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Modern American Poetry (Pre-Modern Poets (Modern American Poetry's…
Modern American Poetry
Pre-Modern Poets
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WHY modernism?
Desire to break away from literary traditions, form, and diction
Era where so many artists were reinventing their art form
"Natural" Language
The founding of IMAGISM
Pound
Ezra Pound (1885-1972) decided he didn't like where poetry was in 1912 → created IMAGISM
- "in revolt against the comparative excess and sentimentality of of Victorian verse" (393, Norton)
What is Imagism? Pound laid out in "A Restrospect":
1. Direct treatment of the thing
2. No superfluous language
-word economy & efficiency
3. Throw away the idea of the meter
-goes against people like Longfellow, whose poetry has a
clear "beat"
-compose, instead, "in the sequence of the musical phrase""Pound wants poetry to be "austere, direct, free from emotional slither" He says that "An 'Image' is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time" (347, Norton)
Does POUND follow the imagist principles? In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough. : :
- brief and concise
-two precise images brought together - the apparition of the faces and the petals
-*DOES THIS POEM FIT IMAGISM? KIND OF
Pound's Translations
- Translates Chinese poetry through notes of Japanese scholars
-Game of telephone... original meaning likely lost
-Why translate Chinese? It's an ideographic language - written symbols represent a idea/object directly
-direct, clear, efficient!
-Ironic: Pound's translations are less concise, more superfluous than originals because of English language
Tension between the old and new
"Make it new" - Pound
- Trying to do new things with old texts
- Though his translations are interesting, they're not really translations! They're new/different
Are his translations Imagist?
The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter"
- Not concise; not a moment in time - an image - but, rather, a narrative
-Descriptions that imagism might deem superfluous: "The monkeys make sorrowful noises overhead. / You dragged your feet when you went out. / By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses, / To deep to clear them away" (18-21)
- These lines aren't clear or direct → though Pound interpreted the translations in his own way, he does not seem to apply imagist principles
H.D.
Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961) was close to Pound and part of the Imagist movement
- Often writes about sexual freedom & gender using traditional female archetypes of flowers and figures like Helen of Troy
- Writes free verse
- Her form of Imagism is "cold, 'Greek,' fast, and enclosed" (Norton)
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Oread (Like Ina Station of the Metro, a very important Imagist poem)
- Oread telling the sea to splash over world with the only descriptors she knows → pines, green, fir
- a PLAY on "direct treatment of the thing" - uses metaphor to to close the gap between forest and sea
-metaphor = a gap in imagist theory
- about the power of language
Sea Rose
- rose symbolizes femininity/women, but this is no ordinary rose → ugly, meagre, but STRONG & SEXUALLY EXPERIENCED
- This rose is more valuable and beautiful than the perfect, untouched spice rose
Williams
William Carlos Williams (1886-1963)
-a physician in NJ!
- wrote in a "rough, plain" language - like the common people (and free from emotional slither, like Pound says)
- wants to communicate with the world directly
- Complex relationship with Pound: Williams denounced Pound as a conformist, yet divided his life into Before and After Pound when they became friends (Pound and Imagism did, at least, influence to Williams) #
The Red Wheelbarrow
- "So much depends upon" is key → each line depends upon the next
-meaning and form bound together
- simple and short; no excess words → Imagist (like a still life of a wheelbarrow)
More distant Imagists
Toomer
Jean Toomer (1894-1967)
- his racial ambiguity during an era of racism and Jim Crow laws shaped his identity
- Idea of himself as a "New American" (not European, not African, just American) & thought America could transcend race and become a unified people
- Went to the South and this perspective changed - wrote Cane -
- Some of his poems are Imagist - rooted in the sensory
Portrait in Georgia
white woman is implicated in the lynching - white woman's beauty is propped up by the oppression of black people through lynching, through slavery
"white as the ash of black flesh after flame" - startling image
- Race & Imagism can be very powerful
- Traditional form of a blason in which parts of a women's body are compared to beautiful things
- New content for an old form: compares woman's body to violent image of a lynching
Frost
The Road Not Taken
I took the one less traveled by, / and that has made all the difference"
- Always misinterpreted! Frost is being ironic - it hasn't made all the difference
Each stanza has 5 lines, abaab rhyme → NOT innovative in form, but does write coloquially
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Relationship to Imagism:
- Befriended Pound and other Imagists in England
Robert Frost (1874-1963)
- Born in San Francisco but wrote about and identified with New England
- put natural language into traditional form and meter
- one of our most famous poets - classic American, wrote about rural life
- he is "a student of darkness, aware of its encroachments, yet hopeful that it can, by art and understanding, be overwhelmed" (202, Norton)
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Experiment
Experimenting with MUSIC
Hughes
Langston Hughes (1902-1967)
- Important figure in the Harlem Renaissance
incorporated African-American music into his poems → blues, jazz
- Created affirmative vision of blackness in a way other black authors did not in this time
*Looked up to McKay -
"The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain"
- argues AGAINST the desire to be white or to see "American" as equaling whiteness
- Says black culture is IMPORTANT - black artists have so much to write about/material to make art with in black culture
- jazz is "the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world" (967, Norton); the heartbeat of black life in America is music
- Hughes = radical! He doesn't care about the white establishment. He doesn't write for them.
The Weary Blues
- poem imitates Blues rhythm, is about a Blues player, and incorporates Blues song lyrics
- Hughes reading it: it's a performance! emphasis on words and pauses; brings out the intended rhythm
- poem is celebration of the Blues → "Sweet Blues!... O Blues!"
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Imagination & Reality
Philosophy
Stevens
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
- interested in imagination and reality; poet-philosopher → liked to ask big questions
- grandness/bigness/smallness of the world → unlike Eliot - everything in fragments
- "In poetry at least the imagination must not detach itself from reality (972, Norton) - imagination and reality can exist together
- Imagination is crucial to "the human effort to cope with an increasingly violent reality" (236, Norton) #
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
- thirteen perspectives of a blackbird -- some concrete, some more abstract
- We need these thirteen images to understand a blackbird → creates images like imagists, but approaches the same thing from many different angles - like Stein and cubism!
- examines how to represent something that exists in a real world in a poem
**Example of Stevens trying and trying to represent something but he can never quite reach it through language → asymptote
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Social Change
Loy
Mina Loy (1882-1966)
- Born in England - culturally mixed - referred to herself as a mongrel
- very exciting life
- friends with Pound #
Feminist Manifesto (written in 1914)
- remained unpublished during her life
- very radical - Loy says that you can't gain freedom as a woman by scratching the surface of the patriarchy - you need to dismantle it
- says virginity - as a physical thing - needs to go because it oppresses women
-"Women must destroy, in themselves, the desire to be loved" (924, Norton)
Parturition
- experience of childbirth (intense pain - feel like a body) and moments of clarity (transcending consciousness)
- pain is as big as the cosmos → relation to Wallace - philosophical & concerned with what is bigger than us - the world, the cosmos
- can read as a metaphor for writing poetry - use this experience as a way to connect with the cosmos through poetry
- Wallace sees himself as a person, Loy sees herself a a woman
- Loy is insistent that there are MANY ways a woman can create
Brooks
Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)
- very influential; many politically conscious work
- involved in civil rights and black arts movement
- Connections with many poets:
- Hughes was her mentor - influenced by his work
- Loy, Stevens, and Brooks are all political, trapped, using imagination to escape
Question: What is the best way to make a political statement through poetry?
- Undo language to make political statements (Stein destabilizing patriarchal language)?
- O write poems that people actually understand (Brooks - let me tell you what it's like to be a woman living in the Projects in Chicago)? # #
Kitchenette Building
- things you have to do in life while scraping by vs. a dream
- if they let this dream come in, maybe it will turn into reality → can the dream break through?
- more immediate thought - taking care of ones self (a lukewarm bath!)
THIS is what is't like to be a black woman living in the projects in Chicago
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