ABSTRACT
It is important to begin by remarking what a wealth of “beginnings” there are in the various stories that can be told about modern poetry and about its immediate predecessors. Some of these beginnings are moments of cultural and stylistic change; others are nodal points, moments when diverse cultural impulses coalesce in poetry of particular force; and finally some of these beginnings are moments of forgetfulness and loss, even instances of active repression, when vital poetic traditions have been suppressed so that more selective histories can be retold thereafter. Even in the selective histories that have served the dominant culture—the “we” of my title—it has been impossible to ignore the fact that modern poetry kept reinventing itself repeatedly and thus began again itself many times.
