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Modern American Poetry by Cam MacDonald (Poets for Social Change (Jean…

- - - - What is Imagism?
        
        2) To use absolutley no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
        
        3) As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome.
        
        1) Direct treatment of the "thing," whether subjective or objective. #
      - Imagism in his poetry
        
        "In a Station of the Metro"
        
        "The apparition of these faces in the crowd;/ Petals on a wet, black bough."
        
        Analysis: Pound is very concise in his word choice exemplifying his Imagist values. Although only two lines long, Pound is able to provide such vivid image for the reader. The poem is brief, and goes by quickly, just like a subway. He rhymes the words 'crowd' and 'bough' also adding to his importance on rhythm in Imagism. The fact that Pound includes people in a busy subway station with petals on a tree is his direct linking between humanity and nature. The people on the metro, and the apparition of their faces will change, just how the petals on the tree change in different seasons and weather conditions.
      - Biography
        
        Ezra Pound was born in 1885 in Hailey, Idaho. He earned his Ph.B. from Hamilton College in 1903. He earned his master of arts degree from UPenn in 1905, but more importantly met Hilda Doolittle, a fellow poet just getting started. He is known as the father of Imagism.
    - - Quintessentially Imagist
        
        " Poems such as 'Oread,' 'Sea Rose,' 'Garden,' and 'Sea Violet' are built around a central image, which is presented with immediacy, economy and precision" (Norton, 393).
        
        "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."
        
        Analysis: H.D. is concise through her word choice and rhyming. She uses anaphora, alliteration, and perfect rhyme in the opening three lines of her poem. These factors all add to her rhythm, as well as being concise in her word choice. "Whirl up sea--/ Whirl your pointed pines," also demonstrates that she is writing an apostrophe, addressed to the sea. We know this through her use of the word "your", which is repeated three more times throughout the poem. All these literary tactics contribute to the conciseness H.D. writes in throughout this poem. #
      - Biography
        
        H.D. was born in Pennsylvania in 1886. She moved to London in 1911 where she began her role within the imagist movement. She was briefly engaged to Pound and he gave her the Pen name H.D. She is also known for expressing her bisexuality.
    - - Excerpt from "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock
        
        "Only, here and there, an old sailor,/ Drunk and asleep in his boots,/ Catches tigers/ In red weather" (12-15).
        
        Analysis: These lines are how Stevens gets at his direct treatment of the "thing". The beginning of the poem describes houses that have no individuality. They are all homogeneous, and the people in them are all wearing white night-gowns. The only real individual is this drunk sailor. A sailor travels and is able to see the world without being confined to a house. This is Stevens contrasting homogeneous with individualism. Additionally, "catches tigers/ In red weather" is Stevens using the 'r' sound, which adds to the rhythm he incorporates. Stevens is concise through his obvious linking of two contrasting factors in this poem to get his message across but is not necessarily as concise as Pound or H.D. in regards to word choice.
      - Stevens was born in Pennsylvania in 1879. He went to school at Harvard and then New York Law School. He worked for an insurance company for most his life, while also writing poetry.
      - Stevens embodies Imagism through his attempts at getting at "the thing" itself, or number 1 on Pounds description of imagism.
- - - - Excerpt from "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;" (1-5)
        
        Analysis: This is probably the most famous Frost poem. His description of the nature scene in front of the narrator is unique and descriptive. The speaker has to make a choice on which road to travel, but both are equally beautiful. Frost believed that a message needed to be taught at the end. He does not flat out tell the reader what the message is, he lets his poetry speak for him. It is generally thought that being an individual is the most important thing to do, but the poem, through descriptive nature and an ABAAB rhyme scheme, ends in a message that will have people talking about it for years and years to come.
  - - - Excerpt from "The Wasteland"
        
        April is the cruellest month, breeding/ Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/ Memory and desire, stirring/ Dull roots with spring rain./ Winter kept us warm, covering/ Earth in forgetful snow, feeding/ A little life with dried tubers." (1-7)
        
        Analysis: Eliot divides up his poem into sections that may seem fragmented, but always link back together. He starts off "The Wasteland" in a very dark way with the first part of the poem being titled The Burial of the Dead. He mentions how April is the cruelest month, but describes Winter as keeping warm, two seemingly contrasting statements. Looking deeper, the snow provides a good feeling for the speaker because it is covering up the dead in the wasteland. It provides a time in which the destruction of WWI can be forgotten. Eliot's poem is truly magical in its layers that always end up connecting, and his use of literary and religious texts and traditions is what makes his poetry stand alone.
- - - - Excerpt from "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"
        
        Analysis: Toomer is putting together the image of a white woman while contrasting it with brutally negative effects of slavery. She starts by comparing a white woman's braided hair to a lynching, which was a public death done outside the law, unfortunately, done mostly to slaves. Being a man that can fit into either racial category, Toomer sends a strong message in this poem stating that white beauty is made possible by these terrible lynchings done to blacks. When one side benefits another severely suffers.
  - - - Excerpt from "I, Being Born a Women and Distressed"
        
        "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:" (1-5)
        
        Analysis: Millay is writing this poem after a one night stand. She is speaking to the fact that because she is a woman and distressed, she desires the man nearby her. This poem is a sonnet and fits the part of talking about love, desire, and sex that sonnets generally do. Sonnets are usually about anticipation, and the poem ends by Millay stating that she is not going to speak to him again. Millay was in an open marriage and is expressing that it is okay to give into desire without love. Women should have the right to do whatever she wants, despite what society may think.
  - - - Excerpts from "kitchenette building"
        
        "We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan,/ Grayed in, and gray. 'Dream' makes a giddy sound, not strong/ Like 'rent,' 'feeding a wife,' 'satisfying a man.'" (1-3)
        "We wonder. But not well! not for a minute!/ Since Number Five is out of the bathroom now,/ We think of lukewarm water, hope to get in it." (11-13)
        
        Analysis: Brooks is expressing her political voice in this poem, speaking to the struggles of living in a kitchenette building. These low-income discriminative residences are not fair. She starts off by talking about dreams but juxtaposes it with the reality of things like paying rent or feeding a wife. In the last stanza, she talks about "Number Five" getting out of the bathroom and hoping for "lukewarm" water. Number five dehumanizes the people living in these kitchenette buildings, and the lukewarm water provides an unpleasant image for readers. The racial discrimination that forces people to live in these types of housing is unfair, and Brooks is addressing this through a contrast of dreams and reality in her poem.
  - - - Langston Hughes was born in Missouri. He is known as being a leader in the Harlem Renaissance. He introduced music into his poems, which makes him unique in this aspect.
      - Hughes "looked mostly to African American music for inspiration- the blues, jazz, work songs, ballads, and spirituals." He influenced people of the Renaissance through moving away from European American literary genres and styles and instead "took as his primary muses the trenchant humor, musical genius, and oral poetry of the black and urban poor and working class" (Norton, 684).
        
        Excerpt from "The Weary Blues"
        
        "I heard a Negro play./ Down on Lenox Avenue the other night/ By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light/ He did a lazy sway.../ He did a lazy sway.../ To the tune o' those Weary Blues./ With his ebony hands on each ivory key/ He made that poor piano moan with melody./ O Blues!' (4-11)
        
        Analysis: Hughes is incorporating the blues into his poetry. During the song portion of his poem, there is a consistent rhythm in the lyrics. Other than that Hughes follows the natural rhythm of speech. He incorporates rhymes, but there is no consistant pattern throughout. He is able to blend the Blues with poetry, expressing that both are beautiful artforms that Negros appreciate and are capable of creating.
- - - - "Curie/ of the laboratory/ of vocabulary/ she crushed/ the tonnage/ of consciousness/ congealed to phrases/ to extract/ a radium of the word"
      - Analysis: Loy is writing a poem about Stein in a way that compares her to Marie Curie, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize. She incorporates what Stein does in words, to what Curie does in the laboratory. She is being original and combining science with poetry. Lines 7-9 beautifully describe how Stein is able to extract meaning from phrases that would not normally seem possible in their elemental stage. Loy uses repetition of the word "of" in the poem, similar to how Stein utilized repetition frequently in her works.
  - - - "The Great Figure"
        
        "Among the rain/ and lights/ I saw the figure 5/ in gold/ on a red/ firetruck/ moving/ with weight and urgency/ tense/ unheeded/ to gong clangs/ siren howls/ and wheels rumbling/ through the dark city."
        
        Analysis: Williams writes in a highly visual way. The reader can picture this firetruck drive by in a busy city where it seemingly goes unnoticed. He does not try and confuse the reader, the words are all common knowledge with the exception of, maybe, "unheeded". Despite his basic word choice, he is original because the lines of the poem get shorter towards the middle then longer again at the end, mimicking a firetruck actually passing by an observer. Through simplicity, Williams showcases his originality.
  - - - Excerpt from "The Fish"
        
        "wade/ through black jade./ Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps/ adjusting the ash-heaps; opening and shutting itself like/
        an injured fan./ The barnacles which encrust the side/ of the wave, cannot hide/ there for the submerged shafts of the" (1-10)
        
        Analysis: Moore uses syllabic verse consistently throughout the poem. She is able to construct each stanza so that it follows the same syllable count for the entirety of the poem. The syllable count she uses is 1, 3, 9, 6, 8. The syllable counts showcase her originality because they mimic and the sounds and movements of
        an ocean's wave. Additionally, Moore maintains a rhyme scheme of AABBC. These first two stanzas demonstrate Moore's ability to incorporate both the syllable count and rhyme scheme.
- - - - Excerpts from "pity this busy monster, manunkind"
        
        pity this busy monster, manunkind,/ not. Progress is a comfortable disease:/ your victim (death and life safely beyond) (1-4)
        We doctors know/ a hopeless case if-- listen: there's a hell/ of a good universe next door; let's go"
        (13-15)
        
        Analysis: Cummings starts the poem by changing what we know as mankind to "manunkind". His use of enjambment in the poem showcases his experimentation with language. Between the first and second line, he creates a feeling of sarcasm. The enjambment puts emphasis on the fact that we should not actually pity manunkind because it is a busy monster. Another place where he usees enjambment is in the last two lines when he writes "there's a hell/ of a good universe next door; let's go" line 14 ending with the word "hell" is one that emphasizes the fact that the world is becoming "manunkind" due to technological advances, specifically the atom bomb, and neglect for nature and its beauty.
  - - - "Applauding youths laughed with young prostitutes/ And watched her perfect, half-clothed body sway;/ Her voice was like the sound of blended flutes" (1-3).
        "But looking at her falsely-smiling face,/ I knew her self was not in that strange place" (13-14)
      - Analysis: This poem is written in the form of a sonnet, which is very traditional, but effective for McKay to spread his message during the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Dancer is a stripper, and McKay is very vivid in his imagery. His use of simile adds to this when he writes, "Her voice was like the sound of blended flutes". He provides a beautiful image of her voice and also describes her body as "perfect". However, he ends the poem by contrasting these compliments, showing that all is not good in Harlem. This dancer must try and make a living, but on the inside, she is not happy, she is struggling and in need of help.
  - - - "Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea./ Susie Asado./ Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea./ Susie Asado." (1-4).
      - Analysis: Clearly Stein is utilizing repetition in the beginning of her poem. However, in addition to being playful with words, she is distorting sounds and being clever in doing so. When reading the lines aloud, the words morph together to sound like "sweetie". Stein is addressing Susie Asado, who was a dancer. In addition to calling her sweetie, the repeated "sweet" is also Stein being playful with sound, but in a different way. It sounds like the repeated tapping of shoes on the ground during a dance, which is fitting because the poem is about a dancer. Stein is experimenting with language in different ways through her use of repetition #