AMERICAN MODERNIST POETRY

A. Modernism - A 20th-century Western world cultural phenomenon (cc. 1900-1945)

(read from: http://faculty.unlv.edu/kirschen/handouts/modernism.html)

- Assault of traditions and boundaries of many kinds

- Rapid developments in science and technology (see psychology, anthropology, philosophy)
- Dizzying pace of change, resulting in breaks with tradition, exploded conventions in the arts,
opening up new formal and thematic possibilities.
- Avant-garde modernism catches fire in Europe in the decade before WW I and in just a few years
sweeps through the major European cities.
- In visual arts, a landmark will be 1907 Picasso’s painting entitled Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
(look on the Internet for this cubist masterpiece and analyze it).
- The first futurist manifesto is published two years later by Marinetti in the journal Le Figaro,
glorifying “the beauty of speed.” Such public declarations explain, justify, and promote the
ambitions and revolutionary, iconoclastic beliefs of convention-defying artists.
- In music, Stravinsky’s ballet Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) breaks with traditional
harmony and rhythms – its first performance sparkling even a riot.
- The central site of Anglophone modernism will be London; 23-year-old Ezra Pound arrives there
in 1908 and ignites the cosmopolitan literary community. He befriends T.E. Hulme, an English
philosopher leading an avant-garde literary group.
- Moaning and whining Romanticism was denounced, at the expense of a “harder and saner dry”
literature, like granite (Ezra Pound).
- Another American expat, T. S. Eliot comes to England in 1914 and surprises Pound by his having
“modernized himself on his own,” as well as by his essays influenced by Hulme.
- Assertion of new form and subject matter, along with the holding up of the standard of classic
texts.
- Repudiation of the slushy, self-indulgent literature of the nineteenth century Victorianism, which
Pound considers to have been “blurry, messy,” and “sentimentalistic.” (The 1914 manifesto of the
journal Blast will ask artists and readers to “BLAST / years 1837 to 1900”; the middle class is
blamed for perpetuating Victorian taste and conventional mores)
- This break is mostly rather in theory than in practice.
- The modernist agitations, declarations, and poetic experiments resulted in the formation of
imagism (an advocation of clear and immediate images, exact and efficient diction, inventive and
musical rhythms). Imagist poetry needed to be brief and stripped down, employing as few words
as possible and bearing no comment on them (similarly to Hulme’s exhortation that the poet
render “the exact curve of what he sees whether it be an object or an idea in the mind”, and
congenial with Pounds demands of a “direct treatment of the ‘thing,’ whether subjective or
objective”; see his recommendations in “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste” and their far-reaching,
transatlantic influence on American poetry and poets).
- A major figure of the imagist movement was the American poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), who
arrived in London in 1911. She wrote poetry under the influence of ancient Greek lyrical
 fragments (praised as “modern” and “laconic” by Pound, who also qualified them as “Objective –
no slither; direct – no excessive use of adjectives, no metaphors that won’t permit examination.
It’s straight talk, straight as the Greek!”). Note the fact that, though both H.D. and Pound would
write long poems as well, they still favored in those works compression, immediacy, and
juxtaposition!
- Eventually, Pound himself will get tired of imagism (which he felt being too static and not
vigorous enough). The next modernist movement that he founded (along with Wyndham Lewis)
was called vorticism and it was intended to underscore the dynamism of the poetic content. The
movement’s emblem – the vortex – was the epitome of whirling, intensifying, encompassing
energy. The main visual arts achievements of this direction in poetry were those of Lewis’
paintings and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s sculptures). Eventually, artists and poets will break with
vorticism’s misogyny and jingoism (chauvinism or arrogant nationalism), whose major
proponents will later embrace fascicism as well).
- Modernist manifestos need to be paid utmost attention, on account of their being an important
literary genre, not only mere declarations of doctrine. Some of them cross poetry with poster art,
while manipulating words for maximum effect. Jagged typography, wild energy, radical
individualism are but some of the means chosen by artists and poets to advanced modernism as
an innovative direction in art.

A. Food for thought: T. E. Hulme:

“After a hundred years of romanticism, we are in for a classical revival, and that the particular
weapon of this new classical spirit, when it works in verse, will be fancy.”; “The romantic,
because he thinks man infinite, must always be talking about the infinite; and as there is always
the bitter contrast between what you ought to be able to do and what man actually can, it always
tends , in its later stages at any rate, to be gloomy.”; “You might say if you wished that the whole
of the romantic attitude seems to crystallize in verse round metaphors of flight. Hugo is always
flying, flying above abysses, flying up into the eternal gases. The word infinite in every other
line.”; “I object even to the best of the romantics. I object still more to the receptive attitude. I
object to the sloppiness which doesn’t consider that a poem is a poem unless it is moaning or
whining about something or other… The thing has got so bad now that a poem which is all dry
and hard, a properly classical poem, would not be considered poetry at all. How many people
now can lay their hands on their hearts and say they like either Horace or Pope? They feel a chill
when they read them…. Poetry that isn’t damp isn’t poetry at all. They cannot see that accurate
description is a legitimate object of verse. Verse to them always means a bringing in of some of
the emotions that are grouped round the word infinite.” (emphasis added); “In the classic it is
always the light of ordinary day, never the light that never was on land or sea. It is always
perfectly human and never exaggerated: man is always man and never a god… But the awful
result of romanticism is that, accustomed to this strange light, you can never live without it. Its
effect on you is that of a drug.”; “It is essential to prove that beauty may be in small, dry
things…. The grat aim is accurate, precise and definite description. The first thing is to recognize
how extraordinarily difficult this is. It is no mere matter of carefulness; you have to use language,
and language is by its very nature a communal thing; that is, it expresses never the exact thing but
a compromise – that which is common to you, me and everybody… But each man sees a little
 differently, and to get out clearly and exactly what he does see, he must have a terrific struggle
with language, whether it be with words or the technique of other arts…. I always think that the
fundamental process at the back of all the arts might be represented by the following metaphor.
You know what I call architect’s curves – flat pieces of wood with all different kinds of
curvature. By a suitable selection from these you can draw approximately any curve you like. The
artist I take to be the man who simply can’t bear the idea of that ‘approximately’. He will get the
exact curve of what he sees whether it be an object or an idea in the mind.”; “Poetry … is a
compromise for a language of intuition which would hand over sensations bodily. It always
endeavors to arrest you, and to make you continuously see a physical thing, to prevent you
gliding through an abstract process. It chooses fresh epithets and fresh metaphors, not so much
because they are new, and we are tired of the old, but because the old ceases to convey a physical
thing and become abstract counters…. Visual meanings can only be transferred by the new bowl
of metaphor; prose is an old pot that lets them leak out. Images in verse are not mere decoration,
but the very essence of an intuitive language. Verse is a pedestrian taking you over the ground,
prose – a train which delivers you at a destination.” (T. E. Hulme, Romanticism and Classicism)

D. Illustrations of imagist principles

“Autumn” (by T. E. Hulme)

A touch of cold in the Autumn night –
I walked abroad,
And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge
Like a red-faced farmer,
I did not stop to speak, but nodded,
And round about were the wistful stars
With white faces like town children.

- In “Imagisme,” F. S. Flint mentioned a few rules of imagist poetry:

“1. Direct treatment of the “thing,” whether subjective or objective.
2. To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation.
3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the
metronome.

E. Ezra Pound’s “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste”

- In this manifesto, Ezra Pound stresses the merit of an “image” to “present an intellectual and
emotional complex in an instant of time”, aimed at giving one “that sense of sudden liberation;
that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we
experience in the presence of the greatest works of art”; “It is better to present one Image in a
lifetime than to produce voluminous works.”
 - In so far as the language of modernist (imagist) poetry is concerned, Pound recommends that the
poet “use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something,” as that can affect
the image and make it grow “dull”; “Go in fear of abstractions. Don’t retell in mediocre verse
what has already been done in good prose…. Use either no ornament or good ornament.”
- As for the sensitive domain of rhythm and rhyme, Pound considers that the poet should fill “his
mind with the finest cadences he can discover, preferably in a foreign language so that the
meaning of the words may be less likely to divert his attention from the movement”; he also
deems that “it is not necessary that a poem should rely on its music, but if it does rely on its
music that music must be such as will delight the expert… Let the neophyte know assonance and
alliteration, rhyme immediate and delayed, simple and polyphonic, as a musician would expect to
know harmony and counterpoint and all the minutiae of his craft…. Don’t imagine that a thing
will ‘go’ in verse just because it’s too dull to go in prose.”

F. “In a Station of the Metro” (by Ezra Pound)

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.”
(Pound’s comment on this poem: “Three years ago in Paris I got out of a ‘metro’ train at La Concorde, and saw suddenly a
beautiful face, and then another and another, and then a beautiful child’s face, and then another beautiful woman, and I tried all
that day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as
that sudden motion. And that evening … I was still trying and I found, suddenly, the expression. I do not mean that I found
words, but there came an equation… not in speech, but in little splotches of colour… The ‘one-image-poem ‘ is a form of super-
position, that is to say. It is one idea getting out of the impasse in which I had been left by my metro emotion. I wrote a thirty-line
poem, and destroyed it…. Six month later I made a poem half that length; a year later I made the following hokku-like sentence. ”

(James F. Knapp: “’In a Station of the Metro’ relies on just two images, both presented in a simple, direct way, plus
the catalyst of one word which is not straightforward description: ‘apparition.’ Through the metaphoric suggestion
of that word, Pound fuses the mundane image of ‘faces in the crowd,’ with an image possessing visual beauty and
the rich connotations of countless poems about spring. And because "apparition" means what it does, he is able to
convey the feeling of surprised discovery which such a vision in such a place must evoke.”)

Notes on Pound’s poem “In a Station of the Metro”

Themes: beauty discovered in unlikely places; the quality of startling and moving sensations; freshness of
the natural world; the unexpected possibilities of the urban landscape.

This poem exemplifies the principles of imagist poetry (read it against Pound’s essay “A Few Don’ts by
an Imagiste” and his comment on the poem).

It is not strictly a haiku poem, yet it contains the brevity, sparseness of description, intensity of
perception, grounding in nature, and focuses on a single effect associated with the Japanese form. (The
single effect is centered on a brief moment in a crowded Paris train station when Pound gets stuck by the
beauty of several passing faces.

The placing of the image of those faces next to that of “Petals on a wet, black bough” is a fresh, surprising
vision, very much in opposition to the city scene described in the first, while capturing the
unexpectedness of the urban “apparition.” The word “apparition” also suggests how unlovely the average
scene at the station is and how pleasing/startling (dream-like) the seeming mirage is.
Almost each word is used allusively, being chosen in order to maximize the epiphany-like effect of the
poem on us.

The fleeting quality of the image, its immediate impression further illustrates the precepts in Pound’s
essay. In the poem, there is no context, no narrative (which would detract the reader from the impact of
that momentary experience of feeling and perception).

Agreeing with Pound’s modernist approach to poetry, the instantaneous effect of the poem “gives that
sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden
growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art.” (“A Few Don’ts”)

The lack of any verbs adds to the quality of this moment being suspended in time. Needless to say that,
later, Pound rejected imagism (viz., the static aspect of such a poem) in favor of vorticism.

G. TASK: Comment on the imagist principles illustrated in H.D.’s poem “Oread”

“Oread” (by H.D.)

“Whirl up, sea—

Whirl your pointed pines,
Splash your great pines
On our rocks,
Hurl your green over us,
Cover us with your pools of fir.”

H. William Carlos Williams - “The Red Wheelbarrow”

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens.

EXPLANATION: "The Red Wheelbarrow"

Lines 1-2

The opening lines set the tone for the rest of the poem. Since the poem is composed of one sentence
broken up at various intervals, it is truthful to say that "so much depends upon" each line of the poem.
This is so because the form of the poem is also its meaning. This may seem confusing, but by the end of
the poem the image of the wheelbarrow is seen as the actual poem, as in a painting when one sees an
image of an apple, the apple represents an actual object in reality, but since it is part of a painting the
apple also becomes the actual piece of art. These lines are also important because they introduce the idea
that "so much depends upon" the wheelbarrow.

Lines 3-4

Here the image of the wheelbarrow is introduced starkly. The vivid word "red" lights up the scene. Notice
that the monosyllable words in line 3 elongates the line , putting an unusual pause between the word
"wheel" and "barrow." This has the effect of breaking the image down to its most basic parts. The reader
feels as though he or she were scrutinizing each part of the scene. Using the sentence as a painter uses line
and color, Williams breaks up the words in order to see the object more closely.

Lines 5-6

Again, the monosyllable words elongate the lines with the help of the literary device assonance. Here the
word "glazed" evokes another painterly image. Just as the reader is beginning to notice the wheelbarrow
through a closer perspective, the rain transforms it as well, giving it a newer, fresher look. This new
vision of the image is what Williams is aiming for.

Lines 7-8

The last lines offer up the final brushstroke to this "still life" poem. Another color, "white" is used to
contrast the earlier "red," and the unusual view of the ordinary wheelbarrow is complete. Williams, in
dissecting the image of the wheelbarrow, has also transformed the common definition of a poem. With
careful word choice, attention to language, and unusual stanza breaks Williams has turned an ordinary
sentence into poetry.

(Source: Exploring Poetry, Gale. © Gale Group Inc. 2001. Online Source)

H. Further generalities on American Modernist Poetry

A Brief Guide to Modernism

"That's not it at all, that's not what I meant at all"

—from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," by T. S. Eliot

The English novelist Virginia Woolf declared that human nature underwent a
fundamental change "on or about December 1910." The statement testifies to
the modern writer's fervent desire to break with the past, rejecting literary
traditions that seemed outmoded and diction that seemed too genteel to suit
an era of technological breakthroughs and global violence.

"On or about 1910," just as the automobile and airplane were beginning to
accelerate the pace of human life, and Einstein's ideas were transforming our
perception of the universe, there was an explosion of innovation and creative
energy that shook every field of artistic endeavor. Artists from all over the
world converged on London, Paris, and other great cities of Europe to join in
the ferment of new ideas and movements: Cubism, Constructivism,
Futurism, Acmeism, and Imagism were among the most influential banners
under which the new artists grouped themselves. It was an era when major
artists were fundamentally questioning and reinventing their art forms:
Matisse and Picasso in painting, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein in
literature, Isadora Duncan in dance, Igor Stravinsky in music, and Frank
Lloyd Wright in architecture.

The excitement, however, came to a terrible climax in 1914 with the start of
the First World War, which wiped out a generation of young men in Europe,
catapulted Russia into a catastrophic revolution, and sowed the seeds for
even worse conflagrations in the decades to follow. By the war's end in
1918, the centuries-old European domination of the world had ended and the
"American Century" had begun. For artists and many others in Europe, it
was a time of profound disillusion with the values on which a whole
civilization had been founded. But it was also a time when the avante-garde
experiments that had preceded the war would, like the technological wonders
of the airplane and the atom, inexorably establish a new dispensation, which
we call modernism. Among the most instrumental of all artists in effecting
this change were a handful of American poets.

Ezra Pound, the most aggressively modern of these poets, made "Make it
new!" his battle cry. In London Pound encountered and encouraged his
fellow expatriate T. S. Eliot, who wrote what is arguably the most famous
poem of the twentieth century--The Waste Land--using revolutionary
techniques of composition, such as the collage. Both poets turned to
untraditional sources for inspiration, Pound to classical Chinese poetry and
Eliot to the ironic poems of the 19th century French symbolist poet Jules
Laforgue. H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) followed Pound to Europe and wrote
poems that, in their extreme concision and precise visualization, most purely
embodied his famous doctrine of imagism.

Among the American poets who stayed at home, Wallace Stevens--a mild-
mannered executive at a major insurance firm in Hartford, Connecticut--had
a flair for the flashiest titles that poems have ever had: "Peter Quince at the
Clavier," "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," "Le Monocle de Mon
Oncle." Stevens, the aesthete par excellence, exalted the imagination for its
ability to "press back against the pressure of reality."

What was new in Marianne Moore was her brilliant and utterly original use
of quotations in her poetry, and her surpassing attention to the poetic image.
What was new in E. E. Cummings was right on the surface, where all the
words were in lower-case letters and a parenthesis "(a leaf falls)" may
separate the "l" from "oneliness."

William Carlos Williams wrote in "plain American which cats and dogs can
read," to use a phrase of Marianne Moore. "No ideas but in things," he
proclaimed. In succinct, often witty poems he presents common objects or
events--a red wheelbarrow, a person eating plums--with freshness and
immediacy, enlarging our understanding of what a poem's subject matter can
be. Unlike Williams, Robert Frost favored traditional devices--blank verse,
rhyme, narrative, the sonnet form--but he, too, had a genius for the American
vernacular, and his pitiless depiction of a cruel natural universe marks him as
a peculiarly modern figure who is sometimes misread as a genial Yankee
sage.

Of the many modern poets who acted on the ambition to write a long poem
capable of encompassing an entire era, Hart Crane was one of the more
notably successful. In his poem "The Bridge," the Brooklyn Bridge is both a
symbol of the new world and a metaphor allowing the poet to cross into
different periods, where he may shake hands in the past with Walt Whitman
and watch as the train called the Twentieth Century races into the future.