Examines the poetics of Richard Hugo, William Stafford, Donald Hall, and Robert Bly. Proposes that these poets are associated more with European and South American literature than with the poetry previously written in the United States and England. Discusses what these poets tell others about language and about writing poetry. (RL)

In 1958 in their journal, "The Fifties," Robert Bly and William Duffy introduced North American readers and students to a number of European and South American poets who had developed an imagination variously described as "ecstatic,""surreal,""fantastic,""mythic," etc. That same year the American poet Donald Hall began to write poetry in a new…

Many students think of poetry as a meaning to be figured out, a puzzle to be solved--as if poets were forever doomed to write only what they never quite mean and to mean what they never actually write. The struggle to discover meaning becomes acute with that distinctly modern poetry created by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and their…