The history of American poetry is not easy to know. 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.
The received narrative of Modernism proposes that Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot were perhaps the most influential modernist English-language poets in the period during World War I.But this narrative leaves out African American and women poets who were published and read widely in the first half of the twentieth century. By the 1960s, the young poets of the British Poetry Revival looked to their American contemporaries and predecessors as models for the kind of poetry they wanted to write. Toward 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 and other cultural groupings(“American poetry”).
