Twentieth-century American poetry

American poets in the twentieth century not merely registered the impact of modernism but were its exemplary figures. People looked to the United States for new voices and forms of experimentation, and for a democratic verse that would expand on the work of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Inherited tone, content, form, poetics and even the lines dividing poetry from other genres were all questioned radically by American poets at the turn of the century. ‘Make it new’ was Ezra Pound's iconic imperative to his contemporaries and heirs. It is this urge towards newness and innovation that characterises the best of twentieth-century American poetry.