SOURCE: “The Emotive Imagination: A New Departure in American Poetry,” in The Southern Review, Vol III, New Series, No. 1, January, 1967, pp. 51-67.

In the following essay, Moran and Lensing welcome a new poetry of “emotive imagination” and the poets, among them Wright, who employ that style.

I

In the last decade and a half, a new movement in American poetry, which we choose to call the emotive imagination, has gained sufficient momentum and import to justify definition and analysis. William Stafford, James Wright, Louis Simpson, and Robert Bly are its central figures.¹ Their work represents a new departure from a poetry that since World War II has wrestled with the antipodal schools of the academic and the beat, both outgrowths of an affluent society. It is indebted neither to these schools nor to those which dominated American poetry between the wars; it is, in a word, meaningfully new...