The New American Poetry, Personism, and the Cold War

Stephan Delbos's deeply researched historical analysis provides new insight into American avant-garde poetry and art after World War II when, in its aftermath and the ensuing Cold War, certain poets and artists set American poetics on a new course. Delbos evaluates this movement from the perspective of recent Anglophone poetry whose concerns for identity and biography have left it oblivious to what was a fierce contest over a half century ago. Yet the famous anthology, The New American Poetry, 1945-1960, has changed the terms of American poetry even into the present. The poets and editors involved in that bygone struggle were not immune to the Cold War's effects both at home and abroad; in fact both the avant-garde poetry and the contemporaneous avant-garde art, in being appropriated for the global struggle, also directly or indirectly reflected that struggle in the work.