AMERICAN MODERNIST POETRY

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AMERICAN MODERNIST POETRY
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Characteristic Features of Modernist Poetry

• The shift of emphasis on the self-referentiality
  of poetic language based on the very modern
  notion of a crisis of language
• A search for the overall coherence of language as
  the preeminent cultural system
• The increasing doubt about the possibility of
  identifying a single, unified speaking subject as
  the voice in modernist poerty.

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The Great Variety of American Modernist Poetry

• The dadaist and surrealist poems of Gertrude
  Stein
• The Imagist poems of Ezra Pound, H.D. (Hilda
  Doolittle) and Amy Lowell
• T. S .Eliots The Waste Land

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H.D. in the mid 1910s
Ezra Pound in 1913.
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The Great Variety of American Modernist Poetry

• Vachel Lindsays doomed fantasy of a fully
  public, participatory, democratic poetry
• The restrained and universalizing regional poems
  of William Carlos Williams
• The prolific Black poetry of Langston Hughes and
  the other blues writers of the Harlem
  Renaissance.

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The Great Variety of American Modernist Poetry

• The populist poems celebrating American life
  (Little Red Song Book,1909, IWW, Joe Hill)
• The socially and politically engaged poetry that
  appeared and continued to develop especially
  throughout the late 20s and the 30s

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Modernist Poetic Landmarks

• Alfred Stieglitzs Camera Work Magazine
• Gertrude Steins essays
• Mina Loys Aphorisms on Futurism

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Harriet Monroes Poetry
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Gertrude Stein1874-The Mother of Us All (1946)

• Studied with William James at Radcliffe College
• Studied brain anatomy at Johns Hopkins Medical
  School
• Major preoccupations
• characterization
• the readers preoccupation with the text.

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Expatriation

• In 1903 moved to France
• Met Alice B. Toklas
• Returned to the United States only once, in 1934
  but claimed America as her country
• Her career in Europe was that of an art critic
• Paul Cezanne was discovered by her brother
• She was called the Mama of Dada
• Pablo Picasso drew her portrait

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Writings

• Three Lives, written in 1904, published in 1909
• The Making of Americans, written in 1911-12,
  published in 1925
• Tender Buttons (1914)
• Tender Buttons Two Gertrude Stein and her
  Brother and G. M. P.
• The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933)

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Writings

• The Geographical History of America (1935)
• Picasso (1938)
• The Mother of Us All (1946).
• Bee Time Vine and Other Pieces (1953)
• Stanzas in Meditation and Other Poems (1956).

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Features of Steins Works

• An attempt to achieve a kind of verbal
  after-image that would penetrate the readers
  consciousness and evoke some genuine response
• Subversion of familiar literary techniques, using
  deliberately unliterary language and diction and
  writing in unliterary structures
• Insisted that writing should be about real
  characters, real objects, real scenes from
  American life forcing the reader to complete the
  description.

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Features of Steins Works

• Draws emotional states but not their physical
  presence creating the most not visual
  characteristics of the objects and avoiding
  labels (Tender Buttons)
• Wit and experimentation
• Use of disguising tactics
• Characters motivations are purely emotional and
  unchangeable.

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Features of Steins Works

• Her work still defies any genre-oriented
  classifications as well as any attempts to assign
  a humanizing persona to the poetic voice
• Devoted to an exploration of how language works,
  anticipated not only most of the linguistic
  experimental strain of modernism but much of
  postmodernism as well.

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Ezra Pound 1885-1972

• Family background
• Education University of Pennsylvania, met
  William Carlos Williams, transferred to Hamilton
  College
• Expatriation 1908 settled in London, a
  productive friendship with William Butler Yeats.
  His poetry from the years 1908-1914 reflects his
  struggle to achieve clarity, precision, and a
  direct conversational diction.

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Writings

• Personae (1909), to be revised and re-issued in
  1926 as Personae The Collected Poems.
• Patria Mia (1912), essays on American literature
  and society
• Indiscretions (1920), autobiographical writing

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Poetic Philosophy

• The modern poet can recapture the vitality of
  ancient myths.
• The notion of personae, or masks the
  contemporary poet can sustain a dialogue between
  past and present by speaking through various
  historical personalities.
• Pounds obsession with the literary past, his
  desire to revive ancient ghosts The Spirit of
  Romance (1910) anticipates T .S. Eliots
  argument in Tradition and the Individual Talent
  (1919)

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Poetic Dictum

• The language in his first poems - obscure and
  antiquated. Ford M. Ford all poetry should have
  the economy and precision of prose
• The concept of translation as a dynamic act-I
  gather the Limbs of Osiris (1911-12), a
  translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem Seafarer.
• Criticism and poetic activity are inseparable.
• Five kinds of fusion between poetry and criticism

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The Poet-Critic

• Criticism by discussion.
• Criticism by translationCathay (1915) and Umbra
  (1920).
• Criticism by exercise in the style of a given
  period
• Criticism via music and the importance of
  melopoeia
• The highest form is criticism in new composition.

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Imagism and Vorticism

• Started around 1912 the first Imagist anthology,
  Des Imagiste (1914).
• Based on the ideas of Hulme, Pounds imagism soon
  turned the doctrine, which was heavily indebted
  to the Symbolist-Impressionist way of thinking
  into an anti-Symbolist and anti-Impressionist
  platform.

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The Image

• A direct treatment of the thing whether
  subjective or objective.
• No words that do not contribute to the
  presentation.
• To compose in sequence of the music phrase, not
  in sequence of a metronome.
• The Image is a fusion of spontaneity, intensity
  and critical discipline, it is also an equation
  for an emotion, its not the verbal metaphor of a
  thing.

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Vorticism

• Collaboration with the Vorticists
• Strengthened his conviction that the permanent
  or absolute image-complex juxtaposition must be
  active rather than static
• Vorticist images swirl, whirl, flutter, strike,
  fall, move, clash and leap, with a new emphasis
  on conflict and distortion
• A re-definition of the Image as Vortex

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Image/Vortex

• The image is not an idea. It is a radiant node
  or cluster it is what I can, and must perforce,
  call a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and
  into which ideas are constantly rushing. Thus
  the image can be described as content conceived
  of as form. It provides a medium for exploration,
  rather than a territory to be explored. It is, in
  his own words, a new focus.

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Hugh Selwyn Mauberley

• Hugh Selwyn Mauberley in 1920, as a farewell to
  London. This was a poem meant to emphasize the
  plight of the Odyssean artist in the modern world
  
• The second part of the poem is a comment on the
  first and the prevailing atmosphere is one of
  postwar disillusionment.

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The Cantos
He called them drafts, a palimsest and the
question for him was always whether they would
form a whole, whether any kind of coherence would
be possible. But despite their ill-conceived
politics and confusing form, they do stand for an
heroic attempt to accept life with an imaginative
openness that could give an access to certain
cultural possibilities that cannot be reproduced.
To a great extent this was preconditioned by the
ups and downs of his strange fate of an American
in Europe who was put to mental institution in
1945, right after the end of the Second World
War, was released in 1958 and died in Venice in
1972.

• Moved to Italy - a lifetime project, the writing
  of The Cantos.
• A Draft of Thirty Cantos, the first collection,
  in 1933
• The Fifth Decad of Cantos in 1937
• The Pisan Cantos (74-84) in 1948
• Rock-Drill (85-95) in 1955
• Thrones (96-109) in 1959
• Drafts and Fragments (110-117) in 1969.