The poetry of the United States began as a literary art during the colonial era. Unsurprisingly, most of the early poetry written in the colonies and fledgling republic used 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, American poets had begun to take their place at the forefront of the English-language avant garde. By the 1960s, the young poets of the British Poetry Revival looked to their American contemporaries and predecessors as models for the kind of poetry they wanted to write. Toward the end of the millennium, consideration of American poetry had diversified, as scholars placed an increased emphasis on poetry by women, Afro-Americans, Hispano-Americans and other subcultural groupings.
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_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:
1819: Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles founded Singapore, a new trading post for the British East India Company. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Stamford_Raffles)
1820: Sponsored by the American Colonization Society, the first African American immigrants established a settlement in present-day Liberia. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Liberia)
1922: France, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States signed the Washington Naval Treaty to limit naval armaments. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Naval_Treaty)
1952: The Duchess of Edinburgh ascended to the British throne while visiting Kenya. She then came down from a treehouse as Queen Elizabeth II. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_II_of_the_United_Kingdom)
1959: Jack Kilby filed the patent for the first integrated circuit. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/integrated_circuit)
_____________________ Wikiquote of the day:
"You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or right, but I would like to suggest that there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down— up to a man's age-old dream; the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order— or down to the ant heap totalitarianism, and regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course." -- Ronald Reagan (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan)