The New American Poetry

📅 1960 ✏️ Donald Allen 📖 Grove Press 📚 Reissued 1999 by University of California Press

AmericanBeat GenerationAvant-Garde20th CenturyMovement-Defining

The New American Poetry 1945–1960 (1960), edited by Donald Allen, is a groundbreaking anthology that introduced the Beat Generation, Black Mountain poets, the New York School, and the San Francisco Renaissance to a wide readership. It contained 215 poems by 44 poets and became one of the most influential American poetry anthologies published since World War II.

Overview

Published by Grove Press in 1960, The New American Poetry 1945–1960, edited by Donald Allen, served as a counterpoint to the "academic" formalist verse dominant in mid-century American poetry. It championed avant-garde and experimental writing that had largely circulated in small presses and "little magazines" rather than mainstream publishing.

Contents and Structure

The anthology contained 215 poems by 44 poets, organized into five loosely defined groups that Allen identified as the significant new movements in American poetry:

Black Mountain poets — Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov
The San Francisco Renaissance — poets associated with the postwar San Francisco poetry scene
The Beat Generation — Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso
The New York School — John Ashbery and associated poets
A fifth, uncategorized group of younger emerging poets

The volume also included "Statements on Poetics" from many contributors, giving readers direct access to the poets' own theoretical positions — an unusual and influential editorial choice for a poetry anthology.

Historical Significance

Robert Lowell famously distinguished the "raw" poets collected by Allen from the more "cooked" traditional poets of the era. The anthology's role in defining and naming these movements — Black Mountain, Beat, New York School — has had a lasting effect on how American literary history is taught and understood; these labels remain standard critical categories.

Poetry scholar Marjorie Perloff called the collection "the fountainhead of radical American poetics." By 1999, it had sold over 100,000 copies, making it one of the most influential and commercially successful poetry anthologies published in the United States since World War II.

Legacy

Nearly every poet Allen anthologized — Ginsberg, Ashbery, Olson, Creeley, Duncan, Levertov — is now considered central to the postmodern American canon. The anthology demonstrates how an editor's act of naming and grouping poets can itself shape literary history.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is The New American Poetry?

The New American Poetry 1945–1960 (1960), edited by Donald Allen, is a landmark anthology that introduced the Beat Generation, Black Mountain poets, the New York School, and the San Francisco Renaissance to a wide audience. It contained 215 poems by 44 poets.

Why is The New American Poetry important?

It named and defined the major avant-garde poetry movements of postwar America, legitimizing poets who had previously circulated only in small presses. Many poets it featured are now central to the postmodern American literary canon.

Last updated: 2026-07-01