THAT there is, and can be, such a style as New Wave literature depends much more on an effectively expressed attitude, sentiment, description, and detail within poetry and prose, rather than a concerted effort to simply write according to formats that have been passed down via the history of literature. And yet, such a history may also contain the spirit, attitude, and vision of New Wave writing today, which is difficult to imitate, since it can only come from within the artist; not from an academically learned process, or grammatical rules the writer may have absorbed.

Early New Wave writing
With such criteria, we can consider ancient Roman poets like Ovid and Horace, and the writer of ‘The Satyricon’, Petronius, as New Wave, but the true beginning of the modern New Wave would only emerge in the mid-19th Century, particularly with French Romantic poets and writers like Baudelaire, Nerval, Gautier, and Rimbaud.
However, it was in the New World of the Americas during the same century that an essential quality of the New Wave, which emphasized the quality the ‘New’, rooted in both the geographic appearance of the entire American landscape, and its experience by humans, who, unlike those of the Old World continents of Europe, Africa and Asia, now found themselves together as a society of Native Red Indians, Africans, Chinese, Europeans of all sorts of cultures and languages, plus hybrid extensions of their intimate result.
It should be stressed that any social problems resulting from this new reality finds more valid solutions via the actual evidence of such human interaction in works of literature and cinematic art, rather than mere righteous or moral instructions that all people, races, cultures, religions etc, are equal before God.

Whitman’s originality
The first profound poet of the Americas to embrace this New World reality was, of course, Walt Whitman with his classic book, ‘LEAVES OF GRASS’ of 1855, its first and most authentic edition, as well as a stunning series of short individual poems. By embracing whole-heartedly and un-prejudicially this new cosmopolitan American experience, Whitman not only had to find a new poetic form to represent what European and other poetic formats never had to face, but his example was a necessary avant-garde position which foresaw the global, simultaneous experience of human transmigration (by whatever process), and later the electronic transmission of distant and diverse realities via visual processes.
Walt Whitman is, therefore, the first great modern precursor of New Wave poetry. Whitman’s poetic lesson of observations, feelings and reasoning, all combined, plus the influence of Baudelaire, La Forgue, and Ezra Pound inspired the new poetry of T.S.Eliot.
But we can either judge it today, solely from a studious academic standpoint, or accept that its formal power exceeds theories, and strengthens a New Wave outlook. A statement by critic, Roland Barthes in ‘THE PLEASURES OF THE TEXT’ adds vital understanding to the role of such new aesthetics: “The new is not a fashion; it is a value. The basis of all criticism.” Hence, the trite contrariness of those offended by the process of the New, which Eliot described this way: “When a new work of art is created (new in the sense of out of the ordinary, or repetitious) something happens simultaneously to all the works of art that preceded it. The existing monuments form, an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them.”

New Wave prose fiction
It is with Marcel Proust’s monumental early 20th Century novel, ‘IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME’, of more than 2500 pages, that New Wave literature became rooted in the self-conscious search to find both its voice through writing, and the adventure of the human personality finding its own place and accomplishments in time, honestly, beyond the false pride of glamorous ignorance and dogmatism.
Proust’s voice in his masterpiece survives to guide narrators in some the best New Wave novels to follow, such as ‘THE PARK’, by Phillipe Sollers, the short stories (and their filmed versions) of Eric Rohmer; ‘THE LOVER’, by Marguerite Duras; the fabulous novels of Claude Mauriac, like ‘DINNER IN TOWN’, ‘THE MARQUISE WENT OUT AT 5’, and ‘FEMME FATALES’; Alain Robbe-Grillet’s short stories, ‘SNAPSHOTS’, his beautiful novel, ‘TOPOLOGY OF A PHANTOM CITY’, and his screenplay for ‘LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD’; Cesare Pavesse’s ‘THE DEVIL IN THE HILLS’; Alberto Moravia’s short stories; John Wain’s ‘HURRY ON DOWN’; Muriel Spark’s and David Lodge’s novels, etc. `
But reading such works, we can begin to perceive where New Wave literature pursues the value of both linguistic and mental pleasure within the framework of art’s ability to  rejuvenate our contemporary sensibilities battered by existential survival in the world.

Pound and the New Wave
The role creative writing plays in this rejuvenation leads to New Wave literature, and takes us right back to one of its foundations, Ezra Pound’s 1916 collection of verse, ‘LUSTRA’, included in his Selected Poems .
The poems of ‘Lustra’ are a New Wave literary prescription for new poets to develop. When Pound writes in ‘Salutation the second’:
‘Go, little naked and impudent songs,/ Go with a light foot…./ Greet the grave and stodgy / Salute them with your thumbs at your noses/ Here are bells and confetti / Go! Rejuvenate things!’, it is an invitation to a never-ending New Wave quest.
Such an invitation blossomed into some of the most pleasurable cosmopolitan 20th century writing, such as Lawrence Durrell’s ‘ALEXANDRIAN QUARTET’ of four novels: ‘Justine’, Baltazar’, ‘Mountolive’, and ‘Clea’; also his ‘Selected Poems – 1935 – 63’, where in one poem ‘APHRODITE’, he watches an ancient statue of this Greek Goddess of love salvaged from the sea, and writes in one line: “Of man’s own wish this breathless loveliness”. That is New Wave illumination spanning the passage of time.

American New Wave writing
Strangely, it is not America’s most popular great writers who really achieved the New Wave liberating style which breaks through to the other side of man’s existential dilemma, but those stylish mystery novelists (and novels), like W.R. Burnett’s ‘The Asphalt Jungle’, Micky Spillane’s ‘Kiss Me Deadly’, Raymond Chandler’s ‘The Lady In The Lake’ and especially Steve Fisher’s classic ‘’I Wake Up Screaming’, among others. As for the leading American New Wave poets, Frank O’Hara, Gary Snyder, James Merrill, and Diane Wakoski set the pace. So common and haphazard has the anonymous influence of New Wave creative values been felt, that we recognize it in the opinions and aspirations of many artists’ lives on Facebook, but such influence also needs conscious contact with such New Wave literature to strengthen its resolve.