In the American boom years after the war, these poets wrote with a contagious subversiveness that compelled them to find their own new forms and subject matter—what Robert Bly in 1958 called “the new imagination”—in the face of such national and cultural blights as McCarthyism, aesthetic jingoism, paternalism, racism, the Vietnam War, and gender discrimination.
In the American boom years after the war, these poets wrote with a contagious subversiveness that compelled them to find their own new forms and subject matter—what Robert Bly in 1958 called “the new imagination”—in the face of such national and cultural blights as McCarthyism, aesthetic jingoism, paternalism, racism, the Vietnam War, and gender discrimination. Each poet responded by divining new language, strategies, and voices that testified to the strength of their genius, as well as to their chutzpah in believing that they could make something new in the wake of their formidable Modernist predecessors.