American poetry

American poetry is poetry written in the United States or shaped by its languages, cultures, and history. It spans Indigenous oral traditions, colonial verse, and diverse modern forms.

Native American literature: Literature created by Indigenous peoples of North America in oral and written forms. Its oral traditions long predate the United States and remain a vital strand of its poetry.
Walt Whitman: An American poet whose book Leaves of Grass helped establish free verse as a major poetic form. His expansive lines and democratic catalogues became touchstones for later American poets.
Free verse: Poetry that does not follow a regular meter or rhyme scheme. Whitman and later poets used it to break from inherited metrical conventions.
Poetry reading: A public event in which poets perform or present poems aloud. Readings connect printed poems with performance, community, and live interpretation.
Harlem Renaissance: A flourishing of Black arts and letters centered in Harlem during the 1920s and early 1930s. Its poets transformed American literary culture and asserted Black artistic self-determination.
Anne Bradstreet: A seventeenth-century English-born poet whose published verse made her an early colonial American literary figure. Her 1650 collection is the first published book of poetry by an English North American colonist.
Emily Dickinson: An American poet known for compressed lyrics, slant rhyme, and unconventional punctuation. Her formally daring poems offer a striking alternative to Whitman's public, expansive voice.
Blank verse: Unrhymed poetry written in regular iambic pentameter. Its measured line shows how American poets also adapted English formal traditions.
Poetry slam: A competitive poetry performance in which poets present original work before an audience and judges. The slam movement made performance-centered poetry a prominent contemporary American practice.
Confessional poetry: A mid-twentieth-century poetic mode that presents personal experience, including intimate or distressing subjects. Its candid first-person voice altered expectations about privacy and subject matter in American poetry.

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