"The conflict between poetic vision and historical reality is a recurring one in American poetry. In Our Last First Poets Cary Nelson shows how this conflict intensified in the open-form poetry written during the 60's and 70's. His sensitive analysis of five major poets-Theodore Roethke, Galway Kinnell, Robert Duncan, Adrienne Rich and W.S. Merwyn- link the period's political-cultural upheavals with the poets' growing disillusionment with democratic idealism. As if trying to create forms sufficiently fractured to contain their experience, these poets adopted increasingly radical forms as they worked through the years since 1960. These are forms that continually challenge their own accomplishments, yet they are forms that cling tenaciously to their own dissollusion" (from the cover).