midcentury modernism, in brief but dramatic contrast with what comes next

sketch of a happy family gathering safely in a fall-out shelter, circa 1950: In an essay called "The Invisible Avant-Garde," John Ashbery remembers that in 1950 "to experiment was to have the feeling that one was poised on some outermost brink." The fifties was a period of confidence and even complacency - a rejection of the restlessness that had given forth modernism. [Citation: "The Invisible Avant-Garde," in Avant-Garde Art ed. Thomas Hess and Ashbery (1967), p. 183.]

• audio: introduction "midcentury modernism" and the "new formalist" poets of the cold-war period, a brief excerpt from James Breslin's From Modern to Contemporary read by Shawn Walker
• a few notes on The New Criticism circa 1960
• from the notebooks of Winfield Townley Scott
• Richard Wilbur, biographical profile
• Richard Wilbur, "Still, Citizen Sparrow" (1950)
• Richard Wilbur, "The Death of a Toad" (1950)
• Wilbur, "Cottage Street, 1953"
• video: Al Filreis and Shawn Walker on Wilbur's "Cottage Street, 1953," with reference to the appearance of the young but "doomed" Sylvia Plath in the poem ()
• Sylvia Plath, biographical profile
• "Sylvia Plath, Forever an Icon" (New York Times, November 9, 2000)
• Robert Frost in Newsweek, 1956
• William Jay Smith, "Epigrams"
• on Smith's epigram "Poet"
• John Frederick Nims' "vituperative political style" (1956)
• John Frederick Nims, "The Academy Disporting" (c. 1959)
• X. J. Kennedy, "Nude Descending a Staircase" (1959-60)
• X. J. Kennedy on The New American Poetry anthology
• Alison Lurie, "Trees, Being Neighbors" (1947)
• Adrienne Rich, biographical profile
• Adrienne Rich, "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers" (and an "ideological reading" of the poem)
• anti-modernism from the right: Donald Davidson, from "Grammar and Rhetoric: The Teacher's Problem" (1953)
• poem about baseball praised as Poundian by Babette Deutsch in 1956: Robert Fitzgerald's "Cobb Would Have Caught It"

  ...and now a hint at what comes next...

• audio: Allen Ginsberg, "Put Down Your Cigarette Rag (Don't Smoke)"
• concrete poetry of the sixties (a sampling of two)

  
  supplemental/optional readings:

• Al Filreis on midcentury modernism and cultural cold-war anxieties
• Marjorie Perloff's essay, "Poetry 1956: A Step Away from Them"
• a personal post-mortem on teaching "The Death of a Toad" in English 88, with a point about irony in language
• Allen Ginsberg as last seen before his death (with reference to a performance of "Put Down Your Cigarette Rag")