LYCOS RETRIEVER 
American Poetry: Traditions
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Although Italian-American poetry began in 1805 with the arrival of Mozart's librettist, the Venetian writer Lorenzo da Ponte, it took another century and a half for enough significant authors to appear to claim the attention of the English-speaking public. The social and cultural barriers that early aspiring writers faced were enormous. Not surprisingly, few poets managed to overcome them. Most immigrants came from the destitute classes of Southern Italy. Poorly educated, often illiterate, few knew Toscano, the standard literary dialect of written Italian (based on the Florentine language of Petrarch and Boccaccio). The immigrant's literary heritage was usually confined to the lively traditions of a local dialect.
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The term American poetry is in some ways a contradiction. America represents a break with tradition and the invention of a new culture separate from the European past. Poetry, on the other hand, represents tradition itself, a long history of expression carried to America from a European past. American poetry ... embodies a clearly identifiable tension between tradition and innovation, past and future, and old forms and new forms. American poetry remains a hybrid, a literature that tries to separate itself from the tradition of English literature even as it adds to and alters that tradition.
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In Italian culture one often notices two conflicting impulses—one to preserve the richness of the past, the other to reject it in search of the new. The same dialectic between tradition and revolution exists in Italian-American poetry. Surveying writers of roughly the same generation, one finds both enlightened traditionalists (like Jerome Mazzaro or Lewis Turco) and feisty iconoclasts (like Gregory Corso or Diane di Prima). Sometimes one sees both impulses in a single writer like Felix Stefanile or Paul Violi. What one rarely sees is aesthetic complacency. Italians take their art seriously. The traditionalists tend to be as passionate and argumentative as the revolutionaries.
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From the most experimental L*A*N*G*U*A*G*E poetry to traditional formal verse, The Body Electric captures the spirit of contemporary American poetry. Among the 180 poets included in this collection are Ai, John Berryman, Charles Bukowski, Lucille Clifton, Carolyn Forche, Allen Ginsberg, Barbara Guest, Robert Hass, Seamus Heaney, Kenneth Koch, Yusef Komunyakaa, Robert Lowell, W. S. Merwin, Czeslaw Milosz, Frank O'Hara, Charles Olson, Michael Palmer, Sylvia Plath, James Schuyler, Derek Walcott, James Wright, and John Yau, plus a generous array of exciting new poets from recent years. The breadth and innovation of American poetry as well as the shifting styles and tastes of over a quarter of a century are represented in this volume -- a breathtaking, incomparable overview of American poetry at the turn of the millennium.
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