Gone were the great experiments of Pound, Eliot, and Williams with free forms and experimental prosodies meant to convey the changeful nature of thought and feeling. The age of New Criticism under Eliot's direction espoused English and Continental literature prior to the French Revolution as the proper models for contemporary verse. Such a retreat to the past threatened to halt the progress toward maturity of American literature and send writers back to a period of Colonial imitativeness of European standards that Whitman himself had fought so passionately in his own poems of a century before.
Olson's manifesto announced a poetics of bold new freedoms that ran counter to all the aims of the present regime of orthodoxy. His poetics, rooted in the romantic tradition of organic art, demanded that prosody have no other mechanism than the human body's own natural processes of breathing and thinking. Line length, he argued, should be determined by the poet's breath rhythms in composing his language and not by a syllable or stress count, as in traditional measure.
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