American poetry

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American poetry refers to the poetry of the United States. It arose first as efforts by American colonists to add their voices to English poetry in the 17th century, well before the constitutional unification of the Thirteen Colonies (although a strong oral tradition often likened to poetry already existed among Native American societies).^[1] Most of the early colonists' work was similar to contemporary English models of poetic form, diction, and theme. However, in the 19th century, an American idiom began to emerge. By the later part of that century, poets like Walt Whitman were winning an enthusiastic audience abroad and had joined the English-language avant-garde.

Much of the American poetry published between 1910 and 1945 remains lost in the pages of small circulation political periodicals, particularly the ones on the far left, destroyed by librarians during the 1950s McCarthy era.^[2] Modernist poets like Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot (who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948) are often cited as creative and influential English-language poets of the first half of the 20th century.^[3] African American and women poets were published and read widely in the same period but were often somewhat prejudicially marginalized. By the 1960s, the Beat Movement and Black Mountain poets had developed new models for poetry and their contemporaries influenced the British Poetry Revival. Towards the end of the millennium, consideration of American poetry had diversified, as scholars placed an increased emphasis on poetry by women, African Americans, Hispanics, Chicanos, Native Americans, and other ethnic groups. Louise Glück is the only contemporary American writer writing primarily poetry who has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, while Bob Dylan, a folk-rock songwriter and poet, has been awarded the same prize.