Imagism is a term associated with an eclectic group of English and American poets working between 1912 and 1917, among them some of the most important writers in English of the first half of the 20th century: Ezra Pound, Amy… Read More ›
Literary Terms and Techniques
San Francisco Renaissance
In the two decades following World War II, an overarching reevaluation of art and its purpose occurred. This reconsideration gave rise to a number of identifiable movements and schools worldwide in the same period; even though those movements had some… Read More ›
The Objectivist Poets
The term objectivist was coined by Louis Zukofsky in 1930 for “‘Objectivists’ 1931,” a special issue of Poetry for which he served as guest editor. Of the many poets included in that issue and in its follow-up anthology, An “Objectivists”… Read More ›
The New York School of Poetry
The New York school of poetry was an innovative group of poets made up principally by Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch. Their poetry was experimental, philosophical, staunchly antiestablishment, and antiacademic. The group began writing… Read More ›
The Language Poets
The writers who emerged in the 1970s and have been identified variously as “Language poets,” “L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets” and “so-called Language poets” generally conceive of themselves less as a movement or school than as a loosely knit community of writers who,… Read More ›
Black Mountain School of Poetry
What came to be known as the Black Mountain school of poetry represented, in mid-20th-century America, the crossroads of poetic innovation. The name of this poetic movement derives from Black Mountain College in North Carolina, an experimental college founded in… Read More ›
Deep Image Poetry
Deep image poetry was part of the post–World War II, New American poetry inspired by the Beats and the Black Mountain School. The “deep” of deep image refers not to some attempt at political or philosophical “profundity” but to the… Read More ›
Fugitive/Agrarian School of Poetry
The Fugitives, a group of poets from Nashville, Tennessee, led the vanguard for modernist verse in the South in the 1920s. In contrast to the Imagist movement centered in England, the Fugitives emphasized traditional poetic forms and techniques, and their… Read More ›
Harlem Renaissance
Between 1919 and 1934 African-American artists flocked to New York City, specifically to Harlem. This era was to become one of the most prolific periods of African-American writing. What Alain Locke called in 1925 a “New Negro Movement” was later… Read More ›
An Introduction to the Black Arts Movement
The Black Arts movement was a controversial literary faction that emerged in the mid-1960s as the artistic and aesthetic arm of the Black Power movement, a militant political operation that rejected the integrationist purposes and practices of the Civil Rights… Read More ›
Literary Terms and Devices
Aestheticism European literary movement, with its roots in France, that was predominant in the 1890’s. It denied that art needed to have any utilitarian purpose and focused on the slogan “art for art’s sake.” The doctrines of aestheticism were introduced… Read More ›
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