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Across the century - Masters and Robinson - Pre-Modernism? (Edgard Lee…
Across the century - Masters and Robinson - Pre-Modernism?
Modern era's shocks (1)
Darwin: we are animals.
Nietzsche: God is dead
Marx --> history is economics. History is about who has the money
Freud: our ego is very small and gets crushed between the it (when you want to do something but you are not allowed) and the superego (when you are obliged to do things) --> you don't really chose what to do
If you live in a world like this: you become a pessimist. Other answers? - Ezra Pound: Make it new! --> new movement: modernism.
Pre-modernism: Edgard Lee Masters, E. A. Robinson -_> they use techniques that have never been used before --> they brought things from the dark hidden interior self to the surface
Edgard Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology (1915)
Presents the problem of small.town society (community that speak, judges, ...).
Trainor: sees the world through the point of view of natural science (as a naturalist) --> critic: he never marries, ... He sees life as mixture of chemicals
An invented town. Homage to local dead and their buried life. The text has inscriptions on grave stones. --> nothing to lose, they tell the truth.
Abel Melveny: he wants his life to be as efficient as possible --> at the end of his life he sees himself as a good machine that life has never used. He sees life as machines.
Trainor + Abel Melvney: they miss something from their point of view
"Butch" Weldy: a work accident that remain uncompensated --> he will end his life in poverty bc someone can claim the he is not in charge.
Margaret Fuller Slack: She wants to be. writer but then she has a lot of kids (no time) and she dies (lock-jaw). Ironical death
Nellie Clark: childhood sexual abuse --> her husband breaks up with her because she is not virgin. Dies.
E.A. Robinson
He presents scenes of psychological confusion (es: Eros Tyrannos)
sad evocation of past time
elegant mourning of destroyed psyches
Mastery of poetic forms (villanelle, sonnet, ...) -->
closed forms
: the forms comes before the function: rhetoric compactness, faces the difficulty of are rhymes with his chosen forms (Es: Luke Havergal - two rhymes each stanza)
sardonic humour and medieval escapism (Miniver Cheevy)
setting often not clear, what is important are the psychological effects that he portrays (psych. death)
He was in love with the woman who married his brother. They had a sad marriage. He suffered. --> setting for Luke Havergal --> invitation to suicide for L.H.
Eros Tyrannus: marriage that is dead but she can't leave cause she has no property, no place where to go, ...
Robert Frost: transitional figure (like Edith Wharton)
man: not glorious, it is a little thing. What can we do? POETRY
Between realism and modernism. Pound: he was able to to the transition to modernism
Lives in Massachusetts, is a farmer, has an healthy relationship with nature
Regional poet (moves to London but his first collection of poems associated with New England)
1874-1963
A lot of depression in his life: his wife tried to run a way many times, one daughter killed herself, another ended uo in an asylum...
Edgard Lee Masters, thematic and poetic method
often poems of frustration (a few happy poems too)
absence of regular rhythm and rhyme (not pretty, but true)
Often accusatory tone of the poem --> "legal argument" (he was a lawyer)
privilegio the I perspective --> poetry as form of public address (the poetry gives voice to the speaker of the poem)
Direct treatment of the subject matter (things as they really are)
Robinson and Masters: early modernist?
attention to psychology and mental health (Eliot)
Attention to the notion of Authenticity and performance --> "Faces that we meet" (Eliot)
Attention to verse: tradition and innovation -- > or traditional form and innovative content or both innovative
Attention to gener relation (fluid, marriage not the only option anymore)
attention to small towns and buried life in rural America (also what Hemingway does)
Sex connected to love or not
sciences and technologies are ways to explain human life
Robert Frost on Poetry
A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom + starts with gestures of positions,
A poem is "a momentary stay against confusion" --> poems are a handle. They help you not to feel confuse in that moment
Conservative: the form is important
Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down --> poems need to shape the world
Robert Frost Technique and subject matter
Offers large assertions playfully... only to question them or take them back at the end: last line of the poem: read again!
Also interested in psychology--> uses analogies from nature to explore states of psychological uncertainty / skepticism
uses traditional poetic forms (sonnets, quatrains, ...) to press skeptical, speculative ideas. The message is not reassuring, but the form YES
? page 28 --> past: positive, future: negative.
Textual Example
Home Burial: dual meaning of the title. Two ways to affront sufferance: they don't understand each other. Almost cartoon like in their oppositions of suffering. !! Metrical line --> Don't don't don't --> the lines stay metrical.
Fire and Ice: it is about apocalypse. 60s --> nuclear exchange --> worried. The world with end with fire or ice? Also desire (fire) vs. hate (ice).
Mending Wall: talks about a wall as a boarder. Walls are neat to be there against nature or good fences make good neighbors? --> tradition vs. innovation. See the two sentences that are repeated twice. No resolution.
Nothing Gold Can Stay: pessimistic determinism. From when we born, we can only fo to the direction of death.
The Gift Outright: JFK's inauguration, but he wrote it earlier in his life. They feel alienated by their mother country (GB), it suggests that there was nothing there before them --> The Theft Outright.