CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Literature is the art of written work. This word literally means "things made from letters". It is commonly classified as having two major forms and two major techniques. One of the major techniques of literature is poetry. Poetry comes from the Greek poiesis which means "making", it is seen also in such more narrowly terms as "hemopoiesis". The making of poetry is a form of literary art which uses aesthetic and rhythmic qualities of language such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, the prosaic ostensible meaning. Poetry has a long history as the history of modern man, dating back to the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh. Many scholars believe poetry predates literacy. The oldest written works on Earth are all presented in some poetic form. The style is believed to have aided memorization and oral transmission. Poetry is specific to particular cultures and genres and responds to characteristics of the language in which the poet writes. Readers accustomed to identifying poetry with Dante, Goethe, Mickiewicz and Rumi may think of it as written in lines based on rhyme and regular meter; there are, however, traditions, such as Biblical poetry, that use other means to create rhythm and euphony. Much modern poetry reflects a critique of poetic tradition, playing with and testing, among other things, the principle of euphony itself, sometimes altogether forgoing rhyme or set rhythm. In today's increasingly globalized world, poets often adapt forms, styles and techniques from diverse cultures and languages. 1 | The American Poetry A. Background of the Study As the researchers talked about poetry, different literatures from different countries have their own poetry. One of the most influential poetry in the world is the American poetry. It is poetry with a great history and parts of its history were the thousands of American poets who have penned the different great poems that have been influenced and inspired the whole world from its beginning until today. And according to the research, from a thousand of American poets during the different periods, there are some of them who are considered as the most America’s most influential and great poets, namely; Phillis Wheatley, Edward Taylor, James Russell Lowell, James Riley, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Carlos Williams, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Anna Bradstreet, Walt Whitman, William Cullen Bryant, T.S Elliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Edward Cummings, Marianne Moore, Herman Melville, Stephen Crane, Vachel Lindsay, Hilda Doolittle, Karl Shapiro, Robert Duncan, Claude Mckay, Jean Toomer, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni and James Wright. These poets had known their names in different eras. They made their works of art with so much efforts and hardships. Because of them, American poetry became one of the most beautiful poetry that had seriously influenced other people, countries and literatures around the world. Talking about American poetry, the poetry of the United States, arose first as efforts by colonists to add their voices to English poetry in the 17th century, well before the constitutional unification of the thirteen colonies. Unsurprisingly, most of the early 2 | The American Poetry colonists' work relied on contemporary British models of poetic form, diction, and theme. However, in the 19th century, a distinctive American idiom began to emerge. By the later part of that century, when Walt Whitman was winning an enthusiastic audience abroad, poets from the United States had begun to take their place at the forefront of the English-language avant-garde. The history of American poetry is not easy to know. Much of the American poetry published between 1910 and 1945 remains lost in the pages of small circulation political periodicals, particularly the ones on the far left, destroyed by librarians during the 1950s McCarthy era. The received narrative of Modernism proposes that Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot were perhaps the most influential modernist English-language poets in the period during World War I. But this narrative leaves out African American and women poets who were published and read widely in the first half of the twentieth century. This study was conducted by the researchers to inform the readers about the American literature particularly in poetry. It was undertaken to get to know the most influential and great American poets who were those mentioned above who have contributed a lot in their literature. And to go further and make afar in this study, the researchers also make points in giving the best poems by the poets, their life and achievements in life, how these poets and their works influenced their country and literature and the researcher also give some other points that are needed and relevant in completing this study. 3 | The American Poetry B. Objectives The main objective of this study is to know all about the American poetry, its history and evolution and to know their greatest and best known poets. The specific aims of this study are to: a. To gain knowledge about American literature particularly in poetry and develop a great insight of it. b. To be able to know who are the poets during the different periods and how they became very influential to their country. c. To develop a better understanding in the literary pieces of those poets and appreciate those pieces. C. Significance of the Study This study will benefit the following individuals: Writers/Poets They will gain additional knowledge/information about their favorite American poets and learned their literature. Filipinos Through this study, most of the Filipino people will get a better understanding not just with our own literature but of course also in other literature particularly the American literature and their poetry. Students This study will give them a great insight about the American literature and help them to know who the best American poets are. This will also help them in 4 | The American Poetry their studies in a way that the researchers will provide all the information about American poetry. Professor Through this study, he/she will able to gain additional information about the American poetry and help him/her in better understand the said poetry and he/she could even share it to his/her other classes. Researchers They will gain new knowledge about the American literature especially in its poetry and they will be learning about the American poets who are the most influential. D. Statement of the Problem This study attempts to answer the following questions: 1. How was the American poetry evolved? 2. Who are the most influential poets from all American poets from different periods (from early to modern period)? 3. What are their best known literary pieces? 4. How these poets influenced their countrymen and their own literature? 5 | The American Poetry CHAPTER II BODY Poetry, verse in English that originates from the territory now known as the United States. American poetry differs from British or English poetry chiefly because America’s culturally diverse traditions exerted pressure on the English language, altering its tones, diction, forms, and rhythms until something identifiable as American English emerged. American poetry is verse written in this altered form of English. The term American poetry is in some ways a contradiction. America represents a break with tradition and the invention of a new culture separate from the European past. Poetry, on the other hand, represents tradition itself, a long history of expression carried to America from a European past. American poetry thus embodies a clearly identifiable tension between tradition and innovation, past and future, and old forms and new forms. American poetry remains a hybrid, a literature that tries to separate itself from the tradition of English literature even as it adds to and alters that tradition. American poetry could be defined differently, however, especially if it is not limited to poetry in English. Without that qualifying term, American poetry has its origins in the rich oral traditions of Native American cultures. Each of these cultures developed complex symbolic tales of the origins and history of its people, similar to epic poems in the European tradition. These tales were performed as part of rituals and passed on through memorization from one generation to the next. Some of them have been translated into 6 | The American Poetry English. Yet these works tend to vanish from most histories of American poetry because they were part of ongoing performances based in spoken rather than written language. Moreover, their rhythms and sounds are bound to the native languages in which they evolved. Similarly, there is a rich heritage of Spanish-language poetry written in America from the time of the earliest Spanish explorers to current Hispanic and Chicano and Chicana poetry. American poetry traditions also have thrived in many other languages, from Chinese to Yiddish, as the result of centuries of immigration to the United States. But most people mean by American poetry those rhythmic, memorable, and significant verse forms composed in English in the United States or in lands that became the United States. This overview of more than 300 years of American poetry tracks the creation of a national literature identifiably different from that of any other nation. In the 1600s colonial poets responded to the challenges of their new world and expressed the hopes and fears of Europeans who settled there. In the years following the Declaration of Independence (1776) American poets created a patriotic poetry as a defining literature for the new nation. A powerful new kind of poetry flowered in the mid- and late 19th century among the first poets to be born and raised as actual citizens of the United States. American modernist poetry emerged in the first half of the 20th century, as many writers sought to subdue nationalist impulses in their poetry and define themselves as part of an international advance in the arts.