The Forms of Youth: Twentieth-Century Poetry and Adolescence

1. “So much of 20th-century culture,” explained Allen Metcalf, “has been influenced by the notion of the teenager, of teenagers and the teens being a separate age, a time that you revel in, that music and movies are made for” (Cornwell, “The Words of the Decade,” ii).

2. Ariés’s claims about the absence of childhood in medieval and early modern Europe are no longer taken at face value by historians, though they retain their importance in the historiography of childhood and youth; see, for example, Ben-Amos, Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England, and Bruce Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England.

3. For such recognitions, see Brumberg, The Body Project; Chudacoff, How Old Are You?; Esman, Adolescence in Culture; Hunter, How Young Ladies Became Girls; and Kett, Rites of Passage. The historian Ilana Ben-Amos concludes that “few, if any, of the features we … associate with a cohesive [youth] subculture can be attributed to young people in early modern English society” (Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England, 205). Another historian, Barbara Hanawalt, writes that “the absence of a fully developed youth culture for both males and females … is perhaps the chief difference between adolescence [in medieval England] and [adolescence] now” (Growing Up in Medieval London, 127–28).

4. Books and articles on all these topics abound. See especially, for education and youth, 1870–1930: Chudacoff, How Old Are You?; Hunter, How Young Ladies Became Girls; and Kett, Rites of Passage; on 1920s youth: Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat; and Fass, The Damned and Beautiful; on teenagers after 1945: Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat; and Palladino, Teenagers. On feminist readings of girls’ adolescence: Driscoll, Girls; Gilligan, In a Different Voice; McRobbie, Feminism and Youth Culture; and Emily White, Fast Girls.

5. The poem has occasioned much admiring commentary. John Shoptaw describes its “fantasy of passive resistance,” quoting Ashbery’s remark that it describes his own “youth … but also anyone else’s” (On the Outside, 107, 105); David Herd praises its “sense of self equal to its [historical] moment” (Ashbery and American, 119). John Hollander writes that Ashbery’s lines differentiate “between ‘thinking not to grow up’ and pretending not to have done so,” adding that “American visions of maturity—particular during the nineteen-sixties and seventies—should drive the good man screaming to the cradle” (“Soonest Mended,” 211).

6. LeTendre found that “Japanese teachers had no clear idea what adolescence was … and failed to recognize the English loan word”; American middle school teachers “not only knew the word ‘adolescence’ but also had very specific ideas about what it meant” (Learning to Be Adolescent, 1).

7. Spacks’s study informs this book throughout; subsequent work on adolescence in literature has confined itself almost exclusively to prose life-writing and to the novel. On twentieth-century novels, see Dalsimer, Female Adolescence; Pifer, Demon or Doll; Saxton, introduction to The Girl; Barbara White, Growing Up Female; and Kiell, The Adolescent Through Fiction. On continental prose fiction, see especially Steedman, Strange Dislocations; and Neubauer, The Fin-de-Siècle Culture of Adolescence. On nineteenth-century American fiction, see Tanner, The Reign of Wonder, chaps. 9–10.

8. For more recent historically oriented studies, see especially Neubauer, Fin-de-Siècle Culture of Adolescence; Palladino, Teenagers; West, Growing Up in Twentieth-Century America; and Kevin White, The First Sexual Revolution.

9. Palinode, in “Maye,” celebrates “the merry moneth of May, / When loue lads masked in fresh aray” and “Yougthes folke now flocken in.” Piers responds by telling a fable about the perils of youth; his example, a “very foolish and vnwise” “Kidde” (young goat), appears to be going through goat puberty (Spenser, Complete Poetical Works, 23, 25).

10. An anonymous poem published in 1593 described “The brainsick race that wanton youth ensues / Without regard to grounded wisdom’s lore” (Jones, Sixteenth Century Verse, 605). Thomas, Lord Vaux expressed a similar sentiment in a poem of 1576: “When I look back and in myself behold / The wand’ring ways that youth could not descry.′ My knees I bow and from my heart I call, / O Lord forget youth’s faults and follies all” (Jones, Sixteenth Century Verse, 130).

11. On early modern apprentices and their riots, and on Oxford and Cambridge students’ cliques, see Bruce Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England; and Steven R. Smith, “The London Apprentices as Seventeenth-Century Adolescents.”

12. The historian and social theorist John Gillis writes that “many of the traditions of youth that we treat as contemporary—student radicalism, bohemianism, gang behavior, delinquency—can be traced back” to late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century England and Wales (Youth and History, ix, 32–33). No major poets, however, found in these traditions a language suited to lyric purpose and form, not even when Blake, Wordsworth, and other Romantics discovered powerful models for lyric in the separate (and newly interesting) category of children’s speech. On Romantic views of childhood in many fields, including later literature and medicine, see especially Steedman, Strange Dislocations, and Coveney, Poor Monkey. For Romantic children in modern poetry, see especially Flynn, “‘Infant Sight,’” and Travisano, Mid-Century Quartet, chap. 3.

13. “The paradox of imitated authenticity,” writes David Wellbery, “still today a prominent feature of youth culture … found in the ‘Werther-fashion,’” with its blue coat and yellow vest, “one of its earliest manifestations” (New History of German Literature, 387).

14. Another sonnet of Arnold’s invokes “Youth like a star; and what to youth belong—/ Gay raiment, sparkling gauds, elation strong.” The sonnet adds, however, that the Muse wears, under such gauds, “sackcloth” and sad thoughts; its title is “Austerity of Poetry” (Poetical Works, 166).

15. Joseph Kett writes that in early-nineteenth-century America, “No one symbolized the poetic undisciplined nature of youth better than Byron,” through his life and reputation as much as through his poems (Rites of Passage, 103).

16. Byron appears to take these sentiments in part from Rousseau, in whose Swiss locales—as Byron puts in—“air is the young breath of passionate thought” (Major Works, 133).

17. The confrontation that Huck Finn creates between innocence and experience, between—as Tanner puts it—a naive “principle of youngness” and ineffective or hypocritical adult society, requires no third term, no adolescence, only a boy who is able to talk and act; in fact, it makes impossible any such term, leaving only the corrupt adult world and an asocial, “unattainable paradise” (The Reign of Wonder, 181, 172).

18. Frost gave the first edition of A Boy’s Will a series of subtitles that identify the poet with earlier pastoral youth, even with Spenser’s Colin Clout, e.g., “The youth is persuaded that he will be rather more than less himself for having forsworn the world” (Frost, Collected, 969). I thank Bonnie Costello for calling them to my attention.

19. Rimbaud even connects unstable artistic yearnings not only to drugs and drink but to the hormonal changes of the early teens, though he does so most clearly in a poem intended as satire of another poet, François Coppée: “Why did puberty come so late and why such suffering / At the hands of overactive glands? [Pourquoi la puberté tardive et le malheur / Du gland tenace et trop consulté?]” (Rimbaud Complete, 152, 464)

20. Auden’s sonnet “Rimbaud” treats him almost dismissively: “Verse was a special illness of the ear; / Integrity was not enough; that seemed / The hell of childhood; he must try again” (EA 237) Auden’s 1939 review of Enid Starkie’s biography makes no mention of the poet’s youth, nor of youth as a theme (Prose Volume II, 39).

21. Such analogies find an apotheosis in Henry Miller’s Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud (1956): “Like Lucifer, Rimbaud succeeds in getting himself ejected from Heaven, the Heaven of Youth”; “I like to think of him as the Columbus of Youth” (77, 151).

22. On young people as writers, see Damon, who argues that teens in South Boston “redefine poetry and the creative process in the context of their own community” (Dark End, 97). On major poets’ youthful works, see instead Vendler, Coming of Age: “to find a personal style,” Vendler asserts, “is, for a writer, to become adult” (2).

1. By the 1920s, Mintz continues, “as a result of cars, telephones, and the movies, the young had broken away from the world of adults and established their own customs, such as dating.… Girls’ growing freedom evoked alarm” (Huck’s Raft, 214–15). Twenties social critics such as the Lynds attributed the rise in dating to the automobile; John Modell points out that movie theaters and telephones, emerging slightly earlier, played at least as large a role (Into One’s Own, 88–89).

2. Catherine Driscoll quotes a 1916 “guidance manual” by Mary Moxcey that explains that “the recognition of adolescence as a period of human life separate from childhood and from maturity has been a slow achievement of civilization” (quoted in Driscoll, Girls, 56). Even in 1920, Macleod points out, “only one child in six graduated from high school”—regular schooling in the later teen years had become normal only for “students from families of white-collar workers,” the families from which most modernist poets came (Age of the Child, 149).

3. Fass describes the debate about this new youth in American periodicals: “Journals of the twenties”—from mass-market weeklies to The New Republic—“were filled with an image of youth out of control, of energy released from social restraints, and of raw forces unleashed” (The Damned and Beautiful, 20). “Mass-market publications” Chudacoff finds, “directed particular attention to young adulthood, in part because of the emergence of a youth culture” (How Old Are You? 120).

6. Readers today remember Bourne as an opponent of U.S. entry into the Great War, or as an inventor (with Horace Kallen) of the set of ideas now termed multiculturalism. His friends remembered him as an apostle of youth. Gorham Munson devotes an entire chapter in his memoirs to Bourne’s accomplishment. Paul Rosenfeld’s memorial calls Bourne “the youth of a beautiful, unrealized ever-imminent plane of existence sprung from a society banked against that plane” (“Randolph Bourne,” 549). Rosenfeld’s tribute reappeared in Port of New York (1924), one of the first studies of American modernism; other chapters covered Marsden Hartley, Alfred Steiglitz, and William Carlos Williams.

7. “The most precious moment in human development,” Jane Addams rhapsodized, “is the young creature’s assertion that he is unlike any other human being.… Is it only the artists who really see these young creatures as they are—the artists who themselves are endowed with immortal youth?” (Spirit of Youth, 8–9)

8. John Gould Fletcher’s summary of recent British poetry in issue 1 of Youth notes that “most of the younger men are writing about the war”; “when one considers that most of the younger poets here are actually in immediate danger of getting killed, one can excuse them for dwelling on this topic” (Youth, 1:12). A later issue discovers “the impulse of the people to sing themselves” in the collaboratively-written pageants of towns and colleges in North Dakota: one 1917 pageant extols “the spirit of youth—of invincible Youth” (Youth, 10:1).

9. The Little Review also showed a sporadic interest in poems by children: W. L. Comfort’s 1915 article described an eleven-year-old who spontaneously utters “a Japanese poem”: she belonged, Comfort wrote, to “our new generation, the elect of which seems to know innately that an expression of truth in itself is a master-stroke” (“Education,” 5). The next issue ran a five-page spread of poems by seven- through twelve-year-olds (all in vers libre, of course) (Little Review 2, no. 5, 38–42). Other journals and publishers during these years attended to very young poets as well: surveying American poetry and its recent history in 1926, Marianne Moore remembered that “various child poets received, in 1920, the respectful attention of the public” (Complete Prose, 123). Moore likely had in mind Hilda Conkling (daughter of the established poet Grace Conkling), who at ten published Poems of a Little Girl.

10. Louis Gilmore’s poem described an adolescent monkey with romantic human yearnings: “If only our tails were a little longer / We might touch each other” (54).

11. Published in a 1918 Little Review, R. Reiss’s “Sixteen” reads like a parody of Loy: “all around arose the ovoviparous neophytes / with monomania.… Youths of sixteen are mollusks” (59).

12. William Carlos Williams’s poem “The Ogre” (1917) (“little girl with well-shaped legs, / you cannot touch the thoughts / I put over and under and around you”) invites us to condemn Williams for his lecherous feelings or (following Kerry Anne Driscoll) to praise his surprising frankness (CPW 95; 151). Others coeditor Alfred Kreymborg in “Hemstitches” (1916) promises to console “lasses … when you are lonesome / and no boy gives you a thought” (41). Nor was the subgenre of love poems to underage girls limited to Others: consider James Weldon Johnson’s “Girl of Fifteen”: “I see you each morning from my window / As you pass on your way to school.… And my heart leaps through my eyes” (Complete, 73).

13. Stevens’s sonnet 2 begins “Come, said the world, thy youth is not all play”; sonnet 5 hopes for “eyes undimmed and youth both pure and strong” (Souvenirs, 29, 31). The very Keatsian sonnet 8 begins, “The soul of happy youth is never lost / In fancy on a page”; in sonnet 10, “youth is better than weak, wrinkled age … and no disturbing gleam … Mars the high pleasure of youth’s pilgrimage” (Souvenirs 32, 33).

14. On Crane’s reception and his dealings with his closest contemporaries (Josephson, Munson, Tate, Toomer, Winters), see, in particular, Hammer, Janus-Faced.

15. In Loy’s play The Pamperers (1915–16), in part a satire of futurists, Diana (who more or less speaks for Loy) declares, “I am the elusion that cooed to your adolescent isolation, crystallized in the experience of your manhood” (“Two Plays,” 13). Carnevali’s salon devoted to “youth” involved him in explicating Italian futurist poetry, Papini’s included (Autobiography, 125–28).

16. Geoff Gilbert has argued otherwise, finding “modernism as youth and more specifically as adolescence” in British novels and in the Vorticist periodical Blast (Before Modernism Was, 52).

17. Eby’s psychoanalytic reading considers Williams’s choice to publish this poem in the Rutherford High School magazine solely as an act of exhibitionism, “exposing his sexual desires before the … schoolgirls.” Yet Williams also published in the same magazine poems connected to school but not to sex. In “Peter Kip to the High School,” the eponymous landowner, speaking from beyond the grave, addresses New Jersey’s expanding public schools, now being built on his former property: “You are the new generation. I have had / my time” (CPW 566).

18. A good survey of recent approaches is Steinman, “William Carlos Williams,” who finds in Williams’s sequence “places where … social history and aesthetics are related” (409).

19. At least one reviewer thought Williams’s work imitated adolescence all too well: writing in Poetry magazine in 1923, Marion Strobel decided that [Williams] “is like an adolescent boy, who while loving something of soft-petalled beauty, scoffs at it, so that he will be considered a He-Man; yet again and again approaches the same beauty” (“Middle-Aged Adolescence,” 75–76). Williams courted just such comparisons, both in his explicit references to adolescence and in the post-Keatsian ambivalence Strobel finds so hard to take.

20. Some of those qualities provoked from Moore not praise but dissent; Celeste Goodridge has described Moore’s “ambivalence” toward Williams’s “defiant posture” and her growing discomfort with his subjects (Hints and Disguises, 85).

21. Moore’s Dial also reviewed Men, Women, and Colleges; Poems for Youth: An American Anthology (edited by her onetime neighbor William Rose Benét) and Why Do They Like It? whose “author—about fifteen years old—protests” the English public school, displaying “verisimilitude and charm as exhibiting masculine juvenile psychology” (Complete Prose, 248, 254, 239, 253).

22. When the final issue of the Little Review in 1929 sent questionnaires to modernist writers and artists, it asked each respondent to send a photograph; the photo Moore sent shows the poet on a Gothic quad, and may date from her Bryn Mawr days (Moore, [Answers], 64).

23. Moore’s late poems return to her affections for educational institutions. “Values in Use” (1956) begins: “I attended school and I liked the place” (PMM 249). A sententious 1967 tribute to “Katharine Elizabeth McBride, President of Bryn Mawr College” (unpublished during Moore’s lifetime) likens the college to a church, quoting St. Paul (PMM 306). “In Lieu of the Lyre” (1965), addressed to and first printed in the Harvard Advocate, makes a gracious, almost flattering tribute to that student magazine while acknowledging Harvard’s single-sex policy (Moore herself being “debarred from enrollment”) (PMM 302). “Dream” defends the idea of “academic appointments for artists” by imagining “master-classes” taught by Bach, where “students craved a teacher and each student worked” (PMM 301).

24. Robin Schulze confirms that Moore “revised and arranged her poems” herself in Observations (Becoming Marianne Moore, 34).

25. David Bromwich writes that “the Baconian essay or prose-ramble may be the least misleading analogy” for Moore’s poems (“Emphatic Reticence,” 116); “A Jelly-fish,” Margaret Holley records, began among Moore’s class notes on just such prose (Poetry, 3).

26. Darlene Erickson’s extended reading sees the poem as directed against New York Dada and Marcel Duchamp (Illusion, 59–68).

27. Moore has arranged quotations about the prophets so that they describe the oceans as well: her concluding lines incorporate quotations from G. A. Smith, Expositor’s Bible and W. R. Gordon, The Poets of the Old Testament (PMM 331).

28. “The Steeple-Jack” came first in all the volumes of Moore’s verse in which it appeared: though that decision was initially Eliot’s (since he arranged her 1935 Selected) Moore’s later decisions suggest that he was right in viewing that poem as one key to the whole.

29. Costello emphasizes the poem’s admiration for Dürer, who also noticed “minute particulars”; Ambrose, too, “can see the flaws and compromises in this town which seems so prim” (Marianne Moore, 196).

30. When Moore cut Ambrose from “The Steeple-Jack” for her 1951 Collected, “the student” remained in the poem, though the only antecedent noun that suggested a student’s presence was “school-house” (PMM 142). Moore restored Ambrose, along with several stanzas describing animals, for the 1967 Complete.

31. Dorothy Ross, G, Stanley Hall, describes Hall’s role in these debates; for arguments in favor of “tracking”—associated, at the time, with Deweyan liberalism—see Lewis, Democracy’s High School.

1. Public school “‘youths,’” Springhall adds, “passed as schoolboys at an age when most of their less privileged contemporaries had already been in employment for some years” (Coming of Age, 26). Only in 1918 did England extend compulsory school attendance to age fourteen, and not until 1947 to fifteen (Springhall, Coming of Age, 48; Gillis, Youth and History, 134). By contrast, thirty-one U.S. states by 1918 required attendance to age sixteen, and seven more to fifteen; “legal coercion was almost certainly not the primary cause of rising school attendance,” however, and even in 1920 most “children still got most of their education in the elementary grades” (Macleod, Age of the Child, 74–75).

2. Reviewing Connolly’s Enemies of Promise, Auden described “one great psychological class division in English society, the division between those who have been educated at a public school … and those who have not” (Prose Volume II, 19).

3. I follow Bozorth in using “homosexual,” rather than the anachronistic “gay,” for the sex in Auden’s poems and for his life before 1935 but “queer” where the more inclusive term is warranted as a description of the writing.

The “excellent hands” have failed to fulfill their promise; perhaps they wrongly sought help from “Captain Ferguson,” “a temporary master at Sedbergh who was looked down on by the other members of the staff,” and who courted Carritt (Auden, Juvenilia, 241).

5. Mendelson suggests that only Auden did any work for the planned three-volume study; the surviving notebook for this abortive project contains letters about Marl-borough and Sedbergh along with clips from the St. Edmund’s school magazine, including one “which describes Auden’s participation in the drill of the school’s Rifle Club” (PTB 693, 734). During 1932 he wrote (with a younger coauthor) “an article about public schools”; submitted to Life and Letters, it never appeared (Carpenter, Auden, 132).

6. Carpenter suggests that Gresham’s contributed to Auden’s guilt about his sexuality; “in many public schools, where mild homosexual intrigues and scandals were part of daily life, such feelings would probably not have seemed very serious. But the Gresham’s Honour System was designed to suppress exactly this sort of thing” (Auden, 27).

7. John Bayley wrote that this “apparently denunciatory poem about industry and politics … makes its impact … by a use—how conscious a use one cannot say—of the attitudes and imagery of adolescence” (“W. H. Auden,” 62, 64).

10. Compare the Old Boys of the school in Stalky & Co., whose fates Kipling summarizes thus: “Young blood who had stumbled into an entanglement with a pastry-cook’s daughter at Plymouth; experience who had come into a small legacy but mistrusted lawyers; ambition halting at cross-roads, anxious to take the one that would lead him farthest; extravagance pursued by the money-lender; arrogance in the thick of a regimental row—each carried his trouble to the head” (207). Critics recognize other models in the Exeter Book (Fuller, Auden, 96).

11. Auden told Naomi Mitchison that The Orators was “my memorial to Lawrence” (quoted in Carpenter, Auden, 122). But Lawrence’s theories, as expressed in Fantasia of the Unconscious, had little to do with elite education as such; he attacked universal schooling and modern family life in the name of instinct and sexual health. “Let all schools be closed at once. Keep only a few technical training establishments, nothing more” (77, 65).

12. Auden later remarked that “the ideas behind Les Faux-Monnayeurs are exciting but badly executed” (Ansen, Table Talk, 24); Davenport-Hines suggests an earlier enthusiasm for its “energetic youth” (Auden, 97).

13. “At school,” Auden remembered in 1965, “my total lack of interest and aptitude for games of any kind did not make me despise athletics; on the contrary, I greatly admired them … but I did not envy them, because I knew that their skill could never be mine” (Forewords, 508).

14. Larchfield and the Downs were “prep” schools, for boys under thirteen. Though Auden at Larchfield told Anne Fremantle, “I enjoy teaching. And I like teaching small boys best,” he soon pursued teaching jobs in public schools (Sedbergh and later Bryanston) (Spender, Tribute, 59, 79).

15. The original, two-part version of the poem made its school setting more visible. Part 1, a sort of dream-vision of England and its politics, began with Auden (like a medieval poem’s dreamer) set in a place appropriate to his vision, the Larchfield school: “Into a windless morning I stepped and passed / Outside the windows of untidy rooms / Where boys were puzzled by exams” (EA 444).

16. Decades later, Francois Duchêne saw in Poems (1930) “the radical manifesto of a youth,” its “adolescent sense of awakening” designed to create the “myth of the budding poet’s ambition,” which other young writers recognized (The Case of the Helmeted Airman, 37, 45–46).

17. A 1939 lecture, “The Future of English Poetic Drama,” apparently explained to its French audience that “that the world does not belong to the young”; “never has there been a time when, on the one hand, it has been more difficult to attain maturity, and, on the other hand, when maturity was more necessary” (PTB 717) Years later, Auden retained enough interest in boarding schools, teachers, and students not only to visit Richard Eberhart’s class at St. Mark’s School but to contribute an end-of-term “Ode” whose jokey style resembles his later light verse (“School Writings,” 44–47).

18. David Herd has noticed how Ashbery, Koch, and Schuyler, like Auden and Isherwood, used coterie markers and collaborative techniques “to heighten … ordinary lives” (Ashbery and American, 65). John Shoptaw has elicited in Ashbery’s poems a “homotextual” code: Shoptaw also calls “And We Know” “a parody of … Goodbye, Mr. Chipps,” contrasting it unfavorably to another classroom poem, James Schuyler’s “Current Events” (On the Outside, 4–5, 40)

19. Like Larkin, John cannot remember much joy in his own youth: bombed-out Coventry reveals to him “a kind of annulling of his childhood. The thought excited him. It was as if he had been told: all the past is cancelled: all the suffering connected with that town, all your childhood, is wiped out” (Trouble, 219).

20. Larkin wrote to Amis, for example: “I am glad you liked Brunette’s poems: I think all wrong-thinking people ought to like them. I used to write them whenever I’d seen some particularly ripe schoolgirls, or when I felt sentimental: ‘Fam Damnay’ was written for fun … writing about grown women is less perverse and therefore less satisfying” (Selected Letters, 70).

21. In 1972, Larkin reviewed, for the leftish Guardian “a book … which enthusiastically compared ‘the young’ to Negroes—in revolt, seeking their identity” (Selected Letters, 468). What Larkin reviewed was Richard Middleton’s Pop Music and the Blues: his review quotes the book as declaring that “[the white adolescent] has created a new community—a classless international community, which is as real as any traditional group or class” (Larkin, “Negroes,” 21; brackets in original). Larkin comments: “Like the Negro, adolescents are trying to be free and so form a conscious group seeking its own identity; their morality is ‘specific, momentary and circumstantial.’ Mr. Middleton’s obvious respect for these characteristics tempts one to add that neither group is very bright.” Yet Larkin treats Middleton’s argument, if not its protagonists, with some respect: “One can’t say this book is true or false, any more than one could of [Denis] de Rougemont’s Passion and Society; it interprets a set of circumstances” (21).

22. Larkin also contributed a verse epigram to his Hull colleague C. B. (Brian) Cox’s anti-modernizing Black Papers on Education (1968–69), which warned that “the teacher is no longer regarded as the exponent of the great achievement of past civilization; his job is to ‘decode’ the ‘radical critique of the young’” (Cox and Dyson, Fight for Education, 3, 1). A book that Cox lent Larkin (Christopher Booker’s Neophiliacs, a hostile neo-Catholic account of the 1960s) “made [Larkin] realize how little in touch I have been with the world since 1945 … I have registered the Beatles and the miniskirt, but that’s about all” (Selected Letters, 426).

23. Larkin told J. B. Sutton in 1947 that Lawrence “is so great that it is silly to start saying where he was wrong,” though he also wrote the following year that “if we had known as many women as we have read books by DHL we should have a clearer idea” of romance and courtship (Motion, A Writer’s Life, 173, 185).

24. Unsurprisingly, some older critics demurred: Kenneth Allott in 1962 attacked Gunn’s “uncritical sympathy for nihilistic young tearaways in black leather jackets” (quoted in Bold, Gunn and Hughes, 26).

25. Gunn returned to Elvis decades afterward in a disillusioned memorial poem, one cast not in solid quatrains but in halting, short-lined free verse. The “disobedience” and “revolt” Elvis’s first singles celebrate (that poem argued) grew from a “pain” that dissolved when its causes (immaturity, uncertainty, exclusion) did: the late-model Vegas Elvis, “the puffy King,” instead “needed to kill … the ultimate pain // of feeling no pain” (CPG 362).

26. This searcher, Gunn continues, “is the subject of [Duncan’s] Moly poems of 1971,” which Duncan based on Gunn’s own volume Moly; in these poems, Gunn continues, Duncan “is haunted by the ghost of himself at fifteen” (Occasions, 129).

4. McGinley complained in the Ladies’ Home Journal: “At seven, little girls ought to start casting warm looks on their favorite cub scout…. At thirteen or fourteen, they should have turned into accomplished sirens” (Sixpence, 235). Writing in 1956 for Mademoiselle, Jarrell put forth a similar protest: “O future, here around me now in which junior-high-school girls go steady with junior-high-school boys, marry in high school and repent at college! Or rather do not repent”; “the well-counseled Montagues, the well-worked-over Capulets ship the children off to the University of Padua, where, with part-time jobs, allowances from both families, and a freezer full of TV Dinners, they live in bliss with their babies” (Kipling, 251).

5. Allen Ginsberg (echoing, as Ginsberg may have known, the young Auden) dreamt that John Clellon Holmes wrote him a letter which read: “‘The social organization which is most true of itself to the artist is the boy gang’” (Howl, 47).

6. The July 1965 Esquire, as Braunstein notes, proclaimed a “‘total take-over by youth of the entire United States market’ … ‘that vague no-man’s land of adolescence’” had “‘suddenly turned into a way of life’” (“Forever Young,” 245).

10. “Girls still in high school, and … women graduated from high school,” Drake and Cayton write, would “form cliques and social clubs that discriminated against” dropouts (Black Metropolis, 516). Parents worried about the “thousands of lower-class young men who were never arrested as delinquents but who skirted the borderline of crime,” “‘cats’ who, clad in ‘zoot-suits,’ stood around and ‘jived’ the women” (589).

11. In 1969 the U.S. Senate investigated the Rangers’ alleged misuse of federal funds; one Vice Lord remembered that during the investigations, “the Rangers were made out to be the worse [sic] cats in the world” (quoted in Dawley, Nation of Lords, 167). Brooks would later dissociate herself from the Rangers, telling Essence in 1971: “The Blackstone Rangers are a teenage gang in Chicago of immense size and not all of the things they do are nice. I’m not sure just what to say about what they’re doing now, because I’m not close to them” (Report from Part One, 168).

12. Though “Riot” and “Boy Breaking Glass” describe violence in Chicago’s black communities, the riots downtown at the Democratic Convention in August 1968 must have attracted some notice from Brooks as well; one historian writes that the demonstrating Yippies “attempted to use the energy and playfulness of youth culture to wildly redefine radical politics” (and got beaten bloody instead) (Farber, Chicago ’68, xvi).

13. I take Notebook (1970) as my preferred source, rather than the earlier Notebook, 1967–68 (1969) (which omits many poems included in Notebook), the later triptych History, For Lizzie and Harriet, and The Dolphin (1973–1974), or the 1976 Selected Poems; when, as is often the case, poems exist in several versions, Notebook (1970) is the one I cite unless my text gives reasons otherwise.

14. In February 1968, for example, the New York Review of Books treated readers to the Berkeley Free Speech Movement partisan Michael Rossman’s “Notes from the County Jail.” Irving Howe complained that the journal had “done the New Left a considerable service by providing it with a link of intellectual responsibility” (“Intellectuals,” 51). Another issue, to Howe’s dismay, “printed on its cover a diagram explaining how to make a Molotov cocktail” (Margin, 316).

15. Lowell told Elizabeth Bishop in June 1967 that he had written “not a poem for a year and a half” (Letters, 486). By August he was writing to Adrienne Rich that he had “been poeticizing … furiously, and now have three poems, all momento moris [sic] about summer and being fifty,” one of them “long, about a hundred lines” (Letters, 486).

16. “After the demonstrators had been removed from one building,” the Ehrenreichs averred, observers “could see through a window cops ripping up a room, throwing furniture, and books around, breaking chairs, etc.” (Long March, 145).

17. The rubbish heaps may also reflect the New York City garbage collectors’ strike, which, as Spender notes, “took place at almost the same time as the Columbia riots”; “food, and God knows what else, rotted uncollected” (Year of the Young, 8).

18. Other remarks from the same years strike the same note: if “our students have more generosity, idealism and freshness than any other group, … they are only us, younger, and the violence that has betrayed our desires will also betray theirs if they trust to it” (Letters, 513). To Donald Davie in April 1970, Lowell wrote, “I have no faith in idealist violence or in revolution.” And yet, he added, “I don’t like the drear safe / unsafe iron frame of what’s established” (Letters, 533).

19. Examining hippie and New Left manifestos, Braunstein describes the counterculture’s “deep ambivalence about teleology per se—the notion that ideas, phenomena, people should be tending toward something, heading in some direction” (“Forever Young,” 258). If (as I contend) Lowell’s suspicion of progress reacts to utopian youth culture as it erupted and flourished between 1966 and 1973, his antiteleological orientation, his rejection of plan, structure, stepwise progress, itself duplicates a topos of radical youth.

2. For other especially salient examples, see Alison Joseph, “Adolescence,” Spoon River Poetry Review 18, no. 1 (1993): 108; Rebecca Gordon, “Adolescence,” Calyx 8 (1983): 9; Laura Shovan, “Adolescence Prepared Me For This,” Paterson Literary Review 29 (2000): 150.

3. In “Two Girls,” Kasischke depicts herself as Persephone again and adolescence as a fall, a danger; she and a friend “stroll together down the path / of woe,” picking up “that scattered candy in the grass—those / were the hardest brightest flowers / of spring” (Gardening, 59). For other contemporary poets’ retellings of the Persephone myth, see Dove, Mother Love, and Zucker, Eating in the Underworld.

5. The exception, Randall Jarrell, described such dilemmas almost exclusively when writing in the voices of women and girls: the middle-aged homemaker of “Next Day,” for example, reflects: “For so many years / I was good enough to eat: the world looked at me / And its mouth watered” (Complete Poems, 279).

6. In her memoir Tale of a Sky-Blue Dress, Moss remembers thinking, in ninth grade, “Now I must begin to separate from my parents.… As an adolescent, I don’t see the collective experience well; only the personal and solitary. I don’t like it much” (181; italics in original).

7. Laurence Goldstein’s earlier discussion—likely the first extended reading of this poem—also pursues these analogies but reaches far more optimistic conclusions: for him, “the poet’s revenge” on these cultural systems “is to create a secondary world of enduring power” (perhaps analogous to the medium of film itself) (The American Poet at the Movies, 235).

10. Sharon Cameron has suggested that lyric poetry as a genre works to remove particular moments from time: “the contradiction between social and personal time,” she writes, “is the lyric’s generating impulse” (Lyric Time, 206).

11. “The way the sentence operates,” Graham told Thomas Gardner, “became connected, for me, with notions like ending-dependence and eschatological thinking,” with “manifest destiny, westward expansion” (Regions of Unlikeness, 218).

2. Ortega y Gasset wrote that “modern art begins to appear comprehensible and in a way great when it is interpreted as an attempt to instill youthfulness into an ancient world.… Europe is entering upon an era of youthfulness.… For a while women and old people will have to cede the rule over life to boys” (Dehumanization, 50–52).

5. One such entry seems to take place in “Mules,” whose hybrid foal “should have the best of both worlds” but cannot, since its innocence is a condition it has lost by the time it has hit the ground. (PMP 67).

6. Muldoon wrote in the unpublished essay “Chez Moy”: “Though my student days coincided with a period of extreme political unrest in Northern Ireland, I myself never took any direct part in political activity.… I’ve often considered how easily, though, I might have been caught up in the kinds of activity in which a number of my neighbors found themselves involved. As it was I preferred to come to terms with the political instability of Northern Ireland through poetry, often in an oblique, encoded way” (quoted in Kendall, Paul Muldoon, 16–17).

7. Heaney used the metaphor of a “lever” to describe Muldoon’s poetry in the 1980s; Muldoon’s “lever for the Troubles has never been less than the proverbial forty-foot pole” (Heaney, “Pre-Natal Mountain,” 479).

8. For example: in the memoir, Gypsy moves from vaudeville to burlesque in Chicago, and it is her egregious mother (rather than Gypsy herself) who keeps the cow head packed for “the moment vaudeville comes back” (Lee, Gypsy, 255). For more of Muldoon’s sources, see pp. 253 (horse dung), 257 (Nudina), 296–97 (the Eve costume), and 307 (the Daily Worker).

9. The persistence of legal censorship in Australia—where Donald Allen’s New American Poetry “was banned for several years” as obscene (one could not legally bring it into the country)—gives the sense of rebellion particular force (Tranter, New Australian Poets, xvii).

10. David McCooey writes that the Generation of’68’s “revolutionary rhetoric and commitment to alternative forms of publication (and poetic culture generally)… equated formal freedom with political freedom”; late-1960s “rock music briefly gave poetry new cultural capital” (“Contemporary Poetry,” 160–61).

11. Kate Lilley describes the “incapacitating welter of perception” in this characteristic passage: “the faster we drive the younger we grow until the fuel boils, / clearing the sky completely” (“Tranter’s Plots”).

12. Tranter’s 1977 essay “Four Notes on the Practice of Revolution” complains that the Generation of ’68’s program had run its course: “Rebellion for its own sake belongs to the selfish rhetoric of adolescence, and once the opposition has been badly damaged enough, it’s time to stop” (quoted in McCooey, “Contemporary Poetry,” 163).

13. A note says that these phrases come “alternately from the writings of Arthur Rimbaud and an article in the Sydney Sun-Herald” in 1992 (Studio, 109).

14. On “Boeotia”—a catchword in Murray’s own prose—see, for example, Leer (“This Country,” 27): “Boeotian traditional wisdom makes [Australia] habitable as a culture by centering it and containing it in a place”; the inherited farm is “more than a place from which to criticize the metropolis,” because “farming and writing are chiastically connected.”

1. A longer statement of similar claims deserves notice: in 1978 the essayist George W. S. Trow argued that American “culture … did not make available any but the grimmest, most false-seeming adulthood.” Instead, “childhood was provided.… An adolescence had to be improvised, and it was. That it was improvised—mostly out of rock-and-roll music—so astounded the people who pulled it off that they quite rightly considered it the important historical event of their time, and have circled around it ever since” (Within the Context, 86). The demographer John Modell backs up such assertions with data: “The late 1960s and early 1970s,” he writes, “saw … the ability of young people to craft their own life courses virtually ad lib … as long as they did not seek to support full adult establishments,” i.e. a home with children, a fixed career, and a dependent spouse (Into One’s Own, 322–23; italics his).

3. “By the age of sixteen” in 1964 and 1965, Levis wrote, “I was already a kind of teenage failure, an unathletic, acne-riddled virgin who owned the slowest car in town”; “the self-pity of adolescence … made me feel, for a moment anyway, at once posthumous and deliciously alive” (Levis, “Levine,” 105). Levis’s Baby Boom coevals, he said in another interview, “were all violated by a little bit of history, by the Vietnam era” (Michael White, “Interview,” 280).

5. Poems from Elledge’s compilation that describe later, harsher rock music nevertheless repeat the associations of rock with the immediacy of youth and of poetry with belated adult reflection. Robert Long’s “What’s So Funny ‘bout Peace, Love, and Understanding” uses Elvis Costello’s cover of Nick Lowe’s song to describe all Long’s teenage years:

6. On rock and roll in literary poetry, see also Wojahn, Strange, chap. 12, which focuses on Bob Dylan as an influence. “Contemporary poetry has received more of a benefit from rock than rock has gained from contemporary poetry,” Wojahn writes, because “rock has been the soundtrack for the baby-boomer generation and the generations that have followed it”; “most boomer and post-boomer poets have a greater familiarity with rock lyrics than with the poems they profess to revere” (198).

7. “To my surprise,” Arnett writes, “most of them (58%) said their high school years were less stressful and difficult” than their current lives; “only 24% said high school was more stressful and difficult” (Emerging, 220).

8. The Secret Stars—Geoff Farina and Jodi Buannano—released two full-length albums and several singles on indie-rock labels during the 1990s; for more information, see http://outersound.com/band/secret/bio.htm, viewed April 6, 2007.

9. Other poets of Mlinko’s generation note the same analogy. Ben Friedlander, for example, remembers that when he entered the social world of Bay Area experimental writing in the late 1980s, “punk became for me a model of artistic ferment” (Simulcast, 11). “I came to see language writing as a ‘subculture’ in Dick Hebdige’s sense,” he adds; “popular music provided a model for understanding poetry as both aesthetic artifact and social phenomenon” (12).

10. His prose definition of “go-go” emphasizes, first, the music’s ability to call into being a community and, second, its association with youth: “1. A vernacular dance music unique to Washington, D.C.; a non-stop, live party music … 2. a music/dance event featuring Go-Go bands … frequented by teens and young teens ‘hooked up’ in the latest casual wear” (Maverick, 49).

11. The title “12 & Under Crew” puns on age and locale: the unicyclists may hail from west of 12th St NE or SE, or from east of 12th St NW, in Washington’s directional street address system.

12. Such language, new to American poetry during the 1990s, parallels the subcultural talk—at once girlish, aggressive, and “out,” or at least queer-positive—that entered American popular music in those years, with the much-publicized movement called Riot Grrrl. One writer of Riot Grrrl fanzines labeled herself “not a girl,” but “not a woman because of the pre-pubescent dresses, the messy bedrooms, & the toys” (quoted in Leonard, “Rebel Girl,” 232).

13. Here see, in particular, Beach, who argues that recent American poetry relies less than its precursors did on “institutions” and more on “communities”; the latter involve “poets with shared interests,” reliant on informal local “scenes” and transnational “networks” (Poetic Cultures, 5–6).

14. Tony Hoagland describes the most recent poetry, in a very ambivalent essay, with terms that practically brand it as adolescent, though he does not notice the association; this poetry seeks “to break rules, to turn against its obligation, to be irresponsible, to recast conventions” (“Fear of Narrative,” 517).

15. Levine cites a “three-decade study of thirty thousand adolescents and adults” that concluded that “cognitively and emotionally, both groups operated at an average developmental age of sixteen” (Harmful to Minors, 88).