This chapter discusses what happens to modernism, the revolutionary movement that dominated the first half of the twentieth century, as it becomes institutionalized, and examines the movement’s legacy after 1945. It discusses how the poetry of the post-1945 period became dominated by a major schism between “academic” and “anti-academic” poetry (or, as Robert Lowell called it, the “cooked” versus the “raw”). The chapter charts the advent of the New Criticism and explains its main principles, goals, and practitioners, focuses on examples of formalist poems in the New Critical mode by Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, and James Merrill, and introduces the new, alternative forms of poetry that came to be known as “The New American Poetry.”

This chapter discusses the poets associated with the so-called “Middle Generation,” a transitional group of writers who were younger than the modernists but older than the poets of the New American poetry discussed in Chapters 1–4. It addresses how the poets of this cohort struggled with the long shadow of their modernist predecessors and addresses their struggles with alcoholism, personal crises, and mental illness. The chapter charts their move away from the New Critical formalist mode that reigned at mid-century toward a looser, more personal mode, which eventually gave rise to Confessional poetry. Focusing especially on Elizabeth Bishop (who distanced herself from Confessionalism), Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton, this chapter discusses the major stylistic and thematic features of Confessionalism, controversies surrounding this movement, and its profound influence on contemporary poetry.

This chapter reads Heaney’s relationship to America through the notions of place and the writer’s identity developed in his prose, as well as his evolving poetics. It shows how a youthful sense of transatlantic competition matures, with his early visits, into a deep ambivalence about the freedoms and opportunities America affords. America leaves only the faintest impress on the poetry of Wintering Out, the volume composed during his year as visiting lecturer at Berkeley, and distance from home weighs heavily. The political climate in San Francisco, however, and the creative responses it aroused, guide Heaney in the poetic forms and mytho-historical thinking that define North, his most coherent response to the Northern Irish Troubles. Heaney’s public remarks on American poetry and society, and his relationship with Robert Lowell in particular, show a gradual coming round to the loose forms, 'talkiness', and buoyant hybridity that he sees as the poetic articulation of the American experience.