AMERICAN MODERNIST POETRY Characteristic Features of Modernist Poetry

AMERICAN MODERNIST POETRY

Characteristic Features of Modernist Poetry • The shift of emphasis on the selfreferentiality of poetic language based on the very modern notion of a crisis of language; • A search for the overall coherence of language as the preeminent cultural system; • The increasing doubt about the possibility of identifying a single, unified speaking subject as the voice in modernist poerty.

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

H. D. in the mid 1910 s Ezra Pound in 1913.

The Great Variety of American Modernist Poetry • Vachel Lindsay’s doomed fantasy of a fully public, participatory, democratic poetry; • The restrained and universalizing regional poems of William Carlos Williams; • The prolific Black poetry of Langston Hughes and the other blues writers of the Harlem Renaissance.

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 that appeared and continued to develop especially throughout the late 20 s

Modernist Poetic Landmarks • Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work Magazine: • Gertrude Stein’s essays • Mina Loy’s “Aphorisms on Futurism”

Harriet Monroe’s Poetry

Gertrude Stein 1874“The Mother of Us All” (1946) • Studied with William James at Radcliffe College • Studied brain anatomy at Johns Hopkins Medical School • Major preoccupations: • characterization • the reader’s preoccupation with the text.

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

Writings • Three Lives, written in 1904, published in 1909 • The Making of Americans, written in 191112, 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)

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).

• Features of Stein’s Works An attempt to achieve a kind of verbal “after -image” that would penetrate the reader’s consciousness and evoke some genuine response • Subversion of familiar literary techniques, using deliberately unliterary language and diction and writing in unliterary structures • Insisted that writing should be about real characters, real objects, real scenes from American life forcing the reader to complete the description.

Features of Stein’s Works • Draws emotional states but not their physical presence creating the most not visual characteristics of the objects and avoiding labels (Tender Buttons) • Wit and experimentation • Use of “disguising” tactics • Characters’ motivations are purely emotional and unchangeable.

Features of Stein’s Works • Her work still defies any genre-oriented classifications as well as any attempts to assign a humanizing persona to the poetic voice • Devoted to an exploration of how language works, anticipated not only most of the linguistic experimental strain of modernism but much of postmodernism as well.

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. His poetry from the years 1908 -1914 reflects his struggle to achieve clarity, precision, and a direct conversational diction.

Writings • 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

Poetic Philosophy • The modern poet can recapture the vitality of ancient myths. • The notion of personae, or masks: the contemporary poet can sustain a dialogue between past and present by speaking through various historical personalities. • Pound’s 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)

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. • Criticism and poetic activity are inseparable. • Five kinds of fusion between poetry and criticism

The Poet-Critic • Criticism by discussion. • Criticism by translation: Cathay (1915) and Umbra (1920). • 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.

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.

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”. • The Image is a fusion of spontaneity, intensity and critical discipline, it is also an ‘equation’ for an emotion, it’s not the verbal metaphor of a ‘thing’.

Vorticism • Collaboration with the Vorticists • Strengthened his conviction that 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

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. ” Thus the image can be described as content conceived of as form. It provides a medium for exploration, rather than a territory to be explored. It is, in his own words, a new focus.

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley • Hugh Selwyn Mauberley in 1920, as a farewell to London. This was a poem meant to emphasize the plight of the Odyssean artist in the modern world • The second part of the poem is a comment on the first and the prevailing atmosphere is one of postwar disillusionment.

The Cantos • Moved to Italy - a lifetime project, the writing of The Cantos. • A Draft of Thirty Cantos, the first collection, in 1933 • The Fifth Decad of Cantos in 1937 • The Pisan Cantos (74 -84) in 1948 • Rock-Drill (85 -95) in 1955 • Thrones (96 -109) in 1959 • Drafts and Fragments (110 -117) in 1969.