A more or less randomly chosen academic book from 1960: Gordon E. Bigelow's Rhetoric and American poetry of the early national period, published by the University of Florida Press - a 77-page monograph, number 4 in Florida's "Humanities" series. "During msot of Western literary history," Bigelow begins, "rhetoric and poetic [sic] have lain close together, sometimes merging so completely for centuries at a time as to be virtually indistinguishable" ... but not so in America. Although there was much rhetoric written especially for political conversation, writers of the early U.S. did not have the willingness to devote themselves to writing poetry because (primarily) British writers were their competition. Poetry that was written in the early U.S. was done mostly to excite narrowly targeted audiences specifically for political or religious events of the day. American poetry began by being "vigorous" yet "dull" and makes "dull reading today." The poet's "words fall to the ground before they reach our ears." "The urgency which gave his poetry its life" back then is "gone" now.Bigelow is tentative about opining but (especially in his fifth section, "Propaganda and Declamation") his view is readable between the lines: partisan poetry is not poetry because it is not for the ages, it is not universal. There's a definitional problem here, and once one sees that the historical argument goes in a circle. He begins by defining poetry as not rhetoric, argues that the early U.S. poet is rhetorical, and ends by saying that the poetry produced was not poetry. There is no such thing as a didactic poem that deserves the name of "poem."
Is '60 the moment when the end of the end of the Old Left had been reached and the New Left began to emerge? Is it the final ascendancy, in certain scenes at least, of poetic postmodernity? Surely the publication of Donald Allen's The New American Poetry that year suggests this, but then again--once again--we look back on "New" here and see continuity. The rhetoric of the Kennedy-Nixon contest made much less of a dent than everyone (at the time as well as since) claimed, so one wonders why were such great claims made? 
Had we come to expect "1960" to be truly ubiquitously modern in a way that the 1950s really were not--not quite? And what specifically does "modern" mean in the Kennedyesque talk then and now about the torch being passed to a new generation, etc.? The First Lady really meant "modernist" when Camelotians said "modern." What about the others across the new young cultural leadership? I've been surprised by how frequently the 
"Beat movement" was covered in 1960 in the mainstream press. I was expecting a fair measure but I've found tonnage. 1960 was the year when the figure of the beat was beginning to find acceptance, although still 80% of these stories are mocking, rebels-without-cause condescension. For anyone whose analysis made an impact nationally, do these antipolitical adolescents count as part of the "new young cultural leadership"? No, but rather than the two being opposites, they fall along a Continuum of the New American. Now that's a change for '60.
