The Forms of Youth: Twentieth-Century Poetry and Adolescence

ALL HISTORIANS NOTE the importance of youth—of bobbysoxers, teenagers, rock and roll fans, juvenile delinquents, Beatniks, hippies, black revolutionaries, and white student radicals—in the United States after World War II. Few critics now see how that youth drove American poems. At one extreme, Karl Shapiro—Pulitzer Prize–winning poet of World War II and a former editor of Poetry magazine—asked with horror in 1970: “Is the Beatleization of American poetry becoming a reality?” (The Poetry Wreck, 361) At the other, Muriel Rukeyser in the late-1960s poem “For Kay Boyle” paid homage to another, older modernist by declaring their common cause with “the young bearded rebels and students tearing it all away” (Collected Poems, 545).

This chapter will see what aesthetic inventions took place before and between those two extremes. Shapiro, Randall Jarrell, and others responded in verse to the seeming contradiction between pastoral youth and endangered, violent soldiers during the war. Applying a polished 1950s formalism to domestic subjects, Phyllis McGinley became the first American poet to write seriously about teenage girls. Toward the end of the decade, Allen Ginsberg and others drew on new subcultural vocabularies to fashion a poetry received (if not intended) as part of a moral panic about juvenile delinquency.

Of the many poets who altered their practice drastically during the 1960s—switching from meter to free verse, adopting new influences, or resuming interrupted careers—most did not attribute their changes to the new cultural power of youth. A few of the most accomplished, though, did just that. The civil-rights marchers, draft protesters, and hippies in George Oppen’s poems of the 1960s and early 1970s inaugurate new collective ways of being, and Oppen explores his ambivalence about whether they can succeed. For Gwendolyn Brooks, 1960s youth meant not a return to poetry but a change in poetic goals: changes in black America—and changes in the street life of black Chicago—convinced her to emulate, in the cadences of her own poems, the wildness of a rising generation. A more complicated response to youth movements and to the idea of adolescence came in the late-1960s poetry of Robert Lowell, whose sonnets emulate in their own piled-on, grinding lines the frustrations and losses that drastically misplaced youthful hopes might create.

The word “teenager” appeared first in print in 1941, in Popular Science Monthly; later that year Life magazine mused that “teenagers … live in a jolly world of gangs, games, movies and music,” “speak a curious lingo,” and “drive like bats out of hell” (quoted in Mintz, Huck’s Raft, 252). Seventeen published its first issue in 1944, by which time, as Grace Palladino concludes, teenagers “had a brand-new identity as an important social group”; “even the word was now popular” (Teenagers, 93). The word, and the idea, turned up in popular poetry. Phyllis McGinley achieved renown as an author of light verse for the New Yorker in the 1930s and 1940s, later attracting praise from Auden. McGinley’s “Landscape Without Figures” described prewar Westchester County, New York, in terms of its teens, and wartime Westchester in terms of their disappearance:

Such pursuits as tennis and boating seemed frivolous (hence appropriate for teens); they have become appropriate topics for this somber, if undemanding lyric only because their devotees have joined the military. The period before the war, or before Pearl Harbor, is like the summer before high school graduates enter college, but the war itself is shockingly unlike higher education. McGinley’s vanished youth are formerly pastoral, formerly residents of a protected space very much like any classical Green World, or like the youths from the “town” on Keats’ urn. Yet all their pursuits—from record collecting to suntans—seem distinctively modern, as does their never-named enterprise overseas.

No wartime poet paid more attention to youth culture than Karl Shapiro, whose “Drug Store” (1942) described a place designed for adolescents to gather; their “attractive symbols,” “less serious than the living-room or bar,” “[w]atch over puberty and leer” (Poems 11). Appalled by his own fascination, Shapiro attacked the drugstore as a place where “Youth comes to jingle nickels and crack wise”; reading “magazines / Devoted to lust, the jazz, the Coca-Cola, / The lending-library of love’s latest,” young patrons “slump in booths like rags, not even drunk” (Collected Poems, 11). Teen culture here means consumption; each boy “becomes the customer; he is heroized,” without even the politically attractive working-class solidarity or the achieved, supposedly adult masculinity represented by bars and pubs. Shapiro’s “Hollywood” reached for sunnier descriptions of the emerging youth culture:

Paul Fussell has written that “a notable feature of the Second World War is the youth of most who fought it.” During the war, he notes, the draft age fell from twenty-one to eighteen; “soldiers played not just at being killers but at being grown-ups” (The Great War, 51). Shapiro’s war poems, which earned him a Pulitzer Prize, portrayed his comrades as playful too, “the good-bad boys of circumstances and chance” (Collected Poems, 57). Randall Jarrell’s more thoughtful poems about soldiers and airmen also focused on their youth. In “Second Air Force,” a mother who visits an air base “thinks heavily: My son is grown,” though neither her son nor his colleagues nor even their Flying Fortress bombers seem fully grown: “their Fortresses, all tail, / Stand wrong and flimsy on their skinny legs, / And the crews climb toward them clumsily as bears” (Complete Poems, 177). In one of Jarrell’s best-known war poems, “Losses,” the flyers “died like aunts or pets or foreigners. / (When we left high school nothing else had died / For us to figure we had died like)” (Complete Poems, 145).¹ Other war poets also depicted soldiers as adolescents, “not children and not men”: John Frederick Nims’s “Shot Down at Night” (1944) elegizes an airman who “Found in a foreign sky extravagant death” and therefore missed “the baseball-sounding spring, / The summer roadster,” “the dance at Hallowe’en, / The skater’s kiss” (Five Young American Poets 69).

What separates poems like Nims’s and Jarrell’s from previous elegies on the American war dead is not their lament for a life cut off too soon but the specifics of what that life has lost: the trappings of a distinct, peer-dominated phase with its own pastimes, rituals, and tastes—roadsters, baseball, dances, popular song. Susan Schweik finds in verse from the Second World War “a sense of an often uncrossable gap between the male soldier who was understood to have experienced too much and the woman left behind who was understood to have experienced nothing at all” (Gulf So Deeply Cut, 6). Poems about soldiers that focused on their prewar lives—that is, on their lives as students and teens—gave civilian poets, especially women, a way to write about a war whose most prominent features they had not seen.² In their poems about uniformed adolescents, male and female poets, soldiers, sailors, and civilian writers may strike the same note, finding the same pathos in the same collision of new youth culture with old facts of war. Consider McGinley’s “Valedictorian,” subtitled “high school, 1943’: her “young man with the pink and earnest face” anticipates, not the rewards of his high class rank, but “the rifle resting its equal weight / On every shoulder” (Times Three, 110–11). A soldier’s corpse in Gwendolyn Brooks’s 1945 sequence “Gay Chaps at the Bar” seems, much like Nims’s doomed airman, to retain its status as an American teen: “even in death a body … Shows the old personal art, the look. Shows what / It showed at baseball. What it showed in school” (Blacks, 65).

Postwar cultural critics, as Leerom Medovoi notes, could “adopt … youth as a national signifier”; the “striking celebrations” of The Catcher in the Rye (1951), by J. D. Salinger, “place youthful rebellion at the very core of Americanness” (“Democracy,” 257, 261). At the same time, many adults “suspected” that a new peer culture of movies, comic books, and rock music would prevent the rising generation from ever becoming adults (271). This contradiction suffuses some postwar poems. As early as 1949, Jarrell’s “Girl in a Library” made fun of young people’s new “strange speech / In which each sound sets out to seek each other … And ends as one grand transcendental vowel” (Complete Poems, 15). The girl in the library represents everything troublesome (for Jarrell) about modern adolescence, whose peer group is both a debased pastoral and an enemy of the individual, inner life. Jarrrell’s brighter conclusion makes her a worthy representative of premodern pastoral, a kind of person who is not so new after all: “I have seen, / Firm, fixed forever in your closing eyes, / The Corn King beckoning to his Spring Queen” (Complete Poems, 16). Jarrell’s notes for A Sad Heart at the Supermarket (a book of cultural criticism published in 1962, but begun perhaps a decade earlier) include this revealing passage: “Norm now is / younger, more adolescent / to become grown-up faster, the quasi-grown-up category of teenagers is created, that can be reached fast—but grown-ups become more like teenagers, less adult” (quoted in Burt, Randall Jarrell and His Age, 162). Jarrell offered a counterproposal, a truly individual adolescent with a developed inner life, in his longest poem, “The Night Before the Night Before Christmas,” the interior monologue of a fourteen-year-old girl.

Other poets reacted more wryly, or more optimistically, to the same new “quasi-grown-up category.” Published in Poetry in 1950 (when Shapiro was the magazine’s editor), William Stafford’s “Juke Joint” also asked whether and how new teens replicated old pastoral:

Stafford’s youth are either the reincarnation or the empty parody of classical shepherds and nymphs. McGinley in 1946 celebrated “adolescent Sitters,” “Those thrifty juveniles who keep … A watch upon our infants’ sleep / For fifty cents an hour” (Stones, 150). Babysitters (McGinley’s tight comic rhymes specify) wear braces, read comic books, enjoy Benny Goodman, eat candy, are “hep to jive and jitters” and “wear down the telephone” (150–51).

McGinley wrote accurately in 1965, “If I have done anything original, it is in my portrayals of childhood and adolescence” (quoted in Wagner, McGinley, 80). She rose above light entertainment when she saw herself and her readers as worried, ambivalent mothers of teenaged daughters. Her 1960 collection Times Three won that year’s Pulitzer Prize; an entire section consisted of poems about teenagers. Some of those poems try to make elegant lyrics out of the necessarily restricted (and, the poems aver, too easily dismissed) emotional lives of suburban girls. “A Certain Age” takes on the conformist teen of the 1950s, about whom McGinley (like Jarrell) has complaints:

The conflict essential to youth does not (as in Housman) set fleeting beauty or glory against time; rather, it sets the conformity of a peer culture against the individuality which this girl yearns to express. The same girl, or one very like her, stars in McGinley’s mock-chivalric “Launcelot with Bicycle,” where she plays a sort of cul-de-sac Lady of Shalott, contemplating a boy on a paper route, “Wheeling heroic by”; “A wisful and a lily maid / In moccasins and jeans,” the girl finds herself leaning on a “casement,” “Despairing from the seventh grade / To match his lordly teens” (Times Three, 49).

“Portrait of Girl with Comic Book” focuses on the same transitional moment in a girl’s life, with considerably more gravity: remembering “Gooseberry Fool,” we might ask whether Amy Clampitt (a later New Yorker poet, and one just a generation younger than McGinley) had read it. McGinley begins:

“Thirteen” (the poem continues) represents a kind of zero point, a node between the habits and expectations of childhood, and those which mark, or imitate, the habits of adults. As such, “thirteen’s anomalous—not that, not this,” “the one age [which] defeats the metaphor.” It comes with stereotypes, agreed-upon markers, but it bears—indeed, signifies—individuality too: in fact, it is the emblem of uniqueness itself, since nothing else can stand for it.

Wallace Fowlie wrote in Poetry in 1949, “Rimbaud is the poet of adolescence who is all beings at once, who desperately refuses to choose himself and thereby limit himself.” Hence, Fowlie adds, “today every kind of reader recognizes himself in Rimbaud” (“Rimbaud in 1949,” 168–69). McGinley recognizes this aspect of nothing-and-everything in her thirteen-year-old, who therefore deserves, and gets, the extremes and paradoxes that other poets reserve for metaphysics or for adults. “Thirteen,” McGinley continues,

The punning last line (meaning pride and unsteadiness and new shoes) lightens the generalities above it but does not invite us to dismiss them; it asks us, instead, to frame them, to take a generous but removed perspective. The poem, in other words, presents itself not only as wit but as wisdom; it takes the attitude mothers of thirteen-year-old girls ought to, need to take, an attitude of sympathetic and patient remove. These sudden transitions happen to all girls these days; mothers should take heart: this too will pass.

McGinley was not the only postwar poet to recommend such remove. Edward Brunner describes Richard Wilbur’s odd status as both a popular poet of the 1950s and a paragon of learned technique: Wilbur “anticipates the charge that his poetry—or … the kind of experience in which his poetry specializes—might be inconsequential by displaying” the use his poems might have for their readers (Cold War Poetry, 33–34). McGinley’s “Thirteen” works in that way as well, except that the “kind of experience” is not only the experience of reading the world aesthetically, of learning disinterestedness, but also the experience of raising a girl. McGinley describes what this young woman thinks and feels, but her calm stance and confidently balanced sentences suggest the point of view of a mother: in this poem and in a handful of others, she became the first twentieth-century American to write serious verse about young people from a mother’s perspective, taking both mothers’ and daughters’ lives as seriously as other 1950s poets took baroque fountains, Old Master paintings, or the U.S. Navy. The poem’s reception, in one way, mirrors its subjects: this poem that asks adults, in adult terms, to take girls seriously was not, itself, taken seriously enough—neither it nor anything else of McGinley’s appears in most current anthologies (the Library of America’s two-volume American Poetry being the happy exception).

We might recognize in these poems not just a neglected accomplishment but also a precedent (if not a foil) for later poems written—and later styles constructed—from daughters’ points of view, poems that also take on what social researchers now call the transition to adult femininity. “Our images of the adolescent,” Barbara Hudson writes, “are masculine images”; “the restless, searching youth; the Hamlet figure; the sower of wild oats; the tester of growing powers.” Girls who want to be accepted as appropriately “feminine,” Hudson continues, “are constantly open to subversion by judgments of their behavior as adolescent,” that is, as flighty, willful, or wild, “whilst at the same time if they are too demonstrably acquiring a mature femininity they are told to have more fun, to be the zany, thoughtless, selfish person we see as the ‘typical teenager’” (“Femininity,” 51). Girls may therefore feel “that whatever they do, it is always wrong” (53). The results are a model of adolescence with a fixed (and heteronormative) endpoint and a set of double binds on the way there, on which McGinley’s gentle ironies draw. Female poets of the 1970s and later—as we will see in chapter 4—would react to these double binds in fiercer, less reassuring poems.

By the end of the 1950s, the assimilation of modern poetry into American universities, where adults taught late adolescents to read and write it, meant that stylistic innovation in postwar America would present itself as both a generational and an antischolastic revolt. Kenneth Koch’s “Fresh Air” complained about “young poets in America … trembling in universities”; Koch imagined a “Strangler dressed in a cowboy suit / Leaping from his horse to annihilate the students of myth!” (Allen, New American Poetry, 231–32).³ Poets and literary historians tend to describe this period by finding some sharp break—at Robert Lowell’s Life Studies (1959), for example, or at Donald Allen’s New American Poetry (1960), which included both Koch’s “Fresh Air” and Frank O’Hara’s 1955 elegy for James Dean. James Longenbach argues against such “‘breakthrough’ narratives,” and their “association of personal or social liberation with formal transgression” (Modern Poetry, 8). Yet such associations may follow whenever poets and readers see their art as having come under too much (or the wrong sort of) institutional control. Applied to persons rather than to works of art, those associations—in which people discover who they really are by experimenting outlandishly, rejecting mentors, and setting out to break rules—are also, not coincidentally, one way in which we have defined adolescence.

Thinkers of the 1950s, in particular, defined it that way. Erik Erikson in Childhood and Society (1950), Edgar Z. Friedenberg in The Vanishing Adolescent (1959), and Paul Goodman in Growing Up Absurd (1960) all argued that postwar conformism had stifled the independence and the risk-taking that the teen years should include. “The American adolescent,” Erikson wrote, “is … too immediately occupied with being efficient and being decent” to “know where he is not free” (Childhood, 321). W. D. Snodgrass versified such complaints in “The Campus on the Hill,” collected in his first volume, Heart’s Needle (1959). “My little ones lean not toward revolt,” Snodgrass sighed, “with such passivity / As would make Quakers swear,” the comfortable students at his private college “look out from their hill and say / To themselves, ‘We have nowhere to go but down; / The great destination is to stay’” (Not for Specialists, 27). These students have made the pastoral ideal of youth into a parody of itself, a sub-Keatsian form of (un-masculine) inaction.⁴ An America (or a literary culture or a university) that made adolescence impossible, that substituted a conformist peer culture for a true youth of chance and choice, was a republic (or a literary culture or a university) in decline.

And yet, Erikson also observed, even if young Americans were turning away from “real” opportunities for self-creation, symbols of teen peer culture, being symbols of independence, were becoming more prominent—coming, indeed, to represent America: “The adolescent … has, in fact, become the cultural arbiter” (Childhood, 340–41). Had teens and their new tastes eradicated the true adolescence on which real individuality and real art would depend? Or could the new teen subcultures furnish counterexamples for a conformist era? Steven Mintz writes that in the 1950s “the adolescent became the archetypal figure for the moral and sexual confusions of the age,” citing The Catcher in the Rye along with the films Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause (Hucks Raft, 297).

He might have added the Beats. Published in Gasoline (1958), Gregory Corso’s “I Am 25” announced “the needy-yap of my youth: / I HATE OLD POETMEN!” (Mindfield, 35) Yet Corso’s poem is an outlier; though they emphasized their distaste for staid, respectable adults, Beat poets did not usually describe their lives and writings as adolescent, transitional, or unusually immature. Critics, reviewers, and journalists, however, did. “The Beats were,” Michael Davidson writes, “demonized as perpetual adolescents” (Guys Like Us, 55); debates about Beats became debates about youth, about whether (as Newsweek asserted in 1956) “Our Teenagers Are Out of Control” (quoted in Mintz, Huck’s Raft, 291). Richard Eberhart in 1956 told the readers of the New York Times Book Review that San Francisco offered “a radical group movement of young poets” with “a young will to kick down the doors of older consciousness” (“West Coast,” 70–71). “The youngest generation is in a state of revolt so absolute that its elders cannot even recognize it,” explained a sympathetic Kenneth Rexroth in 1957; “the heroes of this generation,” models for its poems, were “two great dead juvenile delinquents”—Charlie Parker and Dylan Thomas (World Outside, 42). Norman Podhoretz’s famous 1958 attack compared Beat writers to “the young savages in leather jackets who have been running amuck in the last few years”; “fighting … what the Beat Generation stands for,” Podhoretz concluded, “has to do with fighting the poisonous glorification of the adolescent in American popular culture” (“Know-Nothing Bohemians,” 81).

Charles Bernstein has singled out Allen Ginsberg as “a poet of adolescent identification” largely on the strength of Howl (1956), in which “the best minds of my generation” met their destinies in a vocabulary deliberately alien to the “adult,” academic poems Ginsberg no longer wanted to write (My Way, 270). It would be wrong to see in Ginsberg’s jeremiad the kind of focus on youth as a phase of life or on adolescence as a model for style or as a principal subject, which we have seen (so far) in poems by Williams, Loy, Moore, Auden, Larkin, Gunn, Bunting, Jarrell, and McGinley. And yet parts of Howl do depict and celebrate the adolescent “moratorium,” the period of self-conscious, risky freedom, which midcentury thinkers such as Erikson insisted that all young men (if not women) deserved, and which social critics such as Goodman would, a few years after Howl, insist that American teens were not getting. This is the freedom that Carl Solomon, “who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers” and “drove cross country seventy two hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision,” exemplified, in Ginsberg’s view, and for which an unjust America locked him up (Howl, 5). The country that diagnosed Solomon as insane is the country whose institutions make tame adults out of wild young men, a country where only juvenile delinquents feel free.⁵

Parts of Howl also flaunt linguistic registers new to American poetry, though not to American speech: registers associated with a (supposedly) new criminal class, with drug use, and with a gay male underground. (Mid-century psychiatric discourse, one of the explicit targets for Howl, considered homosexuality a form of immaturity.) Phrases like “angelheaded hipsters,” “busted in their pubic beards,” or “madman bum and angel beat in time” joined frank sexual words like “balled” and “snatched” in Ginsberg’s effort “to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose,” an effort that meant not the creation of new language from nothing but the appreciative quotation of young rebels’ nonstandard speech (Howl, 3–6).

Other poets constructed gentler stanzas from the same youth argot. Robert Creeley hijacked Bohemian slang for comic and tender effects in “A Wicker Basket” (1956–58); the woman in that poem

Certain American poets in the 1960s would make adolescent preoccupations, language, and tastes into foundations for new styles; these in turn reflected changes in adolescence itself. Noting both the career of John F. Kennedy and the heroism of civil rights workers, the cultural historian Peter Braunstein finds in mid-1960s mass media “a new valuation of young people as valorous, crusading, and brimming with moral vitality” (“Forever Young,” 248).⁶ By 1966, “a teenage boy from Buffalo” could tell Newsweek that “adults live without a personal identity” (Palladino, Teenagers, 232). Time in January 1967 declared “the Man of the Year” to be “the Young Generation,” “the man—and woman—of 25 and under”: “The young have already staked out their own minisociety, a congruent culture that has both alarmed their elders and, stylistically at least, left an irresistible impression” (“Man of the Year,” 18–19). During 1967, prevalent ideas of youth became less optimistic, more focused on confrontation and violence. Not coincidentally, that year saw many young activists shift their focus from gaining civil rights for African Americans to ending U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

Marshall Berman calls “arguments about what ‘the kids’ were up to, where they were leading our country and our culture,” “the real sound of the ’60s” (“Sympathy,” 24). Published in the Partisan Review in 1965, Leslie Fiedler’s essay “The New Mutants” became a frequent touchstone (Marvel Comics would later reuse Fiedler’s title for a series about superpowered teens). The essay diagnosed in the rising generation’s “beatniks or hipsters, layabouts and dropouts” “a growing sense of the irrelevance of the past and even of the present” (509, 507). These “new irrationalists” saw “the obsolescence of everything our society understands by maturity”; in consequence, they “are prepared to advocate prolonging adolescence to the grave” (511). The New Mutants (apparently all white men) “feel … they must not only become more Black than White but more female than male” (516). Fiedler warmed to youth movements later, but his label stuck: Frank Kermode, who taught at Wesleyan University during the student strike of 1970, described his “mixed feelings” about “the Rock generation, Mr. Fiedler’s mutants,” “the long-haired pot-smoking past-hating young” (“The Young,” 191). (Richard Wilbur addressed an eloquent poem to the same Wesleyan strikers.)

The seriousness with which adults took youth culture and the prominence of youth in political news entered the poetry of the period, especially (but not only) after Robert Bly and others organized public events in which poets stood alongside student radicals to denounce the Vietnam War.⁷ John Ciardi’s exasperated poem “And You?” makes fun of such events; at his imaginary demonstration, “A manifesto named Bly will recite itself throughout,” and “Victrolas from City Lights will improvise / the lucidity of 20,000 Berkeley undergraduates / in a march toward radiance and sugar for all” (The Little, 74). Other poets took the same phenomena far more seriously. Muriel Rukeyser saw in youth countercultures hopes for not just political but metaphysical change—her “young … resist a system of wars and rewards”:

Youth as innovative rebellion and youth as trans-or antihistorical pastoral, adolescence as individual (like lyric) and adolescence as collective (a youth movement) are for Rukeyser no longer at odds; rather, youth in revolt will restore Eden, the original “pastoral,” making a Green World for us all. “These young,” in Rukeyser’s incantatory phrase, recall the ring of “savages” who worship the sun, “not as a god but as a god might be,” in Stevens’s “Sunday Morning” (Collected Poetry, 53). They recall, too, the Neolithic art in which Rukeyser’s earlier poems (such as “Ajanta”) took an interest, and they are vulnerable to the critiques set down by Stevens and Williams, who attacked other modernists’ failure to distinguish between youth as social fact and youth as metaphor.

At the same pole of response, we can find Denise Levertov, whose poetry lauded antiwar activists, making a point of their newness, their innocence, their distance from compromised adult language and life. She wrote of one activist, “de Courcy Squire, war resister, / began her fast in jail. She is 18” (To Stay Alive, 22). Another activist “travels the country [as] a harbinger. / (He’s 20. His golden beard was pulled and clipped / by a Wyoming sheriff, but no doubt has grown again” (To Stay Alive, 41). In Levertov’s poems of radical sincerity, the stylistic marks of “open field” writing become signals of political commitment: declaratory short lines show the openness to experience that she identified with the young. Levertov even found hopes for radical change (which she identified with generational change) after the bloody debacle of the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968: “Which side are you on? / Revolution, of course. Death is Mayor Daley. / This revolution has no blueprints and … is the first that laughter and pleasure aren’t shot down in” (To Stay Alive, 29). Levertov, who taught in Berkeley during the People’s Park siege of 1969, wrote that the violence had given her “not only the knowledge that there is no such thing as a generation gap when people are engaged in a common task,” “but also the conviction that a meaningful education in the future” would take the form of a commune whose members “cook together … and grow vegetables and flowers together, and mend each other’s clothes” (Poet, 196). In a commencement address at Bennington College in 1969, the poet “suggest[ed] that Bennington turn itself into just such a commune” (Poet, 198).

Poets unsympathetic to radical youth also conceived their 1960s poems and projects as responses to youth’s demands. Shapiro paid tribute to the “juvenile delinquent” stereotype—even, perhaps, admired it—in his collection of prose poems, The Bourgeois Poet (1964):

Waiting in front of the columnar high school (the old ones look like banks, or rather insurance companies) I glance over the top of my book. The bells go off like slow burglar alarms; innumerable sixteeners saunter out.… Here comes a surly defiance. As in a ritual, each lights a cigaret just at the boundary where the tabu ends. Each chews. The ones in cars rev up their motors and have bad complexions like gangsters. The sixteeners are all playing gangster.

Waiting to pick his daughter up at school, Shapiro decides that the teen “sea of subjectivity” has “captured the telephone centers, the microphones, the magazine syndicates (they’ve left the movies to us)”; the high school strikes him as “enemy territory” (Bourgeois, 12). Poets younger than Shapiro are physical threats: “The term generation is a deadly weapon. When a poet says ‘my generation,’ move off a few feet. He probably has a switch-blade knife up his sleeve, and it’s for ‘my’ generation” (Bourgeois, 100). By the time he finished his essay “The Poetry Wreck” (1970), Shapiro had turned entirely against all youth subcultures present and future. “The poetry of semi-literates and rock singers,” he complained, “is equated with Shakespeare and Homer.” “The poetry of adolescents, amateurs and psychotics seems equal to the poetry of masters,” and “the kitsch-camp-op-pop-absurdist-revolutionary sweepings and swill with which [students] fill their wordless minds are what they bring to class” (Wreck, xvi–xvii, 357).

Shapiro and Levertov, as of 1970, disagreed on almost everything. Yet both believed that a new generation gap, and a new kind of American adolescent, inside and outside of colleges and universities, had worked substantial and likely permanent changes in the style and substance of contemporary verse. From the same premise, George Oppen, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Robert Lowell would create some of the decade’s most powerful poems.

Why did George Oppen return to the United States, and to the writing of verse, in 1958? Scholars cite the end of McCarthyite persecution, which had kept the committed communist Oppen, along with his wife and daughter, in Mexico. Oppen’s own letters from those years suggest an additional reason: American youth seemed to Oppen to promise a renewal both of genuine art and of political hope. As Beats gave way to hippies, as the civil rights movement gave way to the New Left, Oppen’s poetry began to emphasize his distance from the rising generation: his later poems could not wholly appreciate—though they still sought hope within—the new world of the young.

George and Mary Oppen moved back to New York City in 1958, after their daughter Linda matriculated at Sarah Lawrence College. Oppen wrote to Louis Zukofsky in 1958 that “the ‘young generation’ seems to me neither beat nor quiet.… They seem to me simply the healthiest in U.S. history” (Selected Letters, 8). “Surely these young people,” Oppen wrote in 1962, “make art a part of their lives in a sense we never did” (Selected Letters, 66). Oppen tried to bring these lives into his poems. In the late 1950s, he completed (but did not publish) “The New People”:

The Oppen who, in Norman Finkelstein’s words, “concentrates … upon the single crucial relationship of the self to community” asks whether the rising generation is different enough from its predecessors to save the community they purportedly share (“The Dialectic,” 360). The “new young people / with their new styles” seemed to Oppen to have attained a more collective, and a less mediated, way of being (and of making art) than Oppen’s generation could have imagined. Adolescent characters in novels, Julia Kristeva has written, become “metaphors of that which is not yet formed” (New Maladies, 151). Oppen plays on such metaphors but differentiates the new teens’ temporary blankness from the absolute, and potentially permanent, “virgin” or “mineral” blankness of an uncarved rock, a wilderness, or a blank page.

Youth culture made its first appearance in Oppen’s published poetry with “Pedestrian” (probably 1960 or 1961):

Oppen told Diane Meyer in late 1964 that while This In Which had not been “a decisive expression of a period,” he expected “to try in the next” book for just such a work (Selected Letters, 108). To Oppen as to so many others, the spirit of the age meant “the new, the ‘new generation’” (Selected Letters, 109). In “A Language of New York” (the sequence that later evolved into “Of Being Numerous”), Oppen not only praises the young Bohemians, Fiedler’s “new mutants,” but tries to describe their subculture and purposes. He sees this endeavor as a response to his own times, but also as a response to William Carlos Williams’s “To Elsie,” with its signature line “The pure products of America / go crazy” (CPW 218). Oppen begins:

Oppen considered his 1967 move from New York back to San Francisco “a homecoming to my adolescence” (Selected Letters, 394, 399). The city itself appeared “very familiar (our adolescence)—and ineffably distant”; the foggy port of Oppen’s youth had become the center for the Summer of Love (Selected Letters, 170). In that city, he transformed “A Language of New York” into “Of Being Numerous” (1968). That longer sequence considers not only young people retaking old buildings but also their art forms—live events, “happenings,” readings, partly improvised psychedelic rock—which, as Oppen saw them, aspired to take up Whitman’s project of representing American multitudes. The “bright light of shipwreck,” the burning failures of bourgeois liberalism, might—in the searching gaze of the young—yet inspire:

“That meditative man” is W. B. Yeats’s epithet for John Synge, who “dying chose the living world for text,” making his plays from the folklife of the Aran Islands (Yeats, Poems, 243, 133). Oppen seems here to identify himself with Synge and with the modernist generation that (as we have seen) explored “the young” for inspiration and material, almost as Synge explored the Aran Islands. “The young,” not “isolated” but collective, might now also represent themselves.

The lines quoted above formed segment 7 in “A Language of New York.” They became segment 25 in “Of Being Numerous.” Section 26 continues the investigation:

“Of Being Numerous” achieved a hesitant style well adapted to these fears, which Oppen also cast as doubts about the young. “Route” complains that the virtues Oppen sees in youth may not last:

On the one hand, the young (the opposite of “adults”) are the only source of social and even artistic hope. On the other, “the young” are (perhaps alarmingly) inchoate and unindividualized, like a geological “mass.” “Route” compares historical change, and change in the human life course, to geological processes—slow, cumulative, unavoidable. At the same time, it appears to suggest that a “sane man” and a next generation, an accurate art and the social body it reflects, can come into being only if young people stop becoming adults, if they retain the qualities—idealism? openness to experience? distance from the cash nexus?—that for Oppen (as for Goodman, Friedenberg, and other observers) characterize adolescence, or ought to characterize it. Oppen strives to embody just those qualities in his open, idealistic, “unfinished” verse, which seems to have left open space for the nonadult, antihistorical, collective future it cannot directly describe.

The events of late 1967 and 1968—the March on the Pentagon, the disturbances on many campuses, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the riots that followed—led Oppen to ask if that future had arrived. A 1967 letter asks if “social existence,” “adequate status,” might be “obtainable also by attaching oneself to a public event: as, the Beats, the Hippies, or even being young, which is rather public these days” (Selected Letters, 161). Oppen may have witnessed violence at Berkeley or at San Francisco State, where students occupied buildings in December 1967. Letters of 1968 show particular attention to the student occupations at Columbia and in Paris; Oppen wrote to William Bronk in May:

The kids, the rioting kids! Amazing! … They want to do something else. Something that has not already been done. I don’t mean they have found it, nor begun to. But this strange, world-wide ‘rising’—revolt, despair, demand—! The life of the mind: what is left for them is the life of the mind. But for how many IS that a possible way of life? … surely I don’t know. And what else is left for them?

Yet Oppen cannot quite join the hopeful collective that his poems from these years envision. “Of what I have witnessed and felt // The young do not yet possess so much time / It is not certain of any young man that he will” (ONCP 331–32). Oppen’s grave tone and his aposiopeses—open spaces left for experience he has not had, will not have—rebuke other grown-up poets’ naive beliefs that their inherited art and their students’ tastes might merge in a seamless, revolutionary whole. One such poet, Kay Boyle, concluded a 1969 tribute to student radicals at San Francisco State by imagining canonical poets “there beside you on / The campus grass, Shakespeare, Rilke, Brontë … Their young arms cradling your bones” (Charters, Portable Sixties Reader, 228). Rather than embracing Boyle’s vision of continuity between old poets and new students, Oppen suggests that 1960s art and culture—unlike all previous Western art and youth—reflect a sense that history might end. The 1962 Port Huron Statement (the founding manifesto of Students for a Democratic Society) declared flatly, “We may be the last generation” (quoted in Carroll, It Seemed Like Nothing Happened, 14). “An antigestalt became prevalent among young people” in the mid-1960s, Jeff Nuttall recalled, “an instinct to leave nothing complete,” “to half-close doors, to half-finish letters … for an act completed is an identity established,” and an identity established meant a commitment that might not last (Bomb Culture, 118). Nuttall’s description of a new outlook that favored the unfinished, the incomplete—and which found in those preferences signals of youth—fits the style Oppen found. Consider the last segment in “Of Being Numerous,” a prose quotation cut off, mid-sentence, by an ellipsis: … Few poems have seemed more “half-finished.”

Nuttall did not wholly trust the style he described; its “weakness,” he wrote, “is a kind of fatigue of communication and constructive action … as if the praxes of art were involved, to their detriment, in the processes of social dissolution” (Bomb Culture, 226). Donald Davie advanced the same objection to the poetry of Oppen and to much else in the arts after 1966, suggesting instead that “poetry should be responsible for giving to Californian youth that ballast which we may feel that it so perilously lacks” (Two Ways, 139). Davie added “Oppen does not agree”; for Oppen, youth “are to be, have to be, trusted, with whatever misgivings. The past will not help them, and perhaps we only thought that it helped us” (Two Ways, 139). Yet Oppen sometimes emphasized his misgivings and allowed his verse to incorporate them. A 1969 letter to Harvey Shapiro considers “A young man in imminent danger of being sent to Vietnam,” who “does not, I suppose, consider it absolutely necessary that universities” (or any other institutions) “should function” at all (Selected Letters, 191). There follows a poem entitle “A Modern Incident,” on the new American youth:

Without a “Shadow” of original sin (as in T. S. Eliot’s “Between the essence / And the descent / Falls the Shadow” [Eliot, Poems, 92]) “the young” advance a “Hedonist” “pop culture.” Their “exotic poetry / Between speech and action” includes all the real-time interventions of art into ordinary life—from street theater to “be-ins”—that had come to characterize the era, and about which Michael Fried, for example, complained, writing in 1967 that “the survival … of the arts has come … to depend on their ability to defeat theater” (Art and Objecthood, 163). Oppen’s antitheatrical terseness and his incomplete grammar allow his poem to resolve neither in confidence nor in fear. That irresolution enters the line break on “clean”: the young promise a “clean” new art, but perhaps deliver only a “clean / Sweep,” a negation of the old.

As the 1960s rolled on, Oppen’s doubts accumulated, filling the open spaces in his lines. George and Mary attended the infamous rock festival at Altamont in 1969, in which a young man was killed while the Rolling Stones played. Altamont became the first subject in “Some San Francisco Poems,” the sequence which anchored Seascape: Needle’s Eye (1972). Crowds arrive at the festival, “moving over the hills”:

The “songs are no one’s own” because they belong to the communal art of 1960s youth, the art that “Of Being Numerous” and “Route” compare, warily but favorably, to Oppen’s own late modernist practice. “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:25): the repeated phrase “needle’s eye” suggests that adult, middle-class America has become that rich man. Yet “needle’s eye” may also mean that the “streams of women and men” with “their long hair” are trying to do the impossible: their failure (to enter Heaven; to construct, from their new arts, a countercultural utopia) explains their “mourning.” Oppen likely had in mind, too, Yeats’s “A Needle’s Eye,” which depicts history as an unresting “stream”: “Things unborn, things that are gone / From needle’s eye still goad it on” (Poems, 288).⁸

In January 1971 Elizabeth Hardwick reviewed Gimme Shelter, “a brilliant documentary film” about Altamont (Bartleby, 30). Hardwick saw “death everywhere,” “in the dead, drugged eyes and in the jostling, nervous kicks and shoves”; she concluded that “something pitiless and pathological has seeped into youth’s love of itself” (Bartleby, 38, 40). Oppen’s poem makes no such grand claims; he said later, “we didn’t know anything about the murder then” (Power, “Interview,” 202). Nevertheless, “we knew something was wrong” (quoted in Mottram, “Political Responsibilities,” 157). “Some San Francisco Poems” records (as Oppen seems to have seen it) the failure of New Left politics and of the new, collectivist art—especially, perhaps, rock and roll—to deliver the new beginnings they promised. San Francisco became failure’s symbol:

To end a poem this way is to equate the fans leaving Altamont and the impoverished or disappointed hippies in post-1967 San Francisco with Adam and Eve leaving Eden. Youth movements’ failure represents (“again”) a second Fall. Adolescence as revolution, as force for permanent change, has already proven false, though youth as pastoral, as eternal hope for future change, might (like the myth of Eden) endure.

These otherwise various “San Francisco Poems” are thus held together in part by Oppen’s fear that the experiment of the American 1960s, the new youth and their new, collective outlook (which would replace the old liberal individualism), had already failed. “Something is wrong with the antiques, a black fluid / Has covered them,” but something is wrong with the new constructions too (ONCP 231). Though symbols of youth remain, “green leaves / Of young plants,” “we” can only “relinquish”

“Some San Francisco Poems” explores what James Longenbach calls “Oppen’s willingness not only to interrogate his own convictions but to suffer their collapse as well”; Oppen, Longenbach writes, “wants to bear failure, bear it willingly, openly” (Resistance to Poetry, 82). The fragmentation and the silences that mark the later Oppen—fragmentations different, in their refusal of grammar, in their frequent avoidance of visual data, from the terse unities of Discrete Series (1934)—look, we might say, like generation gaps, like the spaces that separate Oppen’s modernist consciousness from the necessarily incomplete new projects of the collective young. Yet Oppen will not allow Seascape: Needle’s Eye to end in resignation. Instead, the volume concludes with “Exodus,” whose crowds are not Adam and Eve leaving Eden but Israelites leaving Egypt:

For Gwendolyn Brooks, the changing models of adolescence in the 1960s—along with changing models of urban community, black art, and black identity—prompted not a return to poetry but changes in how, what, and for whom she wrote. The Brooks of A Street in Bronzeville (1945) and Annie Allen (1949) found an attractive solution to one dilemma that vexed earlier African American poets: whether to write of black experience in a “white,” Anglo-American idiom of pentameters and polysyllables, or to write of the same experience in “black” folk diction and forms. Brooks simply did both, often within the same poem. Consider “The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith”:

On the one hand, regular pentameters and end rhymes; on the other, syncopation, with words and phrases (“you get your,” “cat”) alien to standard written English. These effects of mixed diction, and the equally effective device of mixing blues quatrains with Anglo-American “high” forms, established (what Brooks’s early poems had argued explicitly in any case) that the black Americans of Chicago’s South Side deserved at least much dignity, attention, and beauty as anybody else. Yet Brooks’s showy early style had a cost; it cast the poet herself (the speaker in these poems) as authoritative and nearly impersonal, as someone who stood slightly apart from the community of which she wrote. Brooks later remembered “1941 through 1949” as a “party era,” when “we merry Bronzevillians could find each other and earnestly philosophize”; her poetry, though, presented her as a quiet journalist, chronicling the hardships and pleasures of a community which she simply observed (Report from Part One, 68).

To solve this emotional problem of felt remoteness, Brooks would turn first to children and then to adolescents. “A Song in the Front Yard” (also from A Street in Bronzeville) descends from “The Ruined Maid,” by Thomas Hardy, and from Sterling Brown’s “Chillun Got Shoes,” poems in which innocent girls envy well-dressed prostitutes. Brooks’s “Song,” however, adopts a yearning first-person mode:

Maud, however, ends up “all alone,” “a thin brown mouse,” and a possible fate for her author (Blacks, 32). “When I was a teen,” Brooks said in 1967, “my teen friends wondered, as they partied and danced, why I was happy to stay in my tiny room and write” (Report from Part One, 134). “I felt inferior,” she added in a later interview, “because I was not one of the girls who danced” (172).

By contrast with these too-safe girls and teens, Brooks’s early poems about showy young men and risky girls convey at once disapproval and excitement. Her most famous poem, “We Real Cool,” has become a schoolroom chestnut partly by virtue of its contradictory “messages,” since it warns young readers against emulating its speakers even as it shows their “cool.” The pool players, “seven at the golden shovel,” project (and the lines’ syncopation famously reflects) a swagger which the poem tries to acknowledge, even as it says that they will “die soon” (Blacks, 331). The pool players, Brooks said later, “are supposedly dropouts,” “probably young enough [for high school] or at least those I saw were when I looked in a poolroom” (Report from Part One, 155). (Chicago gangs did gather in pool rooms [Dawley, Nation of Lords, 115].) Poems from before 1963 celebrate—always with guilt or ambivalence—similar swagger in such characters as DeWitt Williams (who frequented “the Dance Halls, / Warwick and Savoy”), and “Cousin Vit,” whose sexy vitality defies even death (Blacks, 39, 125). The divisions between respectable and “street,” mature (or patient and studious) and immature (or wild) throughout Brooks’s early poems reflects her city. St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton in Black Metropolis (1945) described a “clear line between the ‘shady’ and the ‘respectable’” among the adults and teens of the Southside (382).¹⁰

Young risk takers, “shady” types, in Brooks’s early poems earn guilty admiration compared with her implicitly timid or prematurely wise, “respectable” poetic voice. When in the mid-1960s a discourse became available that gave adolescent wildness, rebellion, or “shady” behavior ethical value, Brooks embraced it, giving the new street youth not warnings but odes. Authentic, proud blackness, for Brooks, became in the late 1960s inseparable from encounters with the young: Brooks’s daughter Nora remembers her mother exclaiming in 1968, when Brooks herself was fifty-one, “You middle-aged people make me so mad!” (Kent, A Life, 222). “Just now there’s such a gush of raw vigor,” Brooks commented in that year, “something very special happening in poetry today and I see it happening chiefly among the young blacks” (quoted in Kent, A Life, 227–28). Other black poets and critics—among them Brooks’s friend (and later publisher) Don L. Lee (Haki R. Madhubuti)—saw something special too, something they tried to describe, encourage, and codify as the Black Arts Movement. “The black revolt is as palpable in letters as it is on the streets,” wrote Hoyt Fuller (“Towards a Black Aesthetic,” 199). Calls for writers to enact “revolt” resonated so strongly with Brooks—and led so consistently to poems idealizing the young—because she was already interested in how the young saw themselves, and in how she might stand in relation to them.

Completed in 1968, Brooks’s second long poem, In the Mecca, started out as a novel for teenaged readers; the first of two surviving chapters begins with the protagonist on her way to her graduation, “tense, and wondering, and hot-hearted and oh-so-sixteen-going-on-seventeen” (quoted in Kent, A Life, 125). The finished poem, as Cheryl Clarke has put it, reflects “an artistic crisis in [Brooks’s] writing life as she struggled to consider the issues of audience” in a bleak, dense exploration of black-on-black violence, pride, and social abandonment within the apartment complex from which the poem takes its name (“After Mecca,” 27). One of its strongest segments is an ode to girl gangs:

Ruthie and Sue, in other words, are Sadies—but more aggressive Sadies, in whose aggression Brooks finds a political meaning:

The passage shows not just a new disposition toward aggressive teens (whom Brooks no longer sounds ashamed to admire) but new rhythms to match. Such broken-up lines try not just to praise and to justify but to reflect these teens’ caustic, confrontational, and (for Brooks) politically meaningful style. The teen gangs in Brooks seem (to Brooks) to solve the one-many problem that vexed Oppen’s poems about young activists; the collective being of these young people represents something new (hence “single,” individual) in the history of the language.

Brooks was not the only observer who looked at Chicago’s street gangs and saw hope. Starting in 1965, several gangs on the Southside and West Side reorganized themselves as neighborhood-based social service organizations. The activist David Dawley became in 1967 the only white member of one such gang, the Conservative Vice Lords; “moving the Vice Lords from gang to community organization,” Dawley recalled, meant “less crime, fewer homicides … and storefront programs that served the community” (Nation of Lords, xii, xvi). One Vice Lord remembered that in 1967 “most people still considered us a gang, but we were trying to get over to them that we were … no longer out for killing and jive.… The militants came in and say why be a gangbanger and kill each other when you can kill the honky, and we began to see that the enemy was not black” (105, 107).

The same years saw lost credibility for the adult, official leaders of black Chicago. For much of the 1960s the Chicago Coalition of Community Organizations, or CCCO—the subject of a voluminous study by Alan Anderson and George Pickering—tried to end de facto residential segregation, help “children virtually imprisoned in public housing,” and solve the inequalities of its school system (Confronting the Color Line, 145). The organization’s efforts included repeated visits from Martin Luther King Jr.; Anderson and Pickering call this “Chicago campaign … the second major failure of King’s career” (3). 1966 and 1967 saw a rise in local violence, as Southside and West Side teens clashed with police.

From those clashes, young spokespeople—some of them “gang leaders”—emerged (Anderson and Pickering, Confronting the Color Line, 210–11). Reformed and politically minded but still ready for a fight, the gangs struck some Chicagoans as attractive alternatives to a nonviolent movement that had not achieved many of its goals; “the civil rights organizations that came to Chicago” with King, Dawley explains, “were not working with the hard-core people anyway” (Nation of Lords, 108). Across the nation, Black Power seemed an affair of youth, even of teens; William L. Van Deburg notes that “top-ranking” Black Panthers in 1968 “ranged in age from 26 to 34 while second-level leaders were between 21 and 26. 16 to 21-year-olds predominated among the rank and file” (New Day in Babylon, 156).

Brooks would respond to Black Power in Chicago with laudatory poems which emphasized its status as a youth movement, as something quintessentially unfixed and anti-adult. The ceremony to dedicate the Southside Wall of Respect, at which Brooks read “The Wall” and young black poets read their work, allowed Brooks to share that energy in public, paying homage to “Black / boy-men on roofs” (Blacks, 444). But “The Wall” was just the start of Brooks’s attempt to shape a style for these “boy-men.” The Black-stone Rangers on the Southside, like the Vice Lords on the West Side, had tried to become a social-service organization without abandoning their swagger and their insignia. In 1968 and 1969, Brooks recalled, she had “been hearing about the Blackstone Rangers for a couple of years, and I’d had this yearning—it sounds funny, I know—to ‘do something for them’” (Report from Part One, 168). “Something” became the writing class Brooks, with Walter Bradford, taught for gang members and their friends.¹¹ That class inspired “The Blackstone Rangers,” a kind of palinode to “We Real Cool.” Brooks introduces the Rangers “As Seen by Disciplines” (not disciples, but disciplines, such as sociology): “Black, raw, ready. / Sores in the city / that do not want to heal” (Black, 446). As they see one another, however, the Rangers are not sores, but symbols of confidence:

Brooks’s changing views about street gangs and her work with them led her to change her style in order to make it adequate for their praise; she even claimed that the Rangers began to respond to her only once she stopped “imposing … iambic pentameter” (quoted in Clarke, “After Mecca,” 43). Irregular alliterations and repetitions, along with sporadic full rhymes, give Brooks the forward momentum she had earlier used for poems about high livers, profligate rebels, and pleasure lovers (such as “The Rites for Cousin Vit”). Here, however, the profligate rebels are “The Leaders” (Brooks’s subtitle); they conjure up a nation. “Gang Girls are sweet exotics”; the gang girl “Mary is / a rose in a whiskey glass” (Blacks, 449). Brooks encourages Mary to act like a Sadie, not like a Maud, and to accept the sexual advances her Ranger boyfriend is likely to make: “swallow, straight, the spirals of his flask / and assist him at your zipper; pet his lips / and help him clutch you” (Blacks, 450). Such advice in Brooks’s earlier work must have sounded disapproving and ironic. Here, however, the bad girls are the best girls and deserve straightforward if shocking praise, since their expressive choices seem to empower the new nation of the militant young. Acknowledging Mary’s need for “non-loneliness,” the poem also comes close to the glorification of adolescent sexuality, of sexual and national energy in youth, which we have already seen, if not in Oppen, certainly in Williams and in Gunn.

When Brooks’s late-1960s heroes are not adolescents, she sometimes treats them as if they were. Brooks’s paean to Lee (another part of In the Mecca) finds parallels among political power, new kinds of loud music, and the “physical” prowess that Brooks’s spondee-heavy, irregular lines emulate. Lee

Nor was Lee the only hero whom she treated in this way. Assassinated in July 1963 at the age of thirty-eight, after a very visible career in Mississippi’s NAACP, the civil rights martyr Medgar Evers seems an appropriate subject for a laudatory memorial, but not necessarily for a poem about youthful exuberance. Yet Evers, in Brooks’s version, achieved his prominence (and his martyrdom) by gleefully and violently refusing adult rules, adult tempers, adult restraints:

Brooks’s off-balance lines—as rhythmically unpredictable as she could make them, rendered more so by irregular internal rhymes—emphasize not (for example) steadiness of resolve but vigor and speed. This Evers seems to have made his mark by attacking not only segregationist traditions but also the integrationist caution (the slow, “old tempos”) that Brooks attributes to previous generations. Brooks said of Evers in 1969, “He just up and decided he wasn’t going to have anything else to do with the stale traditions of the past” (Report from Part One, 164).

Such vigor also sounds in the jagged lines of “Boy Breaking Glass.” The poem begins in medias res:

The poem argues that a boy breaking a window has accomplished a valid (political) protest and in some sense “created” a work of art. His spontaneous attack on a window demonstrates that no more sophisticated means to contest his condition lies within his grasp: “It was you,” the boy cries, “who threw away my name!” Glossing her poem without saying so, Brooks averred in 1972 that “Today’s young people … want to be free to make, to create. If they are not allowed to create, they break. In a vacuum, breaking seems to them a form of creation” (Report from Part One, 82).

Completed in 1968, “Boy Breaking Glass” may address Chicago’s local violence of 1966 and 1967, the “long hot summer” riots of 1967, or the riots in Chicago (and in more than a hundred other American cities) after the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Dawley, an eyewitness, explained why many black Chicagoans did not mind the destruction at the time: “Violence was directed against property, not people, and the only danger was for whites. There’s no joy but there’s a good feeling because in this riot there’s integrity. Black people are standing up to The Man” (Nation of Lords, 119). Brooks depicted such reactions again in her 1969 poem “Riot,” in which civil disturbances become Romantic uprisings of youth against age, of Black Power against Law:

What makes Brooks’s poetry of the late 1960s so fascinating in retrospect—and so important to my argument in this book—is not simply that she embraced Black Power nor that embracing Black Power, for her, meant embracing ideas about the power in youth. What matters is that she altered her style—and wrote her most original poetry—as a direct result of that embrace and that the poetics that resulted—the broken-up, unpredictable, semimetrical, aggressive, sometimes fragmentary poetics of “The Black-stone Rangers” and In the Mecca and “Riot” and “Boy Breaking Glass”—seems particularly designed to capture the virtues Brooks ascribed to youth, virtues (aggression, rebellion, sexualized vigor, fresh attempts at independence) that she had described, but could not view as virtues, in the more careful poems of her earlier career. Youth as eternal pastoral appears in her poetry only to be repudiated entire; youth as rebellion created and sustained by peer groups (such as street gangs) can impose new language and energize the world.

After 1969, Brooks began to simplify her poetry, narrowing her range of diction, smoothing out her syntax, and shifting her interests from adolescents back to children. Brooks’s 1971 sequence “In Montgomery” records her trip through Alabama on behalf of Ebony magazine: she arrived in the state “expecting / the strong young,” feeling “that all of Before was rehearsal, / that the true trends, the splendors, the splurges, / were to be lit by the young” (In Montgomery, 2). A disappointed Brooks observed less confidence among black youth than late-1960s Chicago had led her to expect. She watches, for example,

In Montgomery consciously reprises Brooks’s earlier work. This girl is “Real Cool”; near her, Brooks sees “bean-eaters” (the title of Brooks’s 1960 book). These bean-eaters, however, look younger than those of 1960: one of them wears “dark glasses,” another “blue jeans,” and yet another plans on “‘goin’ up nawth where the money is. Young/ Jerry Johnson’s not sure” (In Montgomery, 24–25).

Nor is Brooks sure. Montgomery is, still, “not free”; Brooks has not found here the energies she embraced in the Blackstone Rangers, and the poem marks the end of this phase in her work (In Montgomery, 28). Almost the only particularized adolescent in Brooks’s post-1972 work is the troubled collegian of “The Coora Flower,” caught between distress in her unlivable home and “learning nothing necessary” at her white-seeming school (In Montgomery, 81). The glorification of bad-boy and gang-girl vigor in such poems as “The Blackstone Rangers” could not last. Yet the confluence of Brooks’s earlier shyness with late-1960s celebrations of confrontational African American youth made that glorification possible and generated some of Brooks’s strongest poems.

Of all the responses to 1960s youth in literary poetry, the most ambivalent and the most original took place in the work of Robert Lowell. Almost every phase of Lowell’s career involved some quality (not always the same quality) that we might call—or that his peers dubbed—adolescent. David Kalstone found the key to Lowell’s oeuvre in several poems (some entitled “Rebellion”) that told and retold the story of how, in 1936, the nineteen-year-old Robert struck his father and knocked him to the floor in a dispute over the young poet’s love life (Kalstone, Five Temperaments, 45–49). “Of course it was melodramatic and adolescent,” Lowell recalled, “but I was a very melodramatic adolescent indeed” (Letters, 485).

If an adolescent is a kind of person characterized by rebellion rather than obedience, by becoming rather than being, and by challenging and testing rather than trusting, knowing, or believing, it is no wonder that Lowell associated his own work with adolescence throughout his career. His earliest poems, in their borrowings from Milton and their aggression against parent figures, exemplified Oedipal rebellion; his “confessional” verse of the 1950s and early 1960s explored psychoanalytic models of identity, guilt, and change. Regarded early on as a poetic authority, Lowell then used his powers to attack himself: the best accounts of his career highlight his successive rejections and revolts.

In Notebook, this self-canceling, self-attacking tendency entangles itself indissolubly with Lowell’s thinking about the stages of life, about his own age, and about young people, from his ten- and twelve-year-old daughter to the antiwar students with whom he made common cause. The sonnets’ self-canceling lines and sentences are aesthetic equivalents for both adolescent energy and adult unease; the sonnets often reject the seeming promise of adolescence even as they deny the authority of experience and of adulthood. Adolescence as pastoral, in these sonnets, has already collapsed—the green world is already iced-over, invaded, decayed—but adolescence as rebellion is bound to fail. The adult poet thus remains also adolescent, nostalgically and endlessly rebelling against himself. This disillusioned dilemma made its way not only into the free verse of Lowell’s last phase (which often contrasts youthful vigor with middle-aged exhaustion) but also into other poets’ work in the 1970s and afterward, where adolescence as a basis for poetry means not hope nor energy nor change but simply the absence of adult authority, the sense that we are all immature on our own.

To think about late Lowell and adolescence is thus to give an account of Lowell’s late styles. Take, for example, these lines from “Through the Night”:

Like the doomed students in Auden’s Orators, the “I” and “we” in such lines depend for their identities and energies on what they oppose—as weeds, flowerbeds, or firefighters, fires. Moreover “I,” “we,” are always incomplete, resembling the green weed, not the flower or fruit. The strain and unprogress we feel in the sonnets involves the fiftyish Lowell identifying himself as both a father figure and an agent of youth in revolt. In “Memorial Day,” he overhears Harvard students shouting to one another from their dorms:

Lowell’s desire to challenge his own authority and his consequent projection of a self violently divided and incomplete became the basis for the style on which the sonnets depend. Here are some of its salient features:

Now this is the situation adolescents commonly face with parents. Friedenberg (writing in 1959) called adolescence “the period during which a young person learns who he is … and differentiates himself from his culture, though on the culture’s terms” (Vanishing Adolescent, 29). The adolescent can be in a relation of rejection to father and mother, to society and culture, but never in no relation, never simply without. And this is how Lowell regards and addresses history—his own and that of the nation. If part of the strength of the early Lowell was the force with which he attacked his sources, part of the later Lowell’s originality (as Vereen Bell has shown) lay in the ways he credited those sources, insisting that we cannot make everything new. The most persistent symbols in Notebook—rivers clogged with “slush-ice,” and the deciduous foliage that Lowell calls (following Gerard Manley Hopkins) “leafmeal” and also “leaf-lace”—suggest Lowell’s endless work on his always-rough drafts, his “carbon scarred with ciphers,” the self as never original and never finished (N 173).

No wonder, then, that the poems (to quote Bell’s description of “Night Sweat”) “indicate an imperfect transition between childhood and maturity and an arrested suspension between them” (Lowell, 73). In Notebook that suspension becomes a principle of style. The sonnets’ lines, each of which might correct, improve, contradict, or simply rephrase the one before, become his symbols for generational succession and for the instability that Bell describes. The Lowell of these poems has to keep moving, but to no real destination—no future; his grammar maps his odd predicament with overlapping or ambiguous, bidirectional clauses: “The air is snow-touched, fans our streaming backs, / blows in and in, a thousand snow-years back; / we were joined in love, a thousand snow-years back” (N 126). Boustrophedon (backward-then-forward, or right-to-left, then left-to-right—literally “ox-tread”) becomes Lowell’s figure for his relation to history and to the autobiography that leaves him neither certain nor mature. “I’m counterclockwise,” he remarks elsewhere; “I come on walking off-stage backwards” (Selected Poems, 231, 237). Elsewhere, boustrophedon represents political change or its failure; college students graduate then “turn with the tread of an ox to serve the rich” (N 132).

Notebook dwells not just on youth and age but on ages and numbers, especially fifty and twenty. “Can I go on loving anyone at fifty?” (N 97).” It’s as bad for me at fifty as nineteen—/ the thirst for grownups, open cars and girls” (CPRL 610). “We’re fifty / and free!” (N 22). The people in Notebook regularly tell us that they are, or are not, twenty: “You may have joie de vivre, but you’re not twenty” (N 154); “I’m twenty, I’ve done badly, I’ll do better” (“Saint-Just,” N 169). Lowell’s title “Gap” means both a military breach (an opportunity for an infantry charge) and a generation gap: “I wish to live my life back to twenty-one, / be ill-at-ease again as everyone,” that sonnet muses, concluding instead, “My wooing at fifty would engulf the siren” (N 212). Rewritten for History, the poem became “Student” and declared “If I could stop growing, I would stop at twenty” (CPRL 549). These numbers triangulate the Lowell of 1967 and 1968 (age fifty), Lowell’s own remembered teens and early twenties, and the lives of those who are twenty (give or take a few years) in the present time of the poems, which thus show him thinking both about which aspects of youth—and of poetic forms—remain constant over generations, and about which aspects had suddenly changed.

The years of Lowell’s sonnets were also the first in which he took the mood stabilizer lithium carbonate. Frequently he connects his leveled-off disposition to health or to dejected maturity, the exhilaration of adolescence in political and cultural revolt to his own manic states. “Sound Mind, Sound Body” muses “Mens sana? O at last; from twenty years / of the annual mania, thirty of adolescence” (N 216). Lowell’s lithium carbonate regimen required self-administered blood tests: “High Blood” construes a blood test as a test for mania and for generational affiliation, since heartbeats and steady pulses suggest rock and roll: “the aorta and heartbeat of my life” are “acid rock turned high, teen-age record purring” (N 223). The psychiatrist Peter Blos in 1962 defined adolescence as an “individuation experience … which leads in its final step to a sense of identity” by way of “oppositional, rebellious and resistive strivings” (On Adolescence, 12). Such “strivings,” with no “final step,” are what Notebook depicts.

Those depictions, in turn, guide portrayals of public events. Between 1966 and 1969 the New York Review of Books, which Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick had helped to found, became a conduit for communication between older literary figures and radical youth.¹⁴ Leslie Fiedler’s “On Being Busted at 50” appeared in the New York Review of Books in 1967; after Buffalo police (reacting to his stature as a campus leftist) invaded his house and planted drugs on his children and their friends, Fiedler discovered “an adult community more terrified … than I had then guessed of the gap between themselves and the young” (“Busted,” 10). The same issue of the New York Review included Lowell’s Prometheus Bound. This focus on radical youth and student movements among the adults with whom Lowell spent much of his time ought to be seen as central to Notebook, to both its sounds and its structure—correlated, albeit uneasily, with the year’s most newsworthy scenes.

The first such scene is the October 1967 March on the Pentagon, which Lowell describes in both “The March 1” and “The March 2,” and Norman Mailer in The Armies of the Night. Mailer alleged that Lowell happened on his plan for sonnets, or on his Notebook style, after the March on the Pentagon, even as a result of it; after the violence with which the march concluded, Lowell and Dwight Macdonald “left, unhurt, and eventually went home, Lowell to begin a long poem a few days later. (When next Mailer [who writes of himself in third person] saw [Lowell] a month later, 800 lines had already been written!)” (Mailer, Armies, 292).¹⁵ The march gave the poet an experience of solidarity with the young (“lovely to lock arms, to march absurdly locked”) against unjust, “marmoreal” authority (N 54). Yet it also showed his distance from them. Lowell’s protesters “step off like green Union Army recruits / for the first Bull Run,” the first land engagement of the Civil War—for the Union, a surprising and bloody setback; Melville wrote of that engagement, in lines the younger Lowell had used in another poem, “All wars are boyish and are fought by boys” (N 54; CPRL 20; Melville, Battle-Pieces, 43). Successive, conflicting lines of verse suggest the queues of protesters and guards; Lowell, with his wet glasses and shaky hand, feels out of place “march[ing] absurdly locked” with youth, even before confronting a young soldier, who in turn looks out of place defending the draft (N 54).

In this respect the march and “The March 1” stand for the whole of the book; over and over, Notebook depicts a failed or fraudulent spring or revolution, political and emotional promise wasted. “First Spring,” for example, offers

Lowell’s sonnet form looks and sounds new but proves incapable of narrative or argumentative progress; the sonnets repeat the same judgment on late-1960s youth. “Thanksgiving” and “Marching” liken hippies to seventeenth-century antinomians in New England: “They reel, arms locked, from luncheon into night: / bellbottom, barefoot, Christendom’s wild hair; / words are what get in the way of what they say” (N 71). “Youth” compares the students of the late 1960s instead to Lowell’s own cohort; he envies and identifies with the young but concludes that their hopes for “revolution” will not come true: “Many a youth will turn from student to tiger, / revolutionaries will sleep in the grave” (N 221). In “Harvard” what Geoffrey Hartman once called Lowell’s “temporicide” (Beyond Formalism, 268), his habit of merging time-scales, lets him appear to sleep through thirty years; Lowell wakes as a teen, goes back to bed on a snowy morning, sleeps “through high-school, through college, through fall-term vacation,” and wakes again in the 1960s (N 79).

In another sonnet, the middle-aged Lowell claims the same sexual and existential hungers as he had in the 1930s: “it’s the same for me / at fifty as at thirteen, my childish thirst / to be the grown-up in his open car and girl” (N 44). “Thirteen” in Notebook became “Nineteen” in History (CPRL 6ro). The same sonnet (“Through the Night 1”) pursues a three-way comparison among “the generations of leaves,” the stages of a human life, and the endlessly revised but never-completed state of Lowell’s own manuscripts:

Among the recurring symbols in Notebook, none recurs so often as the color green—in leaves, in grass, in insects, in jealous people, in paint; almost always it signifies youth, spring, rebirth. Usually that rebirth is stalled, artificial, feigned, or hors de combat. At Eliot House, where Harvard students live, “cold makes the school’s green copper cupola / greener over the defoliated playground” (N 79). The seals Lowell envies in “Seals” flee humanity and “head north—their haven / green ice in a greenland never grass” (N 250). “For Archie Smith: 1917–35” memorializes Lowell’s classmate by comparing his early death to Dutch elm disease: “Our sick elms rise to breathe the peace of heaven, / at six the blighted leaves are green as mint” (N 220). By noon the leaves will appear less attractive, their shadows less clear; in a few years the tree will die. Green also marks standoffs, endless conflicts, and stalemates, as in the green opposing armies of “The March 2” (N 134). Another sonnet evokes “mercenary battles” whose “lines rushed, and Greek met Greek” in fights which at least came to (lethal) conclusions. By contrast, in contemporary “police-riots,” “Our police hit more to terrorize than kill” (N 241).

“Police riot,” for Lowell, would have had a particular meaning: it was the term by which official inquiries described the bloody confrontation between the New York City police and the students who occupied Columbia University buildings in April 1968. It seems impossible to overstate the attention that those events drew from literary writers; “non-Columbia people” (as the student newspaper, the Columbia Spectator, put it), among them “Dwight Macdonald, Conor Cruise O’Brien, Stephen Spender and Allen Ginsberg,” “wandered about the campus inhaling revolution” (Avorn et al., Up Against the Ivy Wall, 148). In the New York Review, F. W. Dupee recalled the last night of the “uprising” as a kind of dissociative episode: “it was as if I were two different persons, one of them almost stifling in the blackout of his usual ‘style,’ character, profession, identity; the other vaguely exulting in the strange feeling of freedom” (“Uprising,” 38). The uprising seemed to have split adult liberals into two people, one grimly respectable, one immature and energetic.

Lowell’s split phrases reflect that uneasy division. “No destructive element emaciates / Columbia this Mayday afternoon,” his “Pacification of Columbia” begins; the first line remembers Joseph Conrad’s advice (“In the destructive element immerse”), which Stephen Spender used as the title of his once well known book about modernism (N 184). At the end of the sonnet, police officers’

“Pacification” appeared on its own in the New York Review; in Notebook, it introduces the sequence “May.” Lowell asks throughout that sequence whether youth movements and adolescent temperaments always seek violence and if political violence ever succeeds: “Guns / failed Che Guevara, Marie-Antoinette, / Leon Trotsky”; “arms given the people are always used against the people” (N 184–85). The third sonnet portrays a “Leader of the New Left,” perhaps Columbia radical Mark Rudd, with “scars from the demonstrations / he bore like a Heidelberg student,” as if the confrontation he helped to orchestrate had no more consequences (was as much a mere symptom of young men’s hotheadedness) as Heidelberg’s famous duels (N 185).

Alan Williamson finds in the Columbia sonnets “an almost mathematical pairing-off of attacks on Leftists with attacks on administrators” (Pity the Monsters, 174, 174–79). But the sonnets are also Lowell’s attacks on himself. In a particularly well publicized episode, students took over the office of President Grayson Kirk and, in Dupee’s summary, “smoked [Kirk’s] cigars, drank his sherry, worked at his desk, lined up to use his bathroom, inspected the books on his shelves, slept wherever a surface offered, held interminable meetings, climbed in and out of the windows, and received guests” (“Uprising,” 24). Reentering his office, Kirk exclaimed, “My God, how could human beings do a thing like this?” (Avorn et al., Up Against the Ivy Wall, 200). Much of the damage was later traced to the police.¹⁶ In “The Restoration,” Lowell sees and condemns himself both in the students and in President Kirk’s ancién regime:

Stephen Yenser notes the sonnets’ “imagery of dust, draff, kitchen middens, and various wreckage”; Kirk’s office makes just one example (Circle, 290). Helen Vendler, similarly, describes the sonnets’ “nearly indigestible fragments of experience,” “categories melted into one spew” (Part of Nature, 126; The Given, 22). These heaps and middens may owe some of their prominence to the trash, broken furniture, and waste piles so prominent in journalists’ accounts of the Columbia takeover and its aftermath. In the “1930s” sequence from the 1976 Selected Poems, the same rubbish heaps suggest the wasted promise or husk of Lowell’s own adolescence: “a boiled lobster / flung on the ash-heap of a soggy carton”; “old tins, dead vermin, ashes, eggshells, youth” (CPRL 505, 448). To think about politics in the 1960s means, for Lowell, both to think about his own youth and to think about garbage. With his green stalemates, trash piles, and failed revolutions, Lowell constructs a poetics of adolescence in which neither its pastoral nor its promised novelty succeeds: all that is left is the evidence, material and verbal, arranged into rubbish heaps or heaped into poems.¹⁷

One more public event in Notebook deserves note: the Chicago Democratic Convention of August 1968, in which Hubert Humphrey accepted the nomination amid horrific (and nationally televised) violence. Both Lowell and Hardwick attended; Hardwick’s appalled coverage condemned both police and Yippies: “With this lawlessness of the law, misery fell from the sky” (“Chicago,” 5). The carnage of the “children’s crusade” confirmed, for Lowell, that people, events, and generations merely repeat themselves like tides, or like Lowell’s own endlessly marching poetic lines (N 229). On the one hand, individuals do not improve (so that maturity is no better than youth); on the other, generations do not improve on their predecessors (so that youth movements will not make society good):

These public poems with their intractable parallels and endless standoffs show how the Lowell of Notebook found a form for his refusal either to endorse the student-radicals, or to condemn them. “Emotionally I am in sympathy with the ‘Revolution,’” Lowell said to Williamson, but “intellectually I am doubtful that it would really make anything better” (quoted in Williamson, Pity the Monsters, 165). “The new blade is too sharp, the old poisons” (N 80). ¹⁸

The ambivalence toward young activists; the seasonal symbols, in which spring leads to no renewal; the focus on the life course; the form, in which lines strain against one another, defying expectations of linear progress; and the attitude toward public, directly political events are of a piece. Yenser says that “Lowell’s single most characteristic stance” is “a die-hard antimeliorism” (Circle, 312); Bell, that Notebook is “fundamentally antitelelogical” (Lowell, 142). That is, the volume denies that things, people, and society permanently, cumulatively, or naturally get better. One aspect of that denial is a dual suspicion, first of young people’s beliefs that they can radically transform the world and second of adults’ claims to know more than the young.¹⁹ “We’ve so little faith that anyone / ever makes anything better,” Lowell wrote in “For Eugene McCarthy,” making McCarthy one of two exceptional politicians in Notebook whose failure proves a sad rule (N 204). “R.F.K.” described the other: “I miss / you, you out of Plutarch, made by hand—/ forever approaching our maturity” (N 197). Robert Kennedy “may have been our hero,” Lowell wrote, defending his own phrase, but “he was never mature; nor would anyone who knew him well and loved him, have thought so” (Letters, 508). “We have struggled to where we are,” Lowell’s Prometheus says, “by living through a succession of tyrannies. Each ended … when a son cut down his father” (Prometheus Bound, 8). What if one has been the son and is now the father? One cannot remain adolescent or retain the hopes and energies of youth indefinitely, but for Lowell adulthood offers no stable place for critique and no attractive alternative, either in public life (where it represents an exhausted liberalism) or in the household (where it is ineffective fatherhood, failed sexual longing, muddling-through).

“Antimeliorism” describes Lowell’s approach not just to history but also to biography: people grow up (from ten to thirteen, thirteen to twenty, twenty to fifty), but they do not improve. It also describes Lowell’s technique: “I would have liked each line to be better than the last, and knew this was impossible,” Lowell wrote of his Notebook style (Letters, 518). One of his most accomplished single poems, “New Year’s Eve 1968,” takes pains to describe that technique in its relation to the life course. In doing so he seems to compare himself by turns to John Donne, Grayson Kirk, Ulysses, and Prometheus: “These conquered kings pass angrily away,” the poem begins, echoing Donne’s “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” in which “virtuous men passe mildly’ away” (N 173; 87). But Lowell is neither virtuous nor mild, and no literary work can preserve virtue once it moves from potential to action: “each library is some injured tyrant’s home.” “This year” (that is, 1968) requires not virtue but “bad, straightforward, unscanning sentences—/ mine were downtrodden, branded on backs of carbons”; “the typescript looked like a Rosetta Stone.” Like the creator of the Rosetta Stone, Lowell leaves not a guide for the future but a way to translate the otherwise-inscrutable past. The future, meanwhile, like the sky at the New Year, looks as if someone had already written on it, looks, in fact, like Lowell’s typescripts: “The slush-ice on the east water of the Hudson / is rose-heather this New Year sunset; the open channel, / bright sky, bright sky, carbon scarred with ciphers” (N 173). That ending is even more grim than it looks, since it echoes Lowell’s Prometheus Bound: “Bright sky, bright sky, bright sky! … So helpless here, anything living can hurt me. Under this blank sky, nothing will open” (5).

Lowell’s sonnets about his daughter Harriet, who turned thirteen in 1970, try to mediate less grimly between youth and middle age. Notebook opened with several such sonnets, and I conclude my discussion of it with two more. “These Winds” relies on an armature of repeated words and syllables (“these,” “winds,” “upright,” “all”), on abrupt, boustrophedon alternations between harshly enjambed lines and heavily end-stopped ones, and on an unusual, complicating tenderness:

Here the green of literary pastoral collides not with would-be revolutionary energy but with the gentler rhythms of Harriet’s domestic space. Like her father rewriting his poetry, Harriet does not compose or perform but “corrects” her piano piece, going back to fix mistakes. The generations of trees struggle unstably upward, as children learn to crawl, then walk. Lowell identifies, speaks for, both upstairs poet and downstairs child, as he does for both trees and winds.

“The Hard Way,” dedicated to Harriet, better typifies Lowell’s difficulties; it begins with a warning and ends with yet another image of irresolvable conflict:

The poem offers all at once what so many of Lowell’s sonnets offer separately or in pairs. Here are chiasmus (ice, melt, melt, ice), symmetry (tufts, grass, dust, tufts, grass), and aposiopesis, rhetorical figures which avoid cumulative sequence. Here is the unknowable future, reason for qualified hope in Lowell’s daughter if nowhere else. Here is a way of seeing everything in nature as a symbol for generational conflict or generational succession; here are natural processes that do not progress but move ambivalently “backward.” Here is green grass as a failed symbol for flourishing youth. Here is adolescence as violence (not guns but the feathered arrow). And here is one more apologetic attempt to encapsulate changeable youth in fixed poetry, asking—and doubting—whether adolescence can lead to anything better than itself.

By the time he wrote The Dolphin in 1971 and 1972, Lowell’s interest in adolescence focused more tightly on his biography and his mental illness. “Fishnet” warns that this autobiographical poet will not find a clear plot for his “illegible” life, then tries to generalize that plight: “Poets die adolescents, their beat embalms them, / the archetypal voices sing off key” (CPRL 645). The sonnet “Ivana” addresses Lowell’s “small-soul-pleasing” six-year-old stepdaughter, who required plastic surgery after an accidental scalding; almost catechistic in its stream of queries, the poem also sums up conclusions that Notebook had already drawn. No phase of life can know more than another. Teenagers, youth, and adolescents have no special power, but their angst is never outgrown:

In Lowell’s last book, Day by Day (1977), the word adolescence represents not a set of energies and changes he seems unable to escape but one he has escaped. “Death of a Critic” portrays Lowell’s exhaustion (“three parts iced-over,” he calls himself, quoting Matthew Arnold) as an analogue, perhaps even a consequence, of students’ failure to change the world. “The students whose enthusiasm / burned holes in the transitory / have graduated to not having been”; even revived, “they would have the fool’s heartiness of ghosts … / without references or royalties, / out of work” (CPRL 757). Yet Lowell goes on comparing himself to the young:

Put this way, the carpe diem motif sounds not classical and eternal but scriptural and obsolete. Lowell moves from a rapid ten-syllable query into a series of weighty spondees; lines slow down as if to accept death. Perhaps the most affecting single poem in Day by Day, “St. Mark’s, 1933,” remembers Lowell’s fifteenth year as an epitome of undignified, cruel revenge. “All term I had singled out classmates, / and made them listen to and remember / the imperfections of their friends,” until, in retaliation, the classmates surrounded the young poet with scatological abuse: “I was fifteen; / they made me cry in public” (CPRL 801). How could such a state of mind, such a stage of life, prompt optimism, let alone revolution? Yet Lowell’s Notebook testifies that it did.

The Lowell of “This Golden Summer” echoes (perhaps even remembers) Richard Poirier’s essay “The War Against the Young” (1968), republished in The Performing Self (1972). “Every civilization has to invent a pastoral for itself,” Poirier wrote, “and ours has been an idea of youth and of adolescence which has become socially and economically unprofitable, demographically unmanageable, and biologically comic. By a pastoral I mean any form of life which has, by common consent, been secured from the realities of time and history” (163). Poirier argued that the adolescent “pastoral” of the 1920s and 1950s had disappeared by the late 1960s, when young people sought not innocence but power. The Performing Self described Poirier’s uncertainties as to what (if anything) could satisfy those demands. Lowell’s disillusion thus both predicts and echoes the disillusion of the most cogent cultural critics of the 1970s, among them Poirier, Hardwick, and George W. S. Trow. For these critics, the student revolts and the new youth culture had diminished or abolished much of the cultural authority associated with maturity or adulthood, but nothing else had come to replace it. Adolescence, a time of rebellion and uncertainty, had become the default state, the right analogy, for American culture, as in Bourne’s 1910s, but with a pessimistic bent. Teens, students, “youth” now turned to one another, to their peer culture, and adults acted like teens, not out of hope for a revolution but faute de mieux.

Some poets saw this turn as well. Stanley Kunitz would complain in the mid-1970s that “the generations live in separate camps, at odds with each other, with scarcely a language in common. The sons are in a hurry to reject the fathers” (Kind of Order, 140). Kunitz traced this supposed crisis to a new exaltation of youth: “One of the prevailing illusions is that youth itself is a kind of genius … instead of a biological condition” (304). Hardwick in 1977 suggested that adulthood itself had dissolved: “with parents authority seems to have become a burden. Part of it is the peculiar melding of parents and young adults in the way they look and dress, in their common reverence for sexual experience” (Bartleby, 95) We saw in the poetry of Oppen and Brooks the high points and then the partial recession of a hope that either youth itself or a particular generation of youth could use special powers to better the culture at large. We have seen in Lowell a style designed to record the collapse of similar hopes. Poets who formed their styles afterward could take an equal interest in adolescence—but for them it would mean not potency but nostalgia or uncertainty, not a confident vanguard but the absence of desirable adult roles, the perceived impossibility of supposedly more mature manners and forms.