The Manhattan Project, begun in 1942, culminated in August 1945 when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing over two hundred thousand people and forcing Japan's surrender. The bombs ended the Second World War but inaugurated the nuclear age and the anxiety of mutually assured destruction. The moral enormity of Hiroshima became one of the defining subjects of postwar poetry, from direct elegy to the oblique, fractured verse of poets who found conventional language inadequate to the scale of the event.

The advent of nuclear fission and its weaponization in 1945 profoundly influenced poets such as W. H. Auden and Allen Ginsberg, who grappled with themes of apocalypse, ethics, and the fragility of human existence. Their works often reflected the anxiety and moral dilemmas posed by the nuclear age.