SOURCE: McGann, Jerome J. “Contemporary Poetry, Alternate Routes.” Critical Inquiry XIII, no. 3 (1987): 624-47.

In following essay, McGann addresses the social and political implications of the Language Poets' ideas about style and method.

Opposition is true friendship.

—William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

that the vanishing point might be on every word.

—Lyn Hejinian, “Grammar and Landscape”

What is the significance of that loose collective enterprise, sprung up in the aftermath of the sixties, known as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Writing? To answer this question I will be taking, initially, a somewhat oblique route. And I shall assume an agreement on several important social and political matters: first, that the United States, following the Second World War, assumed definitive leadership of a capitalist empire; second, that its position of leadership generated a network of internal social contradictions which persist to this day (the...