The New American Poetry 1945–1960 was a poetry anthology edited by Donald Allen

Donald Allen

Donald Merriam Allen , influential editor, publisher, and translator of contemporary American literature. He is perhaps best known for his project The New American Poetry 1945-1960 , among the several important anthologies of contemporary American innovative writing he made available to the public...

, and published in 1960. It aimed to pick out the "third generation" of American modernist poets, and included quite a number of poems fresh from the little magazines of the late 1950s. In the longer term it attained a classic status, with critical approval and continuing sales. It was reprinted in 1999.

Overview

In 1958, Allen began work on The New American Poetry anthology. Following the Pound

Ezra Pound

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...

/Williams

William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...

 tradition, Allen hoped to present the range of experimental writing produced in the United States since the Second World War. The project took two years to complete and required extensive correspondence with poets, editors, and literary agents. Finally published in 1960 with a brief Preface by Allen, position statements by some of the contributors, biographical notes and Index. Other considerations were taken into account in the organization of this anthology, as the following quotation illustrates:
At the time of its publication, it increased the recognition for such poets as Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Paul Blackburn, and Charles Olson, now precedent figures in what was then an emerging countertradition. Allen originally planned to publish revised anthologies every two or three years. However, he produced only two such books over the next twenty years: New American Writing (Penguin, 1965), and The Postmoderns (Grove, 1965).

The anthology was also influential in Canada. "It affected the writing of at least one generation of Canadian poets", according to The Canadian Encyclopedia. The anthology influenced many Canadian poets to turn away from British influences and toward American models.

Poets in The New American Poetry 1945–1960

Helen Adam

Helen Adam

Helen Adam was a Scottish poet, collagist and photographer who was an active participant in The San Francisco Renaissance, a literary movement contemporaneous to the Beat Generation that occurred in San Francisco during the 1950s and 1960s...

 – John Ashbery

John Ashbery

John Lawrence Ashbery is an American poet. He has published more than twenty volumes of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. But Ashbery's work still proves controversial...

 – Paul Blackburn – Robin Blaser

Robin Blaser

Robin Francis Blaser was an author and poet in both the United States and Canada.-Personal background:Born in Denver, Colorado, Blaser grew up in Idaho, and came to Berkeley, California, in 1944. There he met Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan, becoming a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance of...

 – Ebbe Borregaard – Bruce Boyd – Ray Bremser

Ray Bremser

Ray Bremser was an American poet.Bremser was born in Jersey City, New Jersey. When he was 17 he went AWOL from the United States Air Force and was briefly imprisoned. The next year he was sent to Bordenstown Reformatory for 6 years for armed robbery...

 – Brother Antoninus – James Broughton

James Broughton

James Broughton was an American poet, and poetic filmmaker. He was part of the San Francisco Renaissance...

 – Paul Carroll

Paul Carroll

Paul Carroll was an American poet and the founder of the Poetry Center of Chicago. A professor for many years at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Professor Emeritus, his books include Poem in Its Skin and Odes. While a student, he was an editor of Chicago Review...

 – Gregory Corso

Gregory Corso

Gregory Nunzio Corso was an American poet, youngest of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers...

 – Robert Creeley

Robert Creeley

Robert Creeley was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school's. He was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn. He served as the Samuel P...

 – Edward Dorn

Ed Dorn

Edward Merton Dorn was an American poet and teacher often associated with the Black Mountain poets. His most famous work is Gunslinger.-Overview:...

 – Kirby Doyle

Kirby Doyle

Kirby Doyle , born Stanton Doyle, was an American poet. He was featured in the New American Poetry anthology, with the so-called "third generation" of American modernist poets. He was one of the San Francisco Renaissance poets who laid the groundwork for Beat poetry in San Francisco...

 – Robert Duerden – Robert Duncan

Robert Duncan (poet)

Robert Duncan was an American poet and a student of H.D. and the Western esoteric tradition who spent most of his career in and around San Francisco. Though associated with any number of literary traditions and schools, Duncan is often identified with the poets of the New American Poetry and Black...

 – Larry Eigner

Larry Eigner

Laurence Joel Eigner / Larry Eigner was an American poet of the second half of the twentieth century and one of the principal figures of the Black Mountain School....

 – Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Lawrence Ferlinghetti is an American poet, painter, liberal activist, and the co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers...

 – Edward Field – Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg

Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...

 – Madeline Gleason

Madeline Gleason

Madeline Gleason was a United States poet and dramatist. She is often credited with the founding of the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University...

 – Barbara Guest

Barbara Guest

Barbara Guest née Barbara Ann Pinson was an American poet and prose stylist. Guest first gained recognition as a member of the first generation New York School of poetry....

 – LeRoi Jones – Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac

Jean-Louis "Jack" Lebris de Kerouac was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as Catholic...

 – Kenneth Koch

Kenneth Koch

Kenneth Koch was an American poet, playwright, and professor, active from the 1950s until his death at age 77...

 – Philip Lamantia

Philip Lamantia

Philip Lamantia was an American poet and lecturer. Lamantia's visionary poems were ecstatic, terror-filled, and erotic which explored the subconscious world of dreams and linked it to the experience of daily life.-Biography:...

 – Denise Levertov

Denise Levertov

-Early life and influences:Levertov was born and grew up in Ilford, Essex.Couzyn, Jeni Contemporary Women Poets. Bloodaxe, p74 Her mother, Beatrice Spooner-Jones Levertoff, came from a small mining village in North Wales...

 – Ron Loewinsohn

Ron Loewinsohn

Ron Loewinsohn is an American poet and novelist.Trout Fishing in America is dedicated to Loewinsohn and poet Jack Spicer.- Works :* Watermelons, New York: Totem Press, 1959...

 – Edward Marshall – Michael McClure

Michael McClure

Michael McClure is an American poet, playwright, songwriter, and novelist. After moving to San Francisco as a young man, he found fame as one of the five poets who read at the famous San Francisco Six Gallery reading in 1955 rendered in barely fictionalized terms in Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums...

 – David Meltzer

David Meltzer

David Meltzer is an American poet and musician of the Beat Generation and San Francisco Renaissance. Lawrence Ferlinghetti has described him as "one of the greats of post-World-War-Two San Francisco poets and musicians." Meltzer came to prominence with inclusion of his work in the anthology, The...

 – Frank O'Hara

Frank O'Hara

Francis Russell "Frank" O'Hara was an American writer, poet and art critic. He was a member of the New York School of poetry.-Life:...

 – Charles Olson

Charles Olson

Charles Olson , was a second generation American modernist poet who was a link between earlier figures such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the New American poets, which includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School, the Beat poets, and the San Francisco Renaissance...

 – Joel Oppenheimer

Joel Oppenheimer

Joel Lester Oppenheimer was an American poet associated with both the Black Mountain poets and the New York School. He was the first director of the St. Marks Poetry Project...

 – Peter Orlovsky

Peter Orlovsky

Peter Anton Orlovsky was an American poet.-Life and work:Orlovsky was born in the Lower East Side of New York City, the son of Katherine and Oleg Orlovsky, a Russian immigrant. He was raised in poverty and was forced to drop out of Newtown High School in his senior year so he could support his...

 – Stuart Perkoff – James Schuyler

James Schuyler

James Marcus Schuyler was an American poet whose awards include the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his 1980 collection The Morning of the Poem...

 – Gary Snyder

Gary Snyder

Gary Snyder is an American poet , as well as an essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist . Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry...

 – Gilbert Sorrentino

Gilbert Sorrentino

Gilbert Sorrentino was an American novelist, short story writer, poet, literary critic, and editor.In over twenty-five works of fiction and poetry, Sorrentino explored the comic and formal possibilities of language and literature...

 – Jack Spicer

Jack Spicer

Jack Spicer was an American poet often identified with the San Francisco Renaissance. In 2009, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer won the American Book Award for poetry.-Life and work:...

 – Lew Welch

Lew Welch

Lewis Barrett Welch, Jr. was an American poet associated with the Beat generation of poets, artists, and iconoclasts.Welch published and performed widely during the 1960s...

 – Philip Whalen

Philip Whalen

Philip Glenn Whalen was an American poet, Zen Buddhist, and a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance and close to the Beat generation.-Biography:...

 – John Wieners

John Wieners

John Joseph Wieners was an American lyric poet.-Biography:Born in Milton, Massachusetts, Wieners attended St. Gregory Elementary School in Dorchester, Massachusetts and Boston College High School. From 1950 to 1954, he studied at Boston College, where he earned his A.B...

 – Jonathan Williams

Jonathan Williams (poet)

Jonathan Williams was an American poet, publisher, essayist, and photographer. He is known as the founder of The Jargon Society, which has published poetry, experimental fiction, photography, and folk art for more than fifty years...

Design (first edition)

Published May 29, 1960 for $1.95

White paper wrapper: THE ʃ NEW ʃ AMERICAN ʃ POETRY ʃ [in blue] 1945–1960.
ʃ [in grey] EDITED BY ʃ DONALD M. ALLEN ʃ [list of authors overprinted on red
design] ʃ [vertically in blue along fore edge] EVERGREEN ORIGINAL E-237 $1.95
(U.K. 14/6.) [ornament]. Spine printed vertically: THE NEW AMERICAN POETRY [in blue] 1945–1960 [printed over, in grey] EDITED BY DONALD M. ALLEN ʃ [ornament in blue] ʃ E-237 ʃ [in red] GROVE ʃ PRESS. Back cover printed in blue, black, and red. 5 5/16 X 8.

[I]–[XXIV], [1]–[457] as follows: [I] fly title: [II] blank; [III] title as above; [IV] statement of copyright, etc; V–VIII acknowledgements and permissions; [IX] dedications; [X] blank; XI–XIV preface; XV–XXIII contents; [XXIV] blank; [1]–454 text; [455–457] blank.

See also

• Charters, Ann (ed.). The Portable Beat Reader. Penguin Books. New York. 1992. ISBN 0-670-83885-3 (hc); ISBN 0-14-015102-8 (pbk)

External links

• Great Anthology: The New American Poetry: 1945–1960 article at "The Academy of American Poets" website
• Whose New American Poetry? article by Marjorie Perloff
  Marjorie Perloff
  Marjorie Perloff is an Austrian-born U.S. poetry critic.Perloff was born Gabriele Mintz into a secularized Jewish family in Vienna. Faced with Nazi terror, her family emigrated in 1938 when she was six-and-a-half, going first to Zürich and then to the United States, settling in Riverdale, New York...
  
  
• to Donald M. Allen at Empty Mirror Books website
• Ron Silliman discusses Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry from Silliman's Blog: June 11, 2007. Writes Silliman: "unquestionably the most influential single anthology of the last century. It’s a great book, an epoch-making one in many ways."