What Modernism Asked of the Reader

The idea

Modernist poetry is the period in which American verse stopped explaining itself, and the change was deliberate, announced and argued about by the people making it. Pound supplied the slogan and the method, telling poets to make it new, which meant renovating by reaching past the nineteenth century, and organizing Imagism around three rules: direct treatment of the thing, no word that does not contribute, and a rhythm made from the musical phrase rather than the metronome. His two-line poem about faces in a metro station is the demonstration, a comparison placed without a verb. Eliot took the method to its limit in The Waste Land, cut hard by Pound, which juxtaposes voices, cities, languages and myths without supplying the joins, and gave criticism the objective correlative, the set of objects that will be the formula of a particular emotion. Against that learned, European, allusive line stood Williams, a New Jersey doctor writing between patients, who thought The Waste Land a disaster, insisted on no ideas but in things, wrote sixteen words about a wheelbarrow and built his own long poem out of one American city. Stevens, an insurance executive, made the relation between imagination and reality his lifelong subject and said the poem of the mind must find what will suffice. Moore invented syllabic stanzas and put quotation marks around her borrowings. And Frost, the most read of all of them, kept the meter and the rhyme everyone else was dropping, put two farmers on either side of a wall and refused to say which was right, and called free verse tennis with the net down. What all of them ask of a reader is the same: attention to surface before meaning, tolerance of a poem that will not state its own point, and the willingness to hold two things side by side and let the relation happen.