The poetics of the program era

Abstract

Work on poetry and the Program Era remains at a nascent (and highly fractious) stage. This essay maps out a provisional history of Program Era poetry based on the proposition that most if not all of it can be traced back to some primal modernist forebear, and that these forebears themselves can be divided between innovators of the high modernist lyric such as Eliot, Williams, Pound and Stevens, and radicals of the avant-garde such as Zukofsky and Stein. The history then starts in the post-war era with Yvor Winters at Stanford and Donald Justice at Iowa, alongside the influence of visiting late modernists such as John Berryman and Robert Lowell, who were acknowledged masters of the modern lyric form, and moves through the gradual absorption into the university of various ‘anti-academic’ schools such as the Beats and the Language Poetry in the sixties and seventies. The essay concludes with a discussion of Joshua Clover and Commune Editions as marking the return of the figure of the poet-critic and the genre of the modern epic.