1 - The Elegiac Mode
Rhetoric and Poetics in the 1940s
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 June 2011
Summary
SOME VERSIONS OF ELEGY
Our survey of the San Francisco Renaissance begins and ends with war. World War II and Vietnam, with Korea in the middle, provide the background for a literary movement that served as a sustained commentary on a political landscape in crisis. Kenneth Rexroth characterized the tone of poets living in the Bay Area during this period as elegiac, and Robert Duncan agreed. In a letter to Rexroth discussing a proposed anthology of local poets Duncan described their common ground:
Well, [William] Everson calls us the “Libertarian” poets; but you are more right I think in seeing some kind of unifying principle in the elegiac tone. I feel, nine years now of correspondence underlies it, a kind of contemporaneousness to Everson – yet what other than that mode of the Elegy can link my contrivances with his so direct art?
Like an earlier generation of postwar writers – that of Auden, Spender, and Day-Lewis – the poets who found themselves in the Bay Area after World War II were faced with creating an art within the context of massive human and psychological devastation. Support for the war among poets had been fitful; many were pacifists, several interred for long periods of time at conscientious-objector camps in the West. And whereas for the Auden generation there were soldier-poets like Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke to mourn, for the poets around Rexroth the devastation of World War II was too vast to focus on individuals.
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- The San Francisco RenaissancePoetics and Community at Mid-Century, pp. 33 - 59Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1989