1920s: Reacting to nineteenth-century poetry, which often was highly emotional and narrative in style and strongly reflected the personality of the poet, modernist poets of the first decades of the twentieth century produce detached, intellectually complex, usually unrhymed, and obscure poetry characterized by fragmented imagery.

Today: Through rap and hip-hop and in poetry slams, young poets of the early twenty-first century, continuing the rebellion begun in the 1950s by beat generation poets against academic and modernist poetry, write and perform poetry using everyday and sometimes even obscene speech in heavily rhymed verse concerned with social problems and highlighting the opinions, adventures, and personalities of the poets themselves.

1920s: While the influence of psychoanalytic thought creates a climate that allows some writers like Aiken, James Joyce, and Henry Roth to explore and express emotional vulnerability, other writers, like Ernest Hemingway, still insist on taking a...