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High Modernism - European Flavor (Ezra Pound (1885-1972) (Discovered many…
High Modernism - European Flavor
Definition
distinction between authors who come from somewhere else (realist and so on) and those that have always been modernists. Early - High Modernism
European Flavor: they did not think American Environment could offer them material to be modernists. Nothing to write about there (Pound, T.S. Eliot, Stein, Hemingway)
Gertrude Stein: Oakland: "there is no there there". Moved to Paris in 1903
Hemingway's generation: want to fight the war of all wars. Wrong.
Ezra Pound: studies Troubadors lyrics, seek our masters in London and Paris --> he liked the European literary tradition. Strong musical elements, rhymes,
T.S. Eliot: European tradition
William Carlos Williams: looking after art and ancient was just an affectation: reply to Greek and Latin with bare hands"
Wallace Stevens: America has landscape and a different sense of imagination --> we can generate poems on our climate
Cather vs. Stein
born one year apart
Cather: linear narrative, realistic prose, descriptive details, conclusions with moral lesson, assured point of view, ... VS. Stein: repetitions, sounds, short sentences using few connectors that repeat with slightly variations, --> no story told!
realist vs. modernist
both lesbian: Cather not openly lesbian, Stein: yes.
Willa Cather - 1873- 1947
The sculptor's funeral: exemplifies Dickinson's poem and Master's "truth after death", "Faces the we met" Eliot?
Narratr torn between love for Midwestern landscape and total scent for his boorish inhabitants that think to be super smart
Poverty of rural Kansas discovered through the eyes of Steavens: reality vs. expectation
Born in Virginia, moves to Nebraska at 9. A lot of her texts are set in Nebraska!
People who leave the Midwest and becomes someone important in the east.
the towns "lodges"
Scne of reckoning but after it Jim goes on doing what he did before and dies for a cold.
Stein (1874-)
She destabilizes the sense of who the writer is .
Art Collector in paris
Language can be manipulated --> a medium --> she is aware of the words she put on the page.
playful relationship to reality
Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
Discovered many figures in poetry and art (T.S. ELIOT, ...)
Obsession with Economics and Poetry --> usury --> he applied that notion to his concept of poetry
Imaginism: the first literary movement that he exploits: one image in each poem not 30 like in Victorian movement (es: in a Station of the Metro)
Strict anti-semitism, Profascit broadcast --> jail in Pisa --> bag to the States: mental hospital (12 years) --> then back t Italy
"MAKE IT KNOW" -_> the slogan he invited about modernism.
Bollingen Prize controversy 1949
The Cantos: don't stop for words, let the language work on you. barely connected songs.
In a Station of the Metro: haiku (Japanese form - 5-7-5). An image (usually from nature), something that happens, a "solution". One concrete image. Anapestic meter!!! Like horses galloping. Free verses but wells structured.
Canto I: Modernist reception of Homer's Odyssey and his visits to the end of the world. He emphasizes the stresses and the alliterations.
a pact: he talks with Whitman. it is him who opened the road for his new poetry (we have one sap --> linfa and one root --> radice).
T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)
Committed to formal and intellectual heritage... while changing it radically
Banker and then publisher
his image in the Time: strange symbols --> the images he evokes in his famous poems (West Land - 1922)
He wrote a lot of essays about what he thought was good. "Tradition and the Individual Talent" -_> you can only write poetry if you are aware of the tradition cause you change it.
The Love song. Starts in Italian and you are supposed to understand it. tIt is a love song without results. .--> hesitation and inaction, a life of frustration and not fulfillment, faces that we met (not comfortable in his skin), aquatic-subarime imagery --> drowning in modern mass society (when he gets near something that he loves --> the mermaids singing). Images from Shakespeare, obv. Dante, ...
A poet who investigates the general condition of humankind while (ironically) writing about himself
Alienation pre WWI: not knowing where you belong even if you are in the middle of a crowd. Condition of the modern human being.
Nobel Prize, 1948
European modernist even if raised in the US.
In his first poems: influence of the river in Saint Louis. He went to Harvard (family tradition) where ehe studied Philopshy, Dante more imp. than Shakespeare,
Hemigway, 1899-1961
Expatriate alienation (1927): he can only order a beer
Hills Like White Elephants: plot very simple, there is something beneath the surface (like Eliot's Profrock), they cannot comunicate and they don't understand the reactions of the other person (sim. to Home Burial, Frost - don't don't don't is transformed in please please please). They feel alienated in their environment. The bags: emotional bags. No resolution, revelation: they can't comunicate.