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Modern American Poetry Map by Katie Monteleone (Imagism (Ezra Pound…
Modern American Poetry
Map by Katie Monteleone
Imagism
Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound Bio
Into self fashioning, liked to present himself as a frontier's man
Never finished his PHD, got fired from teaching job
Went to Europe, dated H.D.
Became friends with poets in Europe
1912 - H.D., Pound and Richard Aldington found Imagism and later write "A Retrospect"
Pound edited Eliot's "The Waste Land"
"A Retrospect"
1) Direct treatment of the 'thing',
2) To use no word that does not contribute to the presentation
3) To compose in the sequence of the musical phrase
Pound's Style:
IMAGISM
"An 'Image' is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time" (Norton Anthology, 930) - Pound in "A Retrospect"
Clear and direct style, focused on presenting concrete images
"In a Station of the Metro"
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
A strong example of an Imagist poem!
Jean Toomer
Bio
-Mixed race
-Grew up in segregated black school, later went to segregated white school
-Could pass as black or white - liminal identity
-Wrote
Cane
, one of the founding books of Harlem Renaissance
Style
-Ideas on collective identity
-His poems "reveal his sharp eye for clashing cultures" (Norton Anthology, 557)
-Free verse
-Clear images
-Writes on race and identity
Shows Toomer's style of commenting on black identity through a traditionally white form.
William Carlos Williams
Bio:
-Lived mostly in the U.S.
-Part time poet, full time doctor
~#FriendsWithPound
Style:
-"No ideas but in things"
-Imagism
-"Williams emphasized that a poem must have its own idiom, that it must deal with 'those things which lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses, close to the nose'" (Norton Anthology, 285).
-"The only realism in art is of the imagination." - William Carlos Williams in
Spring and All
This Is Just to Say
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
Imagist poem, also comments on the purpose of poetry by writing about such a basic, every day experience (when people often associate poems with dealing with big, lofty topics)
H.D.
Bio:
Friends with Pound and William Carlos Williams
-Engaged to Pound, then split up
-Later they became friends again and founded Imagism
-Pound named Hilda Doolittle "H.D." and got her published in Poetry Magazine
-Pound holds up H.D. as the ideal Imagist poet
Style:
-Imagism - clear and direct
-Writes about women
-Poems are empowering for women
-Free verse
-Had lots of relationships with men and women so poems reflect that
-Sexual freedom and exploration of romance
"Oread"
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.
Traditional Forms and Meter with SPICE
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Bio:
-Grew up in Camden, ME
-Moved to NYC, started working in theater
-1st woman to win Pulitzer Prize
-Had an open marriage and relationships with men and women all her life
Style:
-Writes in traditional forms (like sonnets)
-Radical in her treatment of gender, sex, desire
-Traditional form, radical content
-Female empowerment
"I find this frenzy insufficient reason / For conversation when we meet again."
-->from "I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed" - shows Millay using traditional sonnet form with radical content of a woman wanting casual sex from a man and nothing more
Claude McKay
#
Bio:
-Lived in Harlem
-Spent a lot of time in France and Morocco
-Moved back to U.S. and started writing poetry
-Black writer of the Harlem Renaissance
Style:
-Known for writing in dialect
-Often wrote sonnets
-Wrote about themes of race
"If we must die, let it not be like hogs"
Frost
Bio
-Moved to New England
-1912, went to England, met Ezra Pound ~#FriendsWithPound
-Successful career as a poet
Style
-Writes about nature
-Famous for writing metrically formal poems in iambs (the language of the people)
-His poems often have a clear message
-Pastorals
The Road Not Taken
-Example of Frost writing in iambs
-Nature setting
-Commonly misread --> isn't saying that taking a different path is a fruitful experience... the speaker is actually saying it doesn't matter what path you choose and making a joke about someone who thinks so carefully about which way to walk in the woods
e.e. cummings
Bio:
-Lived in Cambridge
-Went to Harvard
-First book =
Tulips and Chimneys
-Was an ambulance driver in WWI
Style:
-Sticks to tradition by writing love poems
-Form is experimental, content is traditional
-Writes love sonnets
-Likes parentheses in poems
-Plays with letters and appearances of words
"i carry your heart with me(i carry it in / my heart"
-a-grammatical, uses lower case letters, about love, uses parentheses to comment on the real content of the poem
BIG ideas
T.S. Eliot
#
The Waste Land/Eliot's Style
-Fragmented
-Landscape
-Lots of references
-A bit confusing
-Intense tone
-Body, birth, pain of reproduction = content of the poem
-Pound edited "The Waste Land" quite a bit, created the fragmentation
-"The ghost of some meter should lurk behind the arras in even the freest of verse." - Eliot
Bio
-American who craved a British identity
-Went to Harvard, and eventually Oxford
-Got married in England
-Worked in a bank
-Met Pound in England ~#FriendsWithPound
Wallace Stevens
#
Bio:
-Went to Harvard
-Worked in the insurance business
-Poet with a day job
"I certainly do not exist from nine to six, when I am at the office."
Style:
-Interested in imagination vs. reality
-Poet philosopher - liked to explore big questions and themes such as existence, love, death, life, being, abstractions, etc.
-asymptotes - gets close but never quite touches the "thing"
Study of Two Pears
-poem that shows Stevens exploring big questions - in this case, a question of representation and how reproductions mirror the real thing but never fully ARE the real thing - asymptotal thinking
Mina Loy
#
Bio:
-Born in England, lived in America
-#FriendsWithPound
-Thinks of self as culturally mixed
-Had several marriages with several men
Style:
-Known for abstract, difficult poems
-Uses big words
-Content sometimes confusing
-Known for sardonic take on romance between men and women
-Has a lot to say about sex and romance
-Interested in big, lofty topics --> abstractions
#
Femimist Manifesto
-radical feminism --> destroy the system of the patriarchy
-argues for destroying the hymen surgically
-women's empowerment
Parturition
-childbirth as a big topic
-pain of childbirth, out of body experience
-emphasis on external versus internal/liminal space of experiencing childbirth
-cosmos vs. simple every day occurances
-"precipitating into me / The contents of the universe"
Gwendolyn Brooks
Bio:
-First black author to win Pulitzer Prize
-Her family supported her poetry growing up and she published her first poem at age 13
-in the 1950s, published novel,
Maud Martha
-Style:
-Black activism in poetry
-Represents segregation and unfair treatment of African Americans
-Poems often rhyme
-Influenced by Harlem Renaissance
-Wrote some sonnets and ballads, later turned to free verse
"Maud went to college. / Sadie stayed home. / Sadie scraped life / With a fine-tooth comb." -From "Sadie and Maud"
-Shows the ballad rhyming style
-Represents experience of a young African American woman
Playing with SOUND!
Marianne Moore
Bio:
-Her first poems were published in 1915 in
The Egoist
-In the late 1920's she became editor of
The Dial
-One of the few female poets who was equally as respected as men
Style:
-Revised her poems a lot
-No eroticism
-"Omissions are not accidents" -Moore
-Long sentences
-Wrote in syllabics --> would write a stanza in free verse, then repeat whatever pattern emerged
"Poetry / I, too, dislike it."
Example of poem using syllabics:
-"The Fish"
Langston Hughes
Bio:
-Grew up with grandmother
-Got into poetry in high school
-Made a living through writing and editing
"The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain"
-Essay that expresses desire to reclaim black identity
-Says that black people should be proud to be black and write about their own people in their own style
Style:
-Used music in poetry
-Liked to experiment with how music and words influence one another
-Experimented with sound
-Writes on themes of race
Example of musicality in poem: "The Weary Blues"
Gertrude Stein
Bio:
-Born in Pittsburg, moved to Oakland, CA
-Went to Radcliff (women's branch at Harvard)
-Early 1900s, moved to Paris and started writing
-She had a salon in Paris for artists
-Became close friends with Picasso and other artists
-Stein had a lot of paintings from Picasso (casually tacked to her wall, LOL)
-Life partner = Alice Toklas
Style:
-SUPER experimental!
-Plays with sound
-Repetition
-Playfulness in language
-Interest in how words sound and interact with one another rather than focusing on clear meaning
-Permutations of words --> free association
-Nonsensical language
-A-grammatical
-Distorted reality
-Cubism - art term that Picasso was using, comes into play in her poetry form
"If I told him would he like it. Would he like it if I told him. / Would he like it would Napoleon would Napoleon would would he like it."
-Stein, "A Completed Portrait of Picasso"
--> shows the permutations in Stein's language
Just want to say, I LOVED reading Stein!! My new dream is to write a performance piece/play using her poems... she's amazing and really inspired me as a creative thinker and artist. :)
