The aesthetic and theoretical implications arising from Frost’s impromptu reading of ‘The Gift Outright’ in Washington, DC on 20 January 1961 represent a significant point of departure in Nick Selby’s persuasive contribution to Jennifer Ashton’s engaging Cambridge Companion to American Poetry Since 1945. In ‘Ecopoetries in America’, Selby artfully teases out the ambiguities underwriting the ‘optimistic rhetoric’ and ‘homespun wisdom’ contained within Frost’s poem. Identifying ‘an ambivalent defensiveness in the speaker’s tracing of the relations between land, poem, and America’ in Frost’s environmentally charged text, Selby suggests that there are a number of ‘distinct ideological pressures’ coursing through ‘The Gift Outright’. These are variously felt ‘in the relationship set up between poetic power, as witnessed in the power of this poem as a lyric utterance’, as well as in ‘the politics of power that are played out in the myths of the land as the determinant of American identity’.

Selby’s account of Frost’s poem is worth citing at length here because it gestures towards a mixture of poetics, ideology, and assorted socio-political factors which resonate in the wider context of the Companion. In her general introduction, Jennifer Ashton emphasises the fact that the volume seeks to represent a number of important poetic advances ‘in the period (between 1945 and the present) and to do so in the context of the social, political, professional, and above all, aesthetic forces that shaped those developments’. To do so is no mean feat, for as Ashton notes, ‘the designation “Post 45” is a comparatively new attempt at the periodisation of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and its canons are still in the making’.

The first and second essays in the Companion are especially useful in this regard, as they debate the different ways in which pre-existing cultural formations impacted on the development of American poetry after World War II. The first essay in the collection, Mark Scroggins’s ‘From the Objectivists to “Projective Verse”’proffers an accurate and detailed account of objectivism, a radical poetic movement that flourished briefly in the 1930s (and which bears absolutely no relation to the pseudo-philosophical system of ethical self-interest created by the right-wing Ayn Rand). Devised and theorised by the New York-born poet Louis Zukofsky, objectivism denotes a seminal second-generation moment in the history of American modernism. As Scroggins tells it, the style of writing that Zukofsky privileged was ‘based on observation rather than imagination’; eschewed the more grandiose, mythical poetic tendencies of first-generation modernists like T.S. Eliot; demanded ‘a fidelity to both the objects of the poet’s perceptions and the words with which the poet deals’; and ultimately influenced a host of crucial postwar American poetries, including the Charles Olson-led ‘Projectivists’ (based at North Carolina’s Black Mountain College in the 1950s), and the so-called ‘Language’ writers of the 1980s (who are discussed at length elsewhere in this collection by Steve McCaffrey).

Modernism’s role in the fashioning of postwar American poetry also informs the second essay in Ashton’s Companion.In her detailed and refreshing study of confessional poetry, Deborah Nelson charts the manner in which various writers of the 1950s and 1960s such as Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and W.D. Snodgrass sought to distance their lyrical poetic practice from the model of aesthetic ‘impersonality’ espoused by John Crowe Ransom and the culturally dominant, Eliot-inspired New Critics. Nelson suggests that we read the rise of confessional – or ‘autobiographical’ – poetry as part of a ‘general cultural trend’ that took umbrage at ‘what was increasingly viewed as a fraudulent objectivity or a false universality’, one that still has much to say about the anxieties and pressures pertaining to ‘privacy and self-exposure’ that were pushed to the fore during the Cold War. While the era of the confessional poet proper came to an end in the mid-1970s (by which time Berryman, Plath, and Sexton had all committed suicide), it is important to recognise, as Nelson does, that confessional poetry had an ‘unparalleled impact on poetry writing of the late twentieth century’, particularly on the sort of poetry produced in the seemingly ubiquitous creative writing courses that have proliferated across the landscape of postwar America.

As it happens, the rise of the professional creative writing school is also the subject of Hank Lazer’s eye-opening critique of ‘American Poetry and Its Institutions’. This pithy and polemical piece focuses on the institutional phenomenon known as the graduate program in creative writing, as offered at any number of high-profile universities in America. Lazer’s factually rich account demonstrates that there has been an extensive, and often extraordinary, hyper-professionalisation of the ‘business’ of American poetry since 1945. In his estimation, this is a wholly paradoxical process which ‘has little to do with the sale of the commodity itself’, since the ‘economic value of a poem is miniscule, if not zero or negative’. As Lazer points out, no one can make a living ‘directly from the sale of his or her poetry, although popular poets such as Billy Collins and Maya Angelou may come close’. Similarly, ‘one could not sell enough poems to The New Yorker and Poetry to stay above the poverty line’. At the same time, however, the publication of poems – especially poems of the prize-winning variety – can certify the poet ‘as a possible recipient of the more significant forms of income: academic employment honoraria for workshops, lectures, and reading; and prizes’. This is where the professional graduate writing program comes into play, as it offers the aspiring student/poet/paying customer a potential means with which to negotiate the minefield of the ‘myriad fiefdoms of American poetry’, and, if all goes well, to gain access to the sources of income that are ‘to be made from poetry’s more lucrative ancillary activities’.

Despite remaining ambivalent about the merits of the burgeoning degree industry and the business of training poets, Lazer insists that all is not lost. Referring back to the ‘ongoing legacy of modernism’, and couching his remarks in the language of the French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas, Lazer draws to a close by suggesting his effort to understand these stifling processes of professionalisation have left him more convinced than ever that it remains possible to choose ‘infinity rather than totality, even as many institutions try to rein in, deny, recuperate, absorb, or ignore the rapidly changing and infinitely diverse terrain for American poetry’.

Bringing together a wide range of insightful essays on diverse postwar groupings such as the New York School, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Beat Generation, and the grassroots Black Arts Movement, and debating the critical worth of early twenty-first century figures like Michael Fried and Tao Lin, Jennifer Ashton’s Cambridge Companion to American Poetry Since 1945 confirms Lazer’s assertion, and reveals to students, scholars, and the casual reader alike, that American poetry since 1945 contains multitudes.