Fulbright Poems: Locating Europe and America in the Cold War: Locating Europe and America in the cold war

Adrienne Rich (1929–2012), Richard Wilbur (1921), and John Ashbery (1927) are three American poets who traveled to Europe in the 1950s on a new kind of fellowship. Ashbery received a Fulbright and started work on a PhD in Montpellier, France; Rich won a Guggenheim Fellowship and embarked on a trip to Oxford, England; and Wilbur headed for the capital of Italy after he had received a Prix de Rome from the American Academy. They are representatives of a much larger group of American poets who traveled to Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War. More American poets than ever before in their nation’s history journeyed to Europe, leading to hundreds of poems that were inspired by the Old World. These poets were driving forces behind all the important postwar poetry movements, including Beat poets (Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg), Black Mountain writers (Paul Blackburn and Robert Creeley), Confessional poets (Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton), the Middle Generation (Randall Jarrell and Robert Lowell), and the New York School (Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara). They wrote about nearly all European countries, although they settled in and wrote mostly about Western Europe, especially France and Italy. Some poets vacationed in Europe, but others lived there for many years, sometimes for more than a decade, as Ashbery eventually did.