News at Eleven: The movement from rhetoric to clowning,

from elegy to irony, from self-pity to self-mocker--such a common movement in modern American poetry--is related rather to the modern American poet's fear of the solemn and the naive.

Nevertheless, the American poet is concerned with the eternal verities, not with making casual yet precise observations or capturing the mood or impulse of the moment which is the concern of so many modern English poets.

from The Times Literary Supplement: Then and Now

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