Poetry cooked and raw: from Emily Dickinson to the Beat poets

We will look at Emily Dickinson writing for herself; Eliot’s and Pound’s early experiments, especially Pound stripping language back to the image; Robert Frost's and Edward Thomas's pursuit of the speaking voice; and the various experiments with simple direct language in the 20s and 30s often associated with socialism and Auden's eventual defeat by this.
In the 1950s we will look at Frank O'Hara’s apparently completely simple style and trace the changes in Robert Lowell’s style from his early formalism to the freedom of his poems from Life Studies onwards, relating this (as Lowell admitted when talking of “poetry cooked and raw”) to the influence of the Beat Poets, especially Allen Ginsberg and his love of William Blake. We will look at the rise of confessional verse with Lowell’s influence on two of his students at Boston University – Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath – and the work of others such as John Berryman and Randall Jarrell.
Finally we will trace how prose poetry has developed since its adoption by Baudelaire with its special attraction for some poets and their usual abandonment of it after a time. We will consider whether prose poetry has become so similar to flash fiction that it may be indistinguishable.