Chapter 10 Poetry from 1900 -- 1930s

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Chapter 10 Poetry from 1900 -- 1930s

• From An Outline of American Literature by Peter
  B. High

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Experiment with new forms and content

• Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935)
• use traditional sonnet and quatrain to express
  20th century fears and problems (p.125)
• filled with a modern sense of loss, nothing to
  replace the old values
• Richard Cory

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Richard Cory (p.126)

• Whenever Richard Cory went down town, We people
  on the pavement looked at him He was a
  gentleman from sole to crown, Clean favored, and
  imperially slim. (p.126)
• And he was always quietly arrayed, And he was
  always human when he talked But still he
  fluttered pulses when he said, "Good-morning,"
  and he glittered when he walked.

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• And he was rich - yes, richer than a king - And
  admirably schooled in every grace In fine we
  thought that he was everything To make us wish
  that we were in his place.
• So on we worked, and waited for the light, And
  went without the meat, and cursed the bread And
  Richard Cory, one calm summer night, Went home
  and put a bullet through his head.
• - Edwin Arlington Robinson - The Children Of
  The Night

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Robert Frost (1873-1963)

• Worked in the traditional way of poetry
• Aloneness is a common theme in his poetry
• speaks directly and use an unliterary language
• Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening (1923)
• a good poem begins in delight and ends in
  wisdom.
• The Road Not Taken (1916)

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Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert
Frost
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Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert
Frost

• Whose Woods Are These I think I know.His house
  is in the village thoughHe will not see me
  stopping hereTo watch his woods fill up with
  snow.
• My little horse must think it queerTo stop
  without a farmhouse nearBetween the woods and
  frozen lakeThe darkest evening of the year.

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Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert
Frost

• He gives his harness bells a shakeTo ask if
  there is some mistake.The only other sound's the
  sweepOf easy wind and downy flake.
• The woods are lovely, dark and deep,But I have
  promises to keep,And miles to go before I
  sleep,And miles to go before I sleep

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Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)

• in 1902, she moved to Paris (p.130)
• became close friends with Picasso, Braque and
  Matisse
• the modernist revolt in artto find a new way
  of looking at the world

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• Alice B. Toklas Gertrude Stein, studioat 27
  Rue de Fleurus, Paris. 1922

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Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)

• the idea of her art to find a new way of looking
  at the world
• show the conscious mind in writing
• made her own English language into an entirely
  new language by throwing away the rules of
  traditional grammar and made words act in
  completely new ways.

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Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)

• Useful Knowledge (1928) one and one and one
  and one . . .
• each word has the same completely independent
  existence
• each word appears as if it is new
• the word is happening to us now, coming one after
  another

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Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)

• the words and meanings create something she calls
  the continuous present (p.131)
• read her writing word by word, we are looking at
  it moment-by-moment
• rose is a rose is a rose is a rose
• crate the experience of now as confusing and not
  understandable
• her language has no past and future

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T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

• valued a sense of history see Eliots
  Tradition and the Individual Talent
  (1920)p.132
• knowledge of tradition is acquired for the poet
  to create new poetry see Pounds Credo
  (1911)p.132
• Eliots The Waste Land (1922)p.133
• Pounds Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920)p.133

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Shared Beliefs

• impersonalism as Eliot defined it, the
  progress of an artist is a continual
  self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of
  personality
• used the language and myths of classical
  literature
• important to look at the poetry but not at the
  poet the feeling, or emotion, resulting from
  the poem is something different from the feeling
  or emotion in the mind of the poet

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Ezra Pound

• Defined the image in Imagism as an
  intellectual and emotional complex in an instant
  of time (p.134)
• good poetry was based on images (picture of solid
  real things) rather than ideas
• The apparition of those faces in the crowd
• Petals on a wet, black bough (In a
  Station of the Metro, 1915)
• images drawn from a real world
• placing one image on top of the other so that we
  see them as a single image

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H.D. (Hilda Doolittle, 1886-1961) Amy Lowell

• two other important Imagists during the WWI
• Amy Lowellleader of the Imagist
• Took the leadership of the Imagist movement away
  from Poundthe Amygists
• Patterns (1915), p.135

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Marianne Moore (1887-1972)

• influenced by Ezra Pound and Imagism
• used hard, clear, cold , exact and real images
• Silence (p.136)
• unusual subjects (animals) and study them from
  strange angle
• experimenting with new forms of rhythm, rhyme,
  and content, short sentences mixed with long ones
• Genuine poetry shows us imaginary gardens with
  real toads in them.

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William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)

• a doctor-poet
• influenced by Eliots impersonal style
• more interested in the language and scenes of
  everyday life
• To A Poor Old Woman
• means exactly what they say
• deep concern for people
• more optimistic than Pound or Eliot

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To a Poor Old Woman (p.136)

• munching a plum on
• the street a paper bag
• of them in her hand
• They taste good to her
• They taste good
• to her. They taste good to her
• You can see it by
• the way she gives herself
• to the one half
• sucked out in her hand
• Comforted
• a solace of ripe plums
• seeming to fill the air
• They taste good to her

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Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)

• a full-time businessman in an insurance company
  (p.138)
• used words for their sound rather than their
  meaning
• InFlyers Fall, he describes when a man dies
• Darkness, nothing, of human after-death,
• Receive and keep him in the deepnesses of space
  
• God does not exist and all religions are false
• not sad about the meaninglessness of life because
  we can create our own order and gods Supreme
  Fiction which we create to give meaning to our
  lives

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Anecdote of the Jar (1923)

• the jar is the upreme Fictions of the poet,
  like a new god
• the poet organizes that wilderness and gives it
  order and meaning
• creates a language of a myth

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Anecdote of the Jar (p.139)

• I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was,
  upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness
  Surround that hill.
• The wilderness rose up to it, And sprawled
  around, no longer wild. The jar was round upon
  the ground And tall and of a port in air.
• It took dominion every where. The jar was gray
  and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, Like
  nothing else in Tennessee.