SOURCE: Bartlett, Lee. “What Is ‘Language Poetry?’” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 4 (summer 1986): 741-52.

In the following essay, Bartlett discusses some of the chief characteristics of the Language Poetry movement as described by several poets and literary critics.

W. H. Auden, the sometimes Greta Garbo of twentieth-century poetry, once told Stephen Spender that he liked America better than England because in America one could be alone. Further, in his introduction to The Criterion Book of Modern American Verse Auden remarked that while in England poets are considered members of a “clerkly caste,” in America they are an “aristocracy of one.” Certainly it does seem to be the individual poet—Whitman, Williams, Olson, Plath, O'Hara, Ginsberg—who has altered the landscape of American poetry and prosody, not the group. And most American literary “movements,” as Robert Creeley has pointed out, are simply comprised of a few people who on occasion drink...