Abstract
Beginning from the topic of assimilation in America, this essay will examine the editorial process of the seminal poetry anthology The New American Poetry, 1945-1960, edited by Donald Allen and published in 1960. In it, Allen claims to bring together for the first time the disparate strands of the American postwar avant-garde.
This essay reads the anthology through a nationalist lens, showing how Allen's editorial practices were rather arbitrarily exclusionary on the basis of nationality. His correspondence with Scottish poet Gael Turnbull, for example, reveals that Allen was willing to include him if he would apply for American citizenship.
Allen did include Scottish poet Helen Adam and British poet Denise Levertov, however, because they had lived in America for extended periods and had taken American citizenship. Thus assimilation is central to one of the most influential poetry anthologies of the twentieth century.
By claiming the postwar Anglophone poetic avant-garde for America, Allen in effect assimilated what was a decidedly transnational movement, with poets writing, living and publishing on several continents and in several countries. This essay utilizes national and transnational theory as well as Allen's unpublished correspondence to explore these complexities.