Poetry Across the Generations

One of the first aspects of the poetry in this period written by American-Jewish writers that strikes the reader is the marginalisation of poetry on specifically Jewish themes, even from poets who are considered to be of the first rank. In the most influential and accessible anthologies of American poetry since 1945 – those published by Penguin, Norton and Faber – there is virtually no writing directly concerned with Jewish identity. Even in the work of major poets, such as Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg, M. L. Rosenthal and Howard Nemerov, there is very little. Even more striking is the absence of the Holocaust as specific subject-matter in these poets. Adrienne Rich, in the foreword to her Collected Early Poems 1950–1970, offers a personal explanation of this: ‘Still, at twenty, I implicitly dissociated poetry from politics. At college in the late 1940s, I sat in classes with World War II vets... I knew women who were … refugees from Nazism. I had no political ideas of my own.’ ¹ In fact, arguably the most anthologised poem about the Holocaust is written by a gentile. ²