AMERICAN MODERNIST POETRY

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Characteristic Features of Modernist Poetry

• The shift of emphasis on the self-referentiality of poetic language

• The notion of a crisis of language • Search for the overall coherence of language • Language as the preeminent cultural system • Increasing doubt about the possibility of a

single, unified speaking subject

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The Great Variety of American Modernist Poetry

• The dadaist and surrealist poems of Gertrude Stein

• The Imagist poems of Ezra Pound, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) and Amy Lowell

• T. S .Eliot’s The Waste Land

4Ezra Pound in 1913

H.D. in mid-1910s

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The Great Variety of American Modernist Poetry

• V. Lindsay’s doomed fantasy of a fully public, participatory, democratic poetry

• The restrained and universalizing regional poems of W. Carlos Williams

• The prolific Black poetry of Langston Hughes and the other blues writers of the Harlem Renaissance

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The Great Variety of American Modernist Poetry

• The populist poems celebrating American life (Little Red Song Book,1909, IWW, Joe Hill)

• The socially and politically engaged poetry to develop especially throughout the late 1920s and 1930s

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Modernist Poetic Landmarks

• Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work Magazine

• Gertrude Stein’s essays

• Mina Loy’s “Aphorisms on Futurism”

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Harriet Monroe’s Poetry

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Gertrude Stein 1874-1946“The Mother of Us All”

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Gertrude Stein • Studied with William James at

Radcliffe College

• Studied brain anatomy at Johns Hopkins Medical School

• Major preoccupations:

- characterization

- reader’s preoccupation with the text

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Expatriation• In 1903 moved to France• Met Alice B. Toklas• Returned to the United States only once, in 1934 but

claimed America as her country • Her career in Europe was that of an art critic• Paul Cezanne was discovered by her brother• She was called “the Mama of Dada”• Pablo Picasso drew her portrait

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Writings

• Three Lives, written in 1904, published in 1909

• The Making of Americans, written in 1911-12, published in 1925

• Tender Buttons (1914)

• Tender Buttons Two: Gertrude Stein and her Brother and G. M. P.

• The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933)

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Writings

• The Geographical History of America (1935)

• Picasso (1938)

• The Mother of Us All (1946)

• Bee Time Vine and Other Pieces (1953)

• Stanzas in Meditation and Other Poems (1956)

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Features of Stein’s Works

• An attempt to achieve a kind of verbal “after-image”

• To penetrate the reader’s conscious-ness and evoke some genuine response

• Subversion of familiar literary techniques• Use of deliberately unliterary language

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Features of Stein’s Works

• Writing should be about real characters, real objects

• Real scenes from American life

• Forces the reader to complete the description

• Characters’ motivations are purely emotional and unchangeable

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Features of Stein’s Works

• Draws emotional states but not their physical presence

• Creates not visual characteristics of the objects

• Avoids labels (Tender Buttons) • Wit and experimentation • Use of “disguising” tactics

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Features of Stein’s Works

• Defies any genre-oriented classifications• Defies any attempts to assign a humanizing

persona to the poetic voice• Devoted to an exploration of how language

works• Anticipated most of the linguistic

experimental strain of modernism • Anticipated as well much of

postmodernism

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Ezra Pound 1885-1972• Family background

• Education: University of Pennsylvania, met William Carlos Williams, transferred to Hamilton College

• Expatriation: 1908 settled in London, a productive friendship with William Butler Yeats

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Early Poetry 1908-1914

• Personae (1909), to be revised and re-issued in 1926 as Personae: The Collected Poems.

• Patria Mia (1912), essays on American literature and society

• Indiscretions (1920), autobiographical writing

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Early Poetry 1908-1914 • Reflects his struggle to achieve clarity

and precision• In search of a direct conversational

diction• The notion of personae, or masks: • To sustain a dialogue between past and

present by speaking through various historical personalities

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Poetic Philosophy• The obsession with the literary past, his

desire to revive ancient ghosts: “The Spirit of Romance” (1910)

• Anticipates T .S. Eliot’s argument in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919)

• The modern poet can recapture the vitality of ancient myths

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Poetic Dictum • The language in his first poems - obscure

and antiquated • Ford M. Ford: all poetry should have the

economy and precision of prose• The concept of translation as a dynamic

act-“I gather the Limbs of Osiris” (1911-12)• A translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem

Seafarer

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The Poet-Critic

• Criticism and poetry – inseparable

• Five types of fusion:

- Criticism by discussion

- Criticism by translation:

- Cathay (1915)

- Umbra (1920)

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The Poet-Critic

• Criticism by exercise in the style of a given period

• Criticism via music and the importance of “melopoeia’

• The highest form is criticism in new composition

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Imagism and Vorticism

• Started around 1912; the first Imagist anthology, Des Imagiste (1914)

• Based on the ideas of Hulme• Pound’s imagism soon turned the doctrine,

which was heavily indebted to the Symbolist-Impressionist way of thinking into an anti-Symbolist and anti-Impressionist platform

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The Image

• A “direct treatment of the “thing” whether subjective or objective”

• No words that do not contribute to the presentation

• “To compose in sequence of the music phrase, not in sequence of a metronome”

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The Image

• The Image is a fusion of spontaneity, intensity and critical discipline

• An ‘equation’ for an emotion

• Not the verbal metaphor of a ‘thing’

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Vorticism

• The ‘permanent’ or ‘absolute’ image-complex juxtaposition must be active rather than static

• Vorticist images “swirl, whirl, flutter, strike, fall, move, clash and leap, with a new emphasis on conflict and distortion”

• A re-definition of the Image as Vortex

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Image/Vortex• “The image is not an idea. It is a radiant node or

cluster; it is what I can, and must perforce, call a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which ideas are constantly rushing.”

• The image can be described as content conceived of as form

• Provides a medium for exploration, rather than a territory to be explored

• It is, in his own words, a new focus

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Hugh Selwyn Mauberley

• Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, 1920, a farewell to London

• To emphasize the plight of the Odyssean artist in the modern world

• The prevailing atmosphere is one of postwar disillusionment

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The Cantos

• Moved to Italy - a lifetime project, the writing of The Cantos

• A Draft of XVI Cantos, 1924/25, published in Paris

• A Draft of XXX Cantos, 1930

• XXXI – XLI (XI New Cantos), New York, 1934

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The Cantos

• The Fifth Decad of Cantos (Leopoldine Cantos), London, 1937

• LII – LXI (The China Cantos), 1940• LXII – LXXI (The Adams Cantos), 1940• LXXII – LXXIII, 1944- 1945, in Italian,

posthumously collected• The Pisan Cantos (74-84), 1948 • Rock-Drill (85-95), 1955 • Thrones (96-109), 1959 • Drafts and Fragments (110-117), 1969

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WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS1883-1963

William Carlos Williams, Self Portrait , 1914

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WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS1883-1963

• The most self-consciously American

• Five major categories of works:

• Short, extremely laconic lyric poetry

• Paterson, 1946: five-book long

• Spring and All 1923: mixing of prose and poetry

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Williams’ Work

• In the American Grain:

- Sketches and portraits

- the special quality of the american imagination

• Autobiographical writings: Autobiography, 1951, I Want to Write a Poem: The Autobiography of a Poet, 1958

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Williams’ Poetry

• Referential force• An objectivist poet• New technique of verse:

- triadic units of collocations – ‘variable feet’ - a distinctive American poetry-indebted to French symbolism, surrealim, impressionism, cubism and futurism