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Modern American Poetry By Paul Korte (The Toad (Characterized by Slither,…

- - - - Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)
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        Edna St. Vincent Millay was born in Rockport, Maine, and was one of the most influential figures of her generation in modern poetry. Millay did not focus on leaving behind conventional style and meter from previous centuries, despite the wishes of Pound and his imagist movement, but moved poetry forward through her unique focus on sexuality, feminism, and love from within an older form: the sonnet.
        
        Most of Millay’s poems follow the form of the Petrarchan sonnet, a type of poetry started during the 1300s and traditionally used to objectify a cold, distant woman that is stunningly beautiful to the speaker (always a male). Millay modernized the Petrarchan sonnet by turning the focus of the content from the body of a woman to the relationships between women and men, using aspects of the sonnet such as the Volta and the rhyming couplets to produce powerful commentaries on the realities of sex and love. Her poems portrayed women in a position of power and rationality that previous sonnets never approached, helping a new wave of poetry centered on the feminine experience find a place in modern poetry.
        
        Millay’s sonnets were also more intimate than previous adaptations because of their ability to address taboo subjects with unflinching dialogue while also injecting the writer’s personal experience into the poems themselves. Many of the men discussed by Millay were real people the author had affairs with, adding a layer of legitimacy and intimacy to her writing that violates the tradition of keeping a sonnet’s subject at a distance.
        
        I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed is one of Millay’s earlier works and represents the typical form and content of her poetry. The piece addresses the events following a one-night stand from the woman’s perspective and presents a controversial conclusion: that the woman has no desire to ever see the man again. The subject of the piece, their passionate night, is not entirely without emotion; the speaker recounts the experience as a pleasurable one, but a time that is better left behind. Millay’s objective but emotionally honest representation of a one-night stand displays the best of her poetry and its ability to humanize a subject without glossing it with the patriarchal tropes associated with Western poetry.
    - - Marianne Moore (1887-1972) # #
        
        Marianne Moore was the master of observation and syllabies. No matter what subject she chose, whether it was a steamroller or an octopus, Moore’s poetry was characterized by an astonishing attention to detail and a precision with language that allowed her to skip along the edges of reality, creating a type of writing that was Imagism on steroids. Line after line characterizes then re-characterizes her subjects, adding and negating descriptions until the final product has no resemblance to the original, but remains more faithful than ever. In Moore’s hands a steam roller could be transfigured into a cruel and blunt man with no wit, while an object as large as “poetry” could be reduced to something as succinct as “imaginary gardens with real toads in them”. Her ability to play with language lent new perspectives to every object she touched, making her one of the greatest poets and bringing those toads in the imaginary garden to life for any reader.
        
        Two of Marianne’s most notable works are Poetry and To a Snail. Poetry is exactly what it sounds like: a poem about poetry. Within the 5 syllabies, Moore discusses the thin line between raw emotion and genuine reflection of poetry, emphasizing the simple benefit of curiosity and passion as a source for great writing instead of a focus on the overly-complicated. In To a Snail, Moore transforms the lowly gastropod into a creature of style by applying the words of an ancient philosopher to an animal instead of language, humanizing the creature with a tinge of sympathy and admiration originally meant for an entirely different subject.
  - - - Ezra Pound (1885-1975)
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        Credited as the founder of the imagism movement in Modern American Poetry, Pound was one of the most influential figures during the early parts of the 20th Century and was largely responsible for the growth of free-verse and the objective treatment of subjects in poetry.Pound stressed the importance of poetry “austere, direct, free from emotional slither” with direct treatment of the ‘object’ or ‘thing’ that relied on succinct description with little or no meter.
        
        He wrote In a Station of the Metro, the essential imagist poem totaling just two lines that described his experience within the Parisian underground. The piece does not have a verb or a point of view, choosing to rely on a couplet of radiant gists to paint the image of a metro station.
        
        Other famous works of Pound include the Cantos, an ambitious volume of more than 30 epic verses of poetry, and A Pact, a truce directed at Walt Whitman that pays homage to the work done by writers from previous generations but justifies the new techniques employed during the imagist movement.
        
        Ezra Pound was not just a writer, but a resource for any poet in Europe during the 1910s and 1920s for editing or helping their works get published. Pound is widely lauded for his work editing (and hyping) T.S. Elliot’s modern masterpiece The Wasteland, especially his decision to include the phrase “unreal city” within the first part of the poem.
      - William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)
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        William Carlos Williams was another giant of the imagist movement, but unlike Pound or Elliot was mostly recognized during the post-war period after WWI. Williams was iconic for his adoption of “organic language” that attempted to deal with “No ideas but in things,” a stance that placed him in square opposition to the convoluted epics of Pound and Elliot.
        
        The Red Wheelbarrow is Williams’ most famous poem and the work that best encapsulates his approach to poetry. A meager 12 words, the piece focuses all its energy on the singular object of a wheelbarrow that “so much depends / upon,” (1-2) establishing dynamics of time and space that span far outside the bounds of the countryside his language suggests. The piece meets all of William’s ideals for poetry and continues to be a constant reminder of the power of simple, descriptive language.
        
        Another notable piece of Williams is This Is Just to Say, a brief and intimate apology to someone that confesses a minor transgression: eating another’s icebox plums. Upon first reading the note seems innocuous, but with closer inspection the pauses and transitions within the piece read like a plea that elevates a small mistake into a major event. Williams’ skill in diction elevates the action of eating poems into an intimate violence, with an importance expressible only through deliberate and plain language that captures every emotion in an objective and relatable manner.
        
        Although he spoke extensively against the use of complex rhetorical tools like symbolism and metaphor, Williams draws upon such techniques in many of his works such as The Widow’s Lament in Springtime and Queen-Ann’s-Lace, utilizing the symbolism of flowers to communicate dynamics of grief and pleasure that would otherwise be impossible to establish within the bounds of plain language.
    - - Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) #
        
        Gertrude Stein was one of the primary architects of modernism, influencing the likes of Picasso and Hemingway from her Parisian flat at 27 Rue de Fleures with her unique perspective on art and language. Stein was one of the most experimental poets of Modernism and treated each subject like a tiny, amorphous object that could only be understood through endless permutations. This process could last for a couple of lines or an entire page until the subject developed a meaning independent of traditional metaphor or simile, a trait which stein referred to as giving something "weight and volume complete." Her unorthodox style of indirect treatment violated almost every principle of Pound's imagism, but also provided a novel approach that introduced a flexible approach to discussing an object.
        
        Stein also took inspiration from the early cubist works of Pablo Picasso. The process of displaying a singular figure from multiple perspectives was something that fascinated Stein, and was a phenomena she tried desperately to reproduce in her writing. Many of her works, such as Picasso, address only one subject but use multiple pronouns and points of view throughout the permutations to constantly shift the perspective of the reader.
        
        Stein's best known collection of poems is the book Tender Buttons, a collection of descriptions for a variety of objects that range from "sugar" to "A little called Pauline." The piece did not try to present its content with any sort of clarity or pattern, relying on sound and association to guide the reader through each entry. The title is also slang for "nipples" in French, suggesting an exploration of sexuality and domesticity within the work's poems.
      - Hilda Doolittle aka H.D. (1886-1961) # #
        
        A modernist and imagist with thematic and personal ties to Pound and T.S. Elliot, Hilda Doolittle injected the sparse free verse of Pound’s imagism with classical language and flowing soundscapes, lending her works vivid qualities of movement without having to constantly rely on verbs.
        
        While many of Doolittle’s pieces are objective, her choice of subjects (such as a sea-rose or the mythical figure of Helen) allowed her to explore gender dynamics and sexuality through such objects.
        
        Some notable works of H.D. are Oread, a brief poem about a mountain nymph describing a sea she has never seen in person, Sea Rose, a descriptive work that draws parallels between sexual experiences and the hardships a flower endures along the coast, and A Tribute to Freud, which detailed her relationship with Sigmund Freud as both a student and a subject of psychoanalysis.
- - - - T.S. Elliot (1888-1965)
        
        Born in St. Louis, Missouri, but an Englishman at heart, T.S. Elliot is one of the few poets from the imagist movement to capture widespread attention and become canonized during his lifetime. Elliot worked as a banker in London for most of his life and forged a close relationship with Ezra Pound, who edited and published Elliot’s work and played a large part in his poetry’s initial popularity.
        
        Elliot’s most famous work is undoubtedly The Wasteland, the most important poem to emerge from the post-war ashes of the 20th century. Within its 5 parts, Elliot weaves a convoluted and fragmented account of a broken "Unreal city" that has been left desolate after years of self-ruin. There is no consistent style, meter, or point of view within the poem that helps the reader piece together the references and narratives thrown around in every stanza. The piece acts as a canvas for Elliot to display the heights of his intelligence and education, referencing everything from ancient Greek mythology to contemporary drinking songs to build a comprehensive vision of an empty society that prefers the numbing cover of snow to the pain of growth in springtime. The only ray of hope Elliot leaves is during the last two parts, IV and V, when he references Sanskrit mythology and the existence of an Eastern civilization that may be the only garden left where humanity has nourishment to grow.
    - - E.E. Cummings (1894-1962)
        
        E.E. Cummings is best known for his love poems and adoration of the sonnet, but some of his works were highly experimental and included manipulation of syntax, punctuation, and stanza length to change the way his poems appeared on the page. Pieces such as "in Just-" and "Buffalo Bill's" appear garbled and random, with words running into each other without spacing and lines staggered unevenly like a drunken staircase. However, once the reader gets used to the unorthodox presentation, the content itself becomes fairly orthodox. Cummings loved traditional rhymes and slant rhymes, such as the combination of "knees" and "conceive" in his work "O sweet spontaneous" or the pairing of "apart" and "heart" in his love sonnet "i carry your heart with me (i carry it in". While this habit may have brought significant judgment from critics, it cemented Cummings as the premier go-to poet for something to read at a wedding.
        
        The poem responsible for Cummings' placement on this side of the tree is his masterpiece pity this busy monster, manunkind, a grim inspection of the negative impacts technology produces on the planet. The piece illustrates humanity as an insatiable monster that "plays with the bigness of his littleness" (4) and is shackled to the disease of "progress" (2). The piece changes the technological developments of the atomic bomb and mass production into instruments of destruction rather than hallmarks of progress, indicating that humanity is a "hopeless case" (14). Cummings produces an empty landscape that is not a wasteland nor a space of endless possibility, but a ticking time bomb that is filled with empty things "not...born" (10) but made.
    - - Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) # #
        
        When he was not working in his day-job at the insurance company, Wallace Stevens pondered the boundary between reality and imagination through his creative writing. Stevens did not shy away from large questions and complicated abstraction, addressing philosophical concerns in candid fashion through a variety of scenes.
        
        In the poem The Emperor of Ice-Cream , Stevens describes a funeral where moments of pleasure and playful language clash with cold reality of death. In the same house as the body whose "horny feet protrude" (13) from the bottom of the sheet, boys run with flowers and women "dawdle in dress" (4) while ice cream is served. The piece reveals that the small moments in life are what make living fun and meaningful, because in the face of the inevitable there is no better example of escape than something fleeting.
        
        Stevens' poem "Of Mere Being" transports the reader to the very edge of human consciousness, a strange space covered in "bronze decor" (3) where palm trees sway and birds sing incomprehensible songs. This piece is one of the few times Stevens depicts the space of imagination in literal terms, instead of trying to approach it through metaphor. Imagination and its possibilities hover just out of reach, but the "fire-fangled feathers" that "dangle down" (12) from the bird represent possibilities housed within the empty songs of wandering thought. Imagination and reality may be a confusing and empty space, but there is plenty of possibility to grow in Stevens' lucid garden of the mind.
  - - - Portrayed through Traditional Forms and Style
        
        Jean Toomer (1894-1967)
        
        Toomer was a poet in a unique position to write about the shifting social landscapes of the 20th century because of his racial ambiguity. Born to a white mother and a black father who had grown up in slavery, Toomer straddled the boundary between America’s racial divide and experienced life on both sides of the fence because of his attendance at white and black schools throughout his childhood. These experiences informed his early writing and fueled his belief in the existence of a “new American race” that relied on distinctions other than skin color, but this idealism would be shaken by his time in Georgia during the early 1920s.
        
        Toomer lived in the Peach state for a couple years as an interim school principal and witnessed firsthand the systematic racism and violence that were commonplace throughout the South. After his time in Georgia, Toomer wrote and published his most famous collection of poems, Cane. The book contains visceral accounts of the lynchings and the dark history of the South followed with a tracing of the black migration to the North. The book helped inspire the Harlem Renaissance and established Toomer as one of the country’s most prominent black writers. However, Toomer would never match his early works and would die in poverty, leaving behind the black identity he embraced in Cane in favor of his old ideals.
        
        Toomer’s poems in Cane, specifically Portrait in Georgia and Georgia Dusk, paint vivid landscapes of the black experience in the American South through his descriptive language. However, these pieces utilize classical Western forms such as the blazon to express the black experience and identity, unlike the novel forms or specialized vernacular presented by Langston Hughes or Gwendolyn Brooks.
        
        Claude McKay (1890-1948)
        
        A catalyst for the Harlem Renaissance and an early innovator in 20th century black literature, Claude McKay played an integral role in describing and producing the American landscape from the African-American perspective. McKay's poetry flowed with unique dialect during his early years thanks to his Jamaican upbringing, but gradually lost the vernacular in favor of a more traditional English later in his career. McKay, like Edna St. Vincent Millay, employed Sonnet forms from classical role models with unique content to depict Harlem and the Black experience. Most of his famous works are contained within Harlem Shadows, a collection of poetry often credited with "inaugurating" the Renaissance movement.
        
        One example of McKay's genius from Harlem Shadows is the poem The Harlem Dancer, a traditional sonnet that describes a dancer in a nightclub. The poem displays the woman through the eyes of entranced youths (men and women) who do nothing more than goggle at the beautiful figure, emphasizing the objectification of the black body by many white viewers that traveled to Harlem during the weekend for nightlife. Lines from the poem such as "she seemed a proudly-swaying palm / Grown lovelier for passing through a storm" (7-8) reference historical events such as the Middle Passage to tie the scene into a larger landscape, one that is an accurate representation of McKay's Harlem.
      - Expressed Through Black Artistry and Music
        
        Langston Hughes (1902-1967) #
        
        The most famous of the many poets to come out of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes distinguished himself from his contemporaries (such as McKay) by his adherence to the Black art forms and traditions of the lower class throughout his poetry. Hughes borrowed his rhythms and rhymes from Bues and spoke in voices that could be found in any working class neighborhood, shunning Sonnets and iambic pentameter. His essay The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain stressed the importance of Black tradition to the next generation of artists while detailing the pitfalls of using White language.
        
        Hughes's most famous collection of poems was the Weary Blues, a collection of pieces that brought his unique poetry to the mainstream and shed light on the possibilities Blues provided to poetry. The poem that acted as the namesake for the book The Weary Blues, follows the sorrowful tunes of a piano player that lives for his performances on the street. The poem's characterization of the player as a Muse cast Blues in the same realm as the classical music of Greek Gods and helped legitimize Hughes' approach. The work's conclusion states that after his song ends, the man "slept like a rock or a man that's dead" (35), a startling conclusion that presents the Blues as the only reason the man lives.
        
        The Negro Speaks of Rivers is the best example of Hughes' attempt to create a garden that captures all of the African-American experience within poems. The use of rivers, bloodlines, and the soul create an empowering image that spans time and space but remains an intimate experience because of the use of first person as the point of view.
        
        Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) # #
        
        The first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize, Gwendolyn Brooks played an integral role in bringing poor, urban, and intersectional perspectives to Modern American Poetry. Her early pieces were bound in traditional forms, but later in her career the forms shifted to a unique representation of the political and racial activism Brooks supported during the1960s.
        
        kitchentte building was originally published in 1945 as the second poem in Brooks' debut collection A Street Bronzeville and is one of her most famous works. The piece depicts life in a crowded apartment and the place (or lack thereof) dreams have in the harsh day-to-day experience of African-Americans in the city. Brooks speaks in simple diction that allow the political undertones of her piece to connect with a wide audience, while the vivid descriptions of city life such as "We think of lukewarm water, hope to get in it" (13) contrast the wistful "white and violet" of dreams with reality.
    - - Robert Frost (1874-1963)
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        One of the most famous poets to emerge from the 20th century, Robert Frost was recognized for his depictions of New England’s landscapes and lifestyles during the 1940s and 50s. Frost was different from many of his contemporaries because of his endorsement of traditional forms, stating “Vers libre does not exist, for there is only good verse, bad verse, and chaos” while also likening poetry without rules to “playing tennis without a net.”
        
        The Road Not Taken is Frost’s most common poem and one of his most misunderstood. The poem employs a traditional rhyme scheme and discusses the speaker’s decision to take one of two identical paths, both of which lead to the same place and have everything in common. The final lines state “I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference” (Lines 19-20), suggesting a benefit to taking one path over the other. However, Frost intends the opposite message, revealing throughout the piece that the only difference made is the one the traveler imposes during hindsight.
    - - Mina Loy (1882-1966 # # #
        
        Another poet philosopher who was not afraid to discuss large topics or abstractions, Mina Loy's work was distinct because of its grounding in her experiences as a woman and a "mongrel" born to a British mother and a Jewish father. Loy's complex poems addressed the dualities of body and mind, man and woman, or sex and love, using intimate personal experiences as a springboard for sweeping conclusions that could be applied to anyone.
        
        Parturition is one of Loy's most notable poems and describes the extreme pain of childbirth and universality of motherhood in remarkable detail. Loy likens the agony to the size of the cosmos, while posing the idea that every being who enters maternity is connected into the steam of "cosmic reproductivity". The poem ties Loy's identity as a woman and a mother to a larger category that includes all beings who have created another life with their own. In this manner, Loy is interested in portraying a massive landscape similar to Wallace Stevens, but her landscapes are not raw and capricious. Instead she populates them with herself, creating a vast garden that feels as intimate as a backyard.