8/2/2019 Lindsey on Modernist Poetry

1/6

Trends in Modernist PoetryWilliams, Stevens, Eliot EN272 L. M. Freer Spring 2012

8/2/2019 Lindsey on Modernist Poetry

2/6

ImagismImagismHistorical Details

Also referred to as Imagisme(Fr.)

Originates 1912 as a consciouslydeveloped poetry movement within thebroader Modernist consciousness

Aim is absolute clarity: poetry wasmeant to be akin to sculpture

Covers early poetry of Ezra Pound,Amy Lowell, H.D., Wallace Stevens,William Carlos Williams, and others

Many of its originators break with themovement and go on to practice other(sometimes related) poetic styles

Poetic Principles

To use common language, but also the

exact/precise word

Free verse > conventional meter

Any subject may be chosen for thepoem

To present an image. We are not a

school of painters, but we believe thatpoetry should render particularsexactly and not deal in vaguegeneralities, however magnificent andsonorous.

Hard and clear poetry distilled to itsessence

8/2/2019 Lindsey on Modernist Poetry

3/6

William Carlos WilliamsWilliam Carlos Williams 1883-1963

Key practitioner of Imagist principles

Well-known as both poet and doctor; pediatrician in hishometown of Rutherford, N.J.

But all art is sensual and poetry particularly so. It isdirectly, that is, of the senses, and since the senses donot exist without an object for their employment all art

is necessarily objective. It doesn't declaim or explain, itpresents.

Williams reads The Red Wheelbarrow:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaBpMVo5iog

8/2/2019 Lindsey on Modernist Poetry

4/6

Wallace StevensWallace Stevens 1879-1955

Spent most of his adult life working at an insurancecompany

Was first published at age 35

Saw poetry as a continual dialogue of question-and-

answer between reality and imagination

Opening Question: how many winter-related words

are in The Snow Man, and what is the cumulative

effect of those words?

8/2/2019 Lindsey on Modernist Poetry

5/6

The Snow Man (1921)The Snow Man (1921) A poem expressing a philosophy similar to that of Imagism or of Tradition and

the Individual Talent

Rejects the idea that nature is personifiable or linked to human emotion: thecreative consciousness must discipline itself to a condition of wintriness in orderto apprehend without embellishment. Pat Righelato

The poem is a single sentence describing how to see things as they are.

Later stanzas act upon/change the meaning of earlier oneswe dont get a

complete thought until the end.

Final stanza: we must become so numb that we can see ourselves accuratelyas nothingonly then can we see clearly, free of the desire for metaphor.

The nothing that is = the Modernist crisis of meaning.

8/2/2019 Lindsey on Modernist Poetry

6/6

Thomas Stearns EliotThomas Stearns Eliot 1888-1965

Expatriate: born in the U.S., spends most of his adultlife in Europe/the U.K. Becomes a British citizen in1927.

Major figure of Modernist aesthetics and writer ofpoems, prose, and plays

Convert to Anglican (Episcopal) church in late 1920s;he often wrote about religion in his later life

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2khDhfwsoE