87 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Delbos, The New American Poetry and Cold War Nationalism, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77352-6_4 CHAPTER 4 The Community of Love: The New American Poetry and Revolutionary Relationships in Cold War America In a letter to Robert Duncan on November 3, 1959, the day after he turned in the anthology to Grove Press, Donald Allen suggested that the distinguishing trait of the poems included in The New American Poetry, as opposed to post-war poetry at large, had nothing to do with form or atti- tudes toward academia but was rather a “keener analysis of the elements of love and friendship”: The recurring theme of the anthology (it was only towards the end that I realized this was happening) is love or rather that enormous complex of themes; there are all the themes of lust, desire, hatred, longing, etc., but what profoundly distinguishes much of the New Poetry here from every other group of poets one could assemble from the contemporary scene strikes me as being (what I think of as being the prevailing continuing leav- ening ethic inherited from Black Mountain): the community of love. Whether we (Olson’s the 200 that matter) love each other more today than before, than others have in earlier periods, I can’t say; but the work certainly shows a keener analysis of the elements of love and friendship, etc. 1 1 Donald Allen to Robert Duncan, November 3, 1959, TL: 1, 1959–1964, Box: 77, Robert Duncan Collection, PCMS-0110, The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York.