This chapter tackles relationships between Allen Ginsberg and the New York School poets as more than biographical. It considers how Ginsberg and the New York School poets reinterpreted qualities of heightened emotion and supple linguistic powers that are featured and valued in T. S. Eliot’s poetry and criticism. Ironically, this influence counters the impersonal poetic qualities for which Eliot’s influence is more commonly known and which helped to impersonalize much post-World War II poetry to which New York School, Beat, and Confessional Poetry mutinied. However, Ginsberg and the New York School poets led this vanguard earlier and to more effect than Robert Lowell and others described in or influenced by M. L. Rosenthal’s 1959 Nation article, “Poetry as Confession.” Like Eliot, Ginsberg and the New York School poets emphasize the role of the second person addressee, particularly in the works of Frank O’Hara and his “Personism.”

This chapter explores how Emerson’s essays are tantamount to a new kind of distinctively American art. It suggests Emerson’s importance for subsequent artistic, literary, and musical experimentation and his role as a transitional figure from Romanticism to the modern and contemporary periods. Whether in the experimental writing of Marcel Proust, Ralph Ellison, or John Ashbery, or in the experimental music of Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, Charles Ives, and Elliot Carter, it prompts us to find an Emersonian “self-reliant” art – an art that tests out new independences, opens to complexities of movement and form, and an art that skates, surprises, atomizes, and swings.

Chapter 3 describes the influence of Shakespeare’s Macbeth and The Tempest on Plath’s poetry and prose, focusing on the gendered concepts of witchcraft and magic. The chapter contextualises Plath’s depiction of maternal malice and paternal control in the framework of twentieth-century interpretations of Macbeth’s witches and Prospero from The Tempest. It addresses the mythological origins of the female trio as metaphysical beings with divinatory powers who, for Plath, embody the inescapable maternal presence. The chapter outlines the similarities between Prospero’s magical power and the beekeeping of Plath’s father figure as a magical-scholarly power. In her writings, likewise seeks inspiration from her childhood, reimagining her Atlantic seascape as the magic island from The Tempest in which Prosperoean father emerges as an idealised and dominant figure. The chapter concludes that Plath’s allusions to the early modern supernatural figures were shaped and paralleled by post-war interpretations and poetic retellings. They reflect on the gendered understanding of magical power as a sinister and benevolent controlling force.

The overlap of poetry and essay in modern and contemporary American writing is the focus of this chapter. Covering the literary manifesto, essays on poetry, and the rise of the modern poet-critic, the chapter explores examples of formal and procedural essaying in postmodern and contemporary poetry. These include construction and deconstruction of a speaker-subject, theoretical experimentation, translation, documentary, and social critique. The chapter reflects on the position of the subjective "I" in the essay, lyric and experimental poetry, and hybrids of these and dwells in its conclusion on the problems of form and process in the lyric essay or essayistic poem.

This chapter focuses on the New York School of poetry and traces its origins, its history, and its legacy. It discusses the importance of the avant-garde tradition and visual art, especially Abstract Expressionism, to the poets of the New York School, and examines the most important formal innovations and thematic concerns of the poets at its heart. The chapter focuses on the work of Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, and Barbara Guest, along with poets of the movement’s second generation, including Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, and Bernadette Mayer.

A study of Elliott Carter’s song cycles and other text settings from the period 1998-2011, with close readings of both poetry and music. Included are individual analytical essays on Tempo e tempi (poetry by Eugenio Montale, Salvatore Quasimodo, and Giuseppe Ungaretti), Of Rewaking (poems by William Carlos Williams), In the Distances of Sleep (poems by Wallace Stevens), Mad Regales (poems by John Ashbery), “La Musique” (poem by Charles Baudelaire), On Conversing with Paradise (texts from Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos), Poems of Louis Zukofsky, What Are Years (poems by Marianne Moore), A Sunbeam’s Architecture (poems by e e cummings), Three Explorations (poems by T. S. Eliot), The American Sublime (poems by Wallace Stevens).

Epstein’s chapter challenges the tendency to overlook the significance of Wallace Stevens—and his characteristic idiom, poetics, and philosophical concerns—to the postwar avant-garde movement known as the New York School of poets. This neglect of Stevens as an important precursor causes problems in both directions: it unnecessarily limits our sense of New York School poetry, which can too easily be reduced to a chatty, pop-culture-infused poetry of urban daily life, while simultaneously reinforcing the distorted image of Stevens as a stuffy, backward-looking aesthete, devoted solely to abstraction and imagination. Epstein suggests that, for all their differences, Stevens and the New York School poets share a great deal: an obsession with painting and a passion for all things French; a delight in wordplay and the sensuous surfaces of language; an anti-foundational skepticism toward fixity in self, language, or idea; and, perhaps most of all, an embrace of the imagination and deep attraction to the surreal combined with a devotion to the ordinary and everyday.