The generation of the 1960s

Abstract

In the late 1960s a new generation of Australian poets and some middle-generation poets made a revelatory discovery of certain kinds of American poetry. The New American Poetry. edited by Donald Allen, had been published in 1960, but it trickled into Australia slowly because for some years it was construed as a prohibited import under the paternalistic Australian customs regulations. By the late 1960s, however, the Black Mountain Group centred on Charles Olson and including Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley and such New York poets as Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch had caught the imagination of several Australians. Another substantial group, not included in Allen’s anthology, simultaneously exercised an influence. They were the writers of confessional, post-confessional and ‘life studies’ work, such as Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and John Berryman. A third, less commonly acknowledged, American influence was that of Wallace Stevens, whose notion of ‘poetry as the supreme fiction’ was one inspiration of the New York school.