Abstract

American poetry in the latter half of the 20th century cannot be conceived outside the development of such paradigms as those created by the Language group in the 1970’s and 1980’s or by the Conceptual poets in the first decade of the 21st century. This paper is an analysis of the strategies of manifestation or mystification of the creative self in poems written by Language American poets. Despite the efforts of these poets to prove that the self is ‘exploded’ in their texts, this analysis reveals that this poetic self still exists on the margins of their poems, and still functions as a structuring device, however weakened, of the reading activity.