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Modern American Poetry :silhouettes:: An effort to revise longstanding…

- - - - Jean Toomer 1894-1967
        Toomer sat in a liminal racial state between two mixed race parents. He sought to form the New American Race, one that could transcend all other races and be a united people existing in the US. Many of his free verse poems focus on the desire for singular racial harmony. Use of natural languages through the landscapes he described, Reapers, Portrait in Georgia, Georgia Dusk
        Class Imitation of Her Lips are Copper Wire
        Lamp-posts that sway
        licker drinkers in the fog
        yr breath against me
        the main wires are insulate
        remove the tape
        yr lips incandescent
        Portrait in Georgia
        Hair- braided chestnut
        coiled like a lyncher's rope,
        Eyes- fagots
        Lips- old scars, or the first red blisters,
        Breath- the last sweet scent of cane,
        And her slim body, white as the ash
        of black flesh after flame
        
        Comment: Woman's bodies are generally compared to beautiful things in the world. However, Toomer does the exact opposite here and draws upon juxtapozition of physical description and a painful description of lynching.
        
        Robert Frost 1874-1963
        Both form and meter were essential in Frost's work. He obsessed over natural settings and the language of the people, however used traditional forms to convey both. His work is complex in its contradictory nature and commentary on wisdom.
        The Road Not Taken
        Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
        And sorry I could not travel both
        And be one traveler, long I stood
        And looked down one as far as I could
        To where it bent in the undergrowth;
        Then took the other, as just as fair,
        And having perhaps the better claim,
        Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
        Though as for that the passing there
        Had worn them really about the same,
        And both that morning equally lay
        In leaves no step had trodden black.
        Oh, I kept the first for another day!
        Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
        I doubted if I should ever come back.
        I shall be telling this with a sigh
        Somewhere ages and ages hence:
        Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
        I took the one less traveled by,
        And that has made all the difference.
        The stressed and unstressed syllables keep the pace of the poem at a march, as if someone is slowly stepping through the forest. Side note but every Frost poem I read just sounds so wise. # # #
      - William Carlos Williams 1883-1963
        "We must listen to the language for the discoveries we hope to make."
        Williams valued natural language and its simplicity as it was spoken by everyday people. Short poems with ordinary scenes transformed into a new twist.
        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
        I love this poem for its simple nature- something that anyone can relate to. It talks about a small transgression but also shows an intimate human moment. # # # #
- - - - e.e. cummings 1894- 1962 Cummings is experimental through his use of grammar. He deliberately distorts syntax through punctuation, capitalization, and words that spill over to the next lines. He also changes verbs to nouns and vice versa.
        
        somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
        any experience,your eyes have their silence:
        in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
        or which i cannot touch because they are too near
        your slightest look easily will unclose me
        though i have closed myself as fingers,
        you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
        (touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose
        or if your wish be to close me,i and
        my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
        as when the heart of this flower imagines
        the snow carefully everywhere descending;
        nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
        the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
        compels me with the colour of its countries,
        rendering death and forever with each breathing
        
        Comment: This is unique love poem in its subtleness. The speaker is the flower, an interesting twist, that confuses the flower as a female archetype. # #
- - - - Claude McKay 1890-1948
        In his early career, McKay was know for using Jamaican dialect and then evolved writing in sonnets. While the form was traditional, the content strayed away from the usual love poems and detailed life as a black man in America and Jamaica. His content displayed the injustice and his anger, which contrasts sharply with the strict love meaning behind sonnets.
        
        America
        Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
        And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth,
        Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
        I love this cultured hell that tests my youth.
        Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,
        Giving me strength erect against her hate,
        Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.
        Yet, as a rebel fronts a king in state,
        I stand within her walls with not a shred
        Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer.
        Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,
        And see her might and granite wonders there,
        Beneath the touch of Time’s unerring hand,
        Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.
        
        The sonnet form is used as a vessel for inequality and anger. Hate is internal and visceral (body and blood). #
        
        Marianne Moore 1887-1972
        Viewed as "one of the guys" one of the few woman poets in her time respected as much as men. Also strayed away from sexual content in her poems and instead focused on describing the world around her often using animals as metaphors.
        Moore reformed traditional form by organizing her poems through syllabics. Playing with long sentences chopped into lines of varying length. Lines do not begin with capital letters and have odd syntax to add emphasis. Interesting because it sounds like pros but the form is very enjambed.
        
        Poetry
        I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important
        beyond all this fiddle.
        Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it,
        one discovers that there is in
        it after all, a place for the genuine.
        Hands that can grasp, eyes
        that can dilate, hair that can rise
        if it must, these things are important not be-
        cause a
        high sounding interpretation can be put upon them
        but because they are
        useful; when they become so derivative as to
        become unintelligible, the
        same thing may be said for all of us – that we
        do not admire what
        we cannot understand. The bat,
        holding on upside down or in quest of some-
        thing to
        eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll,
        a tireless wolf under
        a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a
        horse that feels a flea, the base-
        ball fan, the statistician – case after case
        could be cited did
        one wish it; nor is it valid
        to discriminate against “business documents
        and
        school-books”; all these phenomena are important.
        One must make a distinction
        however: when dragged into prominence by half
        poets,
        the result is not poetry,
        nor till the autocrats among us can be
        “literalists of
        the imagination” – above
        insolence and triviality and can present
        for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads
        in them, shall we have
        it. In the meantime, if you demand on one hand,
        in defiance of their opinion –
        the raw material of poetry in
        all its rawness, and
        that which is on the other hand,
        genuine, then you are interested in poetry.
        
        Comment: Poetry is a raw and genuine place, that is unreal, but has real things in them. # # #
      - Edna St. Vincent Millay 1882-1950
        Millay has an honorary degree from Colby!!!
        Although she writes in traditional sonnet form, the meaning behind the form is quite unique. Millay is radical and revolutionary in her treatment of sex and desire. She strays away from the definition of the classic Petrarchan sonnet: a male speaker addressing a "cold untouchable woman". She reclaims the female form by writing sonnets in her own sarcastic/direct voice (as opposed to a woman being the subject of the sonnet that men claim).
        
        I, being born a woman and distressed
        By all the needs and notions of my kind,
        Am urged by your propinquity to find
        Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
        To bear your body’s weight upon my breast:
        So subtly is the fume of life designed,
        To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
        And leave me once again undone, possessed.
        Think not for this, however, the poor treason
        Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
        I shall remember you with love, or season
        My scorn with pity, —let me make it plain:
        I find this frenzy insufficient reason
        For conversation when we meet again.
        Not a direct treatment of the "thing" but instead complicated rhetoric and often uses irony in syntax or after the turn of the poem. # # #