"The New American Poetry is a crucial cultural document, central to defining the poetics and the broader cultural dynamics of a particular historical moment."—Alan Golding

Re-Locating Mid-Century Poetry NetworksSchooling Donald Allen

Donald Allen, editor of The New American PoetryLisa Chinn, Brian Croxall, Rebecca Sutton Koeser, and Kevin Young

“The magazine[s] both created that circle and connected people to us that we didn’t even know.” —Amiri Baraka

How did poetry happen?Donald Allen’s seminal 1960 anthology The New American Poetry, 1945-1960 grouped 44 relatively unknown authors into schools of poetry, based as much on location as on aesthetics. Allen’s taxonomy of poetry influenced an entire generation’s view of literary history.

But how accurate is Allen’s representation of the field of poetry? What networks emerge if we consider the publications that published mid-century American poetry? Do people really stay in tight, geographically defined clusters? Or is there cross-continental pollination?

How did the project happen?“Schooling Donald Allen” is an attempt to make sense of Allen’s classifications of poetry over and against a more complete record of what was published in the years preceding and following his anthology.

Using the little magazines in the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University we created a Django database of all the work published in 12 influential, mid-century poetry journals that scholars have associated with Allen’s schools, including publication information (editors, authors, titles of individual poems and essays, literary allusions, and places of publication) and collected in MARBL’s (Emory’s Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library) Raymond Danowski Poetry Library. We captured over 4,000 published items using the editorial guidelines that we created.

The visualization on the left shows the schools as conceptualized by Donald Allen. The visualization on the right shows our results from data collected from the 12 influential mid-century journals.

Our model of Allen’s version of mid-century poetry Our model of mid-century poetry based on 12 journals

What have we learned?From preliminary results Allen’s schools are limited, but we also see this as a chance to build on his work of providing a better understanding of the period as a whole. And this project serves as a test case for how “big data” approaches can be applied to archives of rare materials that have yet to be digitized.

Work to ComeA dedicated website for the project is under development. It wil l include interactive visualizations, display the contents of the journals, and provide essays analyzing the extent to which the literary communities in the data reflect or deviate from Allen’s schools.