New Poets of England and America

New Poets of England and America is a poetry anthology edited by Donald Hall, Robert Pack and Louis Simpson, and published in 1957. The Introduction was written by Robert Frost. The collection met with success and went through ten printings over the next decade. In 1962, Hall and Pack came out with a revised edition titled New Poets of England and America: Second Selection.

History

To spotlight the rising generation of English and American poets, Hall, Pack, and Simpson only featured contributors who were aged 40 or younger as of 1957. They chose poems from 52 different poets, including several poems written by themselves. The selections in the anthology embodied "the best of the Academic Poets, so called because many of them held teaching posts at colleges and universities but, more important, because of the button-down formalism of their verse."

In The Sewanee Review literary magazine, American poet James Dickey gave the anthology tepid praise: "Though its inclusions and exclusions are questionable in many cases, most of these poets have every right to admission, being as well as any others representative of a generation that has as yet exhibited very little passion, urgency, or imagination." His depiction of New Poets of England and America as staid and unadventurous was an image that would become the critical consensus.

Soon after the book's publication, the Beats burst into prominence and challenged conventional notions of American literature. In 1960, Donald Allen edited a groundbreaking anthology, The New American Poetry 1945-1960. It emphasized the avant-garde work being produced in the U.S.—by the Beats, Black Mountain poets, San Francisco Renaissance poets, and New York School poets—and did not feature a single American poet who also appeared in New Poets of England and America.