Poetry has also served as a form of protest, resistance, and witness to oppressive political and social systems across the world. The French-language négritude movement was launched in the 1930s by poets Aimé Césaire of Martinique and Léopold Sédar Senghor of what was then French West Africa, and became a rallying point for West African and Caribbean nations challenging French colonial rule. Senghor would subsequently become president of the newly independent country of Senegal. South African poets Es'kia Mphahlele, Dennis Brutus, and Breyten Breytenbach directed their protests against the racist practices of apartheid. Chileans Nicanor Parra and Ariel Dorfman, Nicaraguan Claribel Alegria, and Cuban Herberto Padilla were among those opposing dictatorships and human rights violations in their respective Latin American countries. In Eastern bloc countries poetry was engaged in more subtle forms of resistance. In Poland, Zbigniew Herbert and Wisława Szymborska composed muted, ironic portraits addressing the struggle to hold onto moral independence within a repressive regime, while in the former Yugoslavia, Tomaz Salamun hurled his aggressive and surreal imagery in the face of his would-be censors. In the Soviet Union, Joseph Brodsky and Irina Ratushinskaya were imprisoned for poems that by their independent spirit alone appeared subversive to the Communist regime. These poets sometimes published through the medium of samizdat, self-published works circulated secretly or smuggled abroad. Dorothy Livesay and Earle Birney were among the Canadian poets who published in left-leaning journals as well as elsewhere, and remained important in Canadian poetry through the 1970s. In the United States, Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka, among many others, added their voices to the struggle for civil rights. Daniel Berrigan, W. S. Merwin, Galway Kinnell, and Muriel Rukeyser were among a number of poets using their work to protest, overtly or subtly, American involvement in the Vietnam War (1959-1975).
In recent years, American poetry has been greatly charged by the increased presence of poets from a wide range of cultural backgrounds. African Americans made their voices heard as far back as the 18th century, with poet Phillis Wheatly, but they assumed a more distinctive presence with the arrival of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s. Poets associated with this influential group included Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, and Sterling Brown. While Cullen preferred to write in traditional forms, Hughes and others worked to craft new forms reflecting African American voices and experience, taking inspiration from slang and inflection, blues songs, and African chants. Later poets such as Amiri Baraka, Etheridge Knight, Lucille Clifton, Ishmael Reed, Quincy Troupe, and contemporary spoken-word poets took inspiration from these early efforts, while Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, and Melvin Tolson adhered more closely to established forms. Latino voices such as Gary Soto, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Martin Espada, Sandra Cisneros, and Jimmy Santiago Baca have also sought to express diverse cultural experience in their poems, as have Native Americans Linda Hogan, Sherman Alexie, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Joy Harjo. Among Asian Americans, the vastly different writings of Kimiko Hahn, Li-Young Lee, Arthur Sze, Michael Harper, Toi Derricotte, and John Yau show the artistic breadth of cross-cultural influence. In recent decades, the dramatic increase of work in translation and its widespread distribution have made poetry more than ever an international art, informed by a broad range of traditions.
North American immigrants and Native Americans claimed a literary voice in Canada during the 1990s. Lola Lemire represents the confusion of identity familiar in a plural culture like Canada’s, further complicated by the culture of the 20th century. Trinidad-born Dionne Brand, African-Canadian George Elliot Clarke Daniel, and David Moses, a writer of Delaware Indian heritage, are among Canada’s contemporary ethnic writers expressing the diversity within Canada’s historical plurality.
This democratization of poetry during the 20th century extends not only to subject matter, but to the writers of poems themselves. While there have been great women poets from early times–Enheduanna and Greek poet Sappho being prime examples–limitations on women’s education, financial constraints, and the burdens of child-rearing and tending a household seriously inhibited any widespread tradition of women’s writing. Those poets who did succeed in creating time and space to write often had extraordinary circumstances in their favor, such as an independent income or an unusually enlightened environment in which to develop their talents. In the wake of pioneering poets of the 19th century such as Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the 20th century has been rich in innovative and exciting poetry from women.
Early in the century, Russian poets Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetayeva wrote strikingly original lyrics. Among the modernists, Americans such as Gertrude Stein profoundly expanded the possibilities of poetic experiment, while Marianne Moore crafted complex collage poems, drawing on the vocabularies of zoology and botany. Canadian poet P.K. Page brought the lives of ordinary people burdened by the social conditions of the post-war world into view. In Chile, Gabriela Mistral wrote passionate lyrics exploring personal and national identity; she went on to become the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize. Closer to the present, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, and Adrienne Rich have made crucial contributions to the development of a woman’s poetic tradition, exploring and challenging the centrality of conventional poetic subjects such as fame and the idealized beloved. Canadian poet Margaret Atwood examined both psyche and society through metaphors of encountering the wilderness. Contemporary poets including Americans Louise Glück, Jorie Graham, Ann Lauterbach, Jane Miller, Lucie Brock-Broido, C. D. Wright, Thylias Moss, Joy Harjo, and Canadian Anne Carson, continue to extend poetic possibilities in their work. While some of these poets resist being labeled feminists and feel that emphasizing that they are women writers lessens their impact, others readily embrace feminist ideals and the creation of a poetic style that reflects what they see as women's distinctive ways of being.
Open form is a concept developed by American poet Charles Olson in 1950. Opposing it to such so-called “closed forms” as the sonnet, Olson proposed a new poetry that gave itself over to momentary sensations and associations, in which the process of the poem's composition, rather than being concealed beneath an ordered, finished surface, made itself felt through shifts, leaps, hesitations, and fragmentation:
the thing you're after
may lie around the bend
of the nest (second, time slain, the bird! the bird!
And there (strong) thrust, the mast! Flight
(of the bird
o kylix, o
Antony of Padua
sweep low, o bless
the roofs, the old ones, the gentle steep ones
on whose ridge-poles the gulls sit, from which they depart . . . (“I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You,” 1953)
Central to the success of open-form poetry was the concept of the poetic line as a breath rather than a specific number of syllables or accents. This structure was reflected in the poem's appearance on the page, the varying line lengths and white space forced a reader's eye to keep pace with abrupt transitions of perception and thought. Referred to as the Black Mountain School after the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina where Olson taught, poets who embraced the new method included Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan. Canadians Margaret Avison, George Bowering, and Frank Davey were among a group of poets in Vancouver, British Columbia, who were also influenced by the Black Mountain poets, and in particular the effort to capture the effects of a speaking voice on the page. Though not strictly associated with the Black Mountain School, American poets John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler–themselves often labeled the New York School–were influenced by Olson's writings, particularly the notion of the poem as a record of its own making.
While much early poetry dealt with the lives of heroes and gods in an elevated style, poets have also turned to the flawed lives of ordinary people, in particular bawdy or sexual scenes, since very early times. Fragments of poems by the Greek poet Archilocus speak graphically of erotic mishaps, the Romans Catullus and Propertius plumbed the depths of their decadent empire with frankness, the French criminal-poet François Villon heaped abuse on his enemies and jailers, while the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer recorded the lusty adventures of less-than-pious pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales.
Poetry in the last few centuries has turned increasingly to ordinary, day–to-day concerns, with a corresponding interest in bringing literary language closer to natural speech. English poet William Wordsworth, in his 1802 preface to the Lyrical Ballads, railed against artificial poetic diction and declared his intention to write “in a selection of language really used by men.” In part, he was reacting against the excessively stylized poems of 18th-century Augustan writers such as John Dryden and Alexander Pope. In his well-known “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” (1800), one of the “Lucy” poems, Wordsworth uses simple language to express his grief at the loss of a beloved young woman:
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees,
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course
With rocks, and stones, and trees!
Similarly, in the 20th century, the celebration of the ordinary came in part from a reaction against outdated forms of expression. Early in the century, poets of the movement known as imagism–including Americans Ezra Pound, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Amy Lowell, and William Carlos Williams–turned from ideas to things, and the impersonal description of objects in the world, a style which could actually produce a profound emotional response in the reader. Williams went so far as to declare, “No ideas but in things.” Deeply influenced by Chinese and Japanese poets, he wrote poems in which the presence of an object took central place. In Chile, Pablo Neruda launched a related campaign; his series of Elemental Odes (1954) sing the praises of tomatoes, celery, and a watch. More recently, American poet Charles Simic began his career in the 1960s with a number of “thing” poems, including explorations of the mysterious lives of the knife, spoon, and fork. In a different take on the idea of the ordinary, American poets of the 1950s such as Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton, sometimes referred to as “confessional poets,” began to write openly of domestic problems, mental illness, divorce, and family strife. Canadian poets W.E.E. Ross and A.J.M. Smith used the lens of imagist techniques to look at the wilderness as if for the first time.
The oral traditions of Native American cultures cannot be traced in the same ways as written poetry, but their widespread presence and cultural importance among different groups can hardly be overestimated. Praise poems, chants, curses, and remedies existed in many Native American cultures, with song regarded as a powerful spiritual instrument. Arranged in the right way, language was and is believed to be a source of magical strength, drawing upon good or deflecting evil forces. This Apache song was employed in rituals involving masked dancers, or Gan, who represented divine beings:
When my songs first were, they made my songs with words of jet.
Earth when it was made
Sky when it was made
Earth to the end
Sky to the end
Black dancer, black thunder, when they came toward each other
All the bad things that used to be vanished.
The bad wishes that were in the world all vanished.
(“Songs of the Masked Dancers,” trans. Pliny Earl Goddard, 1968)
A Navajo farm-song ritually fulfills the growth of the staple foods corn, white beans, and squash, willing the cycle to completion by appeal to the House-God:
Now in the east
the white bean
and the great squash
are tied with the rainbow
Listen! the rain's drawing near!
The voice of the bluebird is heard.
From the top of the great corn-plant the water foams, I hear it.
Around the roots the water foams, I hear it.
Around the roots of the plants it foams, I hear it.
From their tops the water foams, I hear it.
(“Songs in the Garden of the House God,” trans. Washington Matthews, 1968)
In their repetitions and refrains, these songs belong to oral traditions reaching back to the oldest poetic forms.
Strongly influenced by Arabic models, poetry in Swahili, an African language written in Arabic script, dates back to the 18th century . Among the Swahili people, poetry is the principle mode for recording historical events, with woman enjoying a leading position as keepers of oral tradition and gifted reciters. A principle form is the utendi (tendi in the plural), a narrative poem, sometimes intended to teach, that recounts history, lives, and legends. Tendi consist of four phrase units; the first three units rhyme, while the fourth introduces a different rhyme echoed in the final syllable of each stanza (aaab). With its words typically ending on a vowel sound, the Swahili language is a rich source of rhyme, lending itself to intensely musical patterns. One of the best known tendi is the Utendi of Mwana Kupona, a 19th-century woman, whose poem gives advice to her daughter:
Take this amulet that I give you
fasten it carefully upon a cord
regard it as a precious thing
that you may cherish it with care.
Let me string for you a necklace
of pearls and red coral let me
adorn you as a beautiful woman
when it shines upon your neck.
(Trans. Ali Ahmed Jahadmy, 1975)
