When I think of some of the better-known poetry of the early fifties, I think first of Dylan Thomas, E. E. Cummings, Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke and of a poetry that was intensely, sometimes cloyingly, personal….

The thirties were not just over in the fifties: they were devalidated…. The loss of faith in the public life and in progress in general was wide and deep, and it provided a rich ground for the cultivation of conservative social and political ideas. After the war there was an eager return to "normality" in human affairs, a normality that neatly ignored the Depression in fashioning fantasies about what was, in fact, a new sociological occurrence, the suburb. It was also a time of an intense desire to substitute moral categories for political ones. The attack did not always come from the right, though. Whatever Joseph McCarthy or J. Edgar Hoover did...