Modernist Poetry

This is Unit Fourteen of American Literature, part one of two: the poetry that broke with the forms it inherited, and announced that it was doing so. Unit thirteen closed on a movement arguing about what Black art owed anyone. This unit runs through the same decades with a different quarrel, and its governing idea, which part two pays off, is that modernist poetry treats difficulty as a method rather than a failure. The break had causes: a war that discredited the old vocabulary, cities and machines, Freud, and a new physics. In poetry it meant abandoning regular meter, decorative diction and the comfortable speaking voice. Ezra Pound supplied the slogan, make it new, which meant renovating poetry by reaching back past the nineteenth century to older and foreign models, so that new here means recovered rather than invented. He organized Imagism around three rules, found and promoted most of the poets who mattered, and edited some of their best-known work. We take the programme first, then Pound's own career and the quarrel it ended in, then Eliot, then Frost, who kept meter and rhyme while everyone else dropped them, and then Stevens. By the end you will be able to state what modernism broke with and what the slogan meant. To give Imagism's three rules. To account for Pound's long poem and his prize. To read Eliot's major poems and define his tested term. And to place Frost's forms and Stevens's strangeness.

Five entries on the programme: the causes of the break, the slogan, three rules, and two poems that demonstrate them.

A break with the forms, after a war.

AML 1301 Modernism: The Break and Its Causes

Modernism is the early twentieth century's break with inherited forms, driven by a war that discredited the old vocabulary, by cities and machines, by Freud and by a new physics. In poetry it meant abandoning regular meter, decorative diction and the comfortable speaking voice. The break is deliberate and announced rather than gradual.

Renovation, by going further back.

AML 1302 "Make It New": Pound's Instruction

Ezra Pound's instruction to make it new became the movement's slogan, and it meant renovating poetry by going back past the nineteenth century to older and foreign models. Pound found and promoted most of the poets who mattered, and edited some of their best-known work. New here means recovered rather than invented.

The thing itself, no waste.

AML 1303 Imagism and Its Three Rules

Imagism, which Pound organized around nineteen twelve, asked for direct treatment of the thing, no word that does not contribute, and a rhythm composed in the sequence of the musical phrase rather than the metronome. The three rules are a programme against Victorian decoration rather than a description of a style.

Two lines, and no verb.

AML 1304 "In a Station of the Metro"

Pound's two-line poem of nineteen thirteen sets the apparition of faces in a crowd beside petals on a wet black bough, with no verb and no comparison stated. He described cutting it down from a much longer draft, and the compression is the demonstration. The comparison is placed rather than asserted.

Greek material, cut to the image.

AML 1305 H.D. and the Imagist Poem

Hilda Doolittle, who published as H.D., wrote the hardest and clearest Imagist poems, drawn from Greek material and built from sharp physical images without commentary. Pound sent her work to a magazine over the signature H.D., Imagiste, which named the movement in public. The initials were Pound's editorial act.

Two entries on Pound himself: a poem he worked on for half a century, and a quarrel about whether a poem can be judged apart from its author.

Fifty years, and no spine.

AML 1306 Pound's *Cantos* and the Difficulty

Pound worked on the *Cantos* for half a century, assembling history, economics, Chinese characters, Greek and quotation into a poem without a narrative spine. It is the period's most extreme demand on a reader and the clearest case of modernist difficulty used as a method. The difficulty is a method, and it costs him readers.

A prize, given to a confined man.

AML 1307 Pound's Politics and the Prize Quarrel

Pound made wartime radio broadcasts for Fascist Italy, was charged with treason, found unfit to stand trial and confined to a hospital. A committee then gave his poetry a major prize, and the argument was whether a poem can be judged apart from its author. The course reports the episode and judges nothing about it.

Seven entries on Eliot: a man who cannot act, a civilization after a war, a term the exam sets, and a quieter late voice.

St. Louis, Harvard, London, a bank.

AML 1308 T. S. Eliot: An American in London

Born in St. Louis and educated at Harvard, Eliot settled in England, worked in a bank and later in publishing, and became a British subject. He is claimed by both literatures, and the exam treats him as American by birth and modernist by method. Both countries claim him, which is a fact about reception rather than about the poems.

An evening, etherised on a table.

AML 1309 "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

Published in nineteen fifteen, the poem follows a timid, ageing man through an evening he cannot commit to, worrying about his hair, his trousers and whether he dares eat a peach, and it opens with an evening spread against the sky like a patient etherised upon a table. The love song is never sung to anyone.

A monologue by a man paralyzed.

AML 1310 Prufrock's Voice and the Dramatic Monologue

The poem is a dramatic monologue whose speaker addresses an unnamed you and reveals more than he means to: the paralysis, the self-mockery, the sense of having measured out his life with coffee spoons. Eliot took Browning's form and removed its confidence. The form is Browning's, and the nerve is not.

April, called the cruellest month.

AML 1311 *The Waste Land*

Published in nineteen twenty-two and cut sharply by Pound, *The Waste Land* moves without transition among voices, cities, myths and languages, opening by calling April the cruellest month. It was read at once as the poem of a civilization exhausted by war. Pound's editing shaped the poem that was published.

Fragments, allusions, and notes.

AML 1312 Fragment, Allusion, and the Notes

The poem works by juxtaposing fragments without ever explaining the joins, and by allusion to Dante, Shakespeare, the Grail legend, Hindu scripture and popular song. Eliot added notes to the first book edition, and readers have argued since about whether they help or mislead. The notes are part of the poem's reception rather than its key.

The cause, and not the feeling.

AML 1313 The Objective Correlative

Eliot's term for the way a poem produces emotion: find a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events that will be the formula of that feeling, so the emotion arrives when the facts are given rather than when it is described. The term is Eliot's own, and the exam sets it.

Four places, and a quieter voice.

AML 1314 *Four Quartets* and the Later Eliot

After converting to Anglicanism, Eliot wrote *Four Quartets*, four long meditative poems each named for a place and each working through time, memory and religious patience. The voice is quieter than the earlier work and the difficulty is philosophical rather than fragmentary. The late work turns religious, and it slows.

Seven entries on Frost: a poet who kept the old forms, was read by everyone, and is much darker than his reputation.

Old forms, carrying hard subjects.

AML 1315 Robert Frost: The Public Poet

Frost farmed in New England, published first in England, and became the most widely read American poet of his century, reciting at a presidential inauguration. He kept meter and rhyme when his contemporaries dropped them, and used them to hold dark material. The popularity hides how bleak he actually is.

Two men, one wall, two sentences.

AML 1316 "Mending Wall"

Two neighbours meet each spring to repair the stone wall between them. The speaker asks why a wall is needed where there are no cows, and the neighbour answers only that good fences make good neighbours. The poem gives both lines and refuses to decide between them. The famous line belongs to the neighbour rather than to the poem.

Two roads, worn about the same.

AML 1317 "The Road Not Taken" and Its Misreading

The speaker chooses between two roads he says were worn about the same, then predicts that he will one day claim, with a sigh, that the less travelled one made all the difference. It is usually read as praise for nonconformity. Two readings are defended and both of them stand, which is the entry's point.

Lovely, dark and deep, then on.

AML 1318 "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"

A traveller stops to watch a neighbour's woods fill with snow, notes that his horse must think it queer, and turns back because he has promises to keep and miles to go before he sleeps. The repeated closing line invites readings the poem never confirms, and the course does not confirm them either.

A staircase, two ways of grieving.

AML 1319 "Home Burial" and the Dramatic Narrative

A husband and wife quarrel on a staircase after the death of their child, he unable to say the right thing and she unable to forgive his way of grieving. Almost the whole poem is dialogue in blank verse, which means the reader hears the marriage failing rather than being told about it.

A boy swinging; a ladder standing.

AML 1320 "Birches" and "After Apple-Picking"

"Birches", which the witness uses as its example of blank verse, imagines a boy swinging birches down and wishes to get away from earth awhile and then come back. "After Apple-Picking" leaves a ladder standing in a tree and slides toward a long sleep. Both poems edge toward death without ever naming it.

Speech, heard against a meter.

AML 1321 Frost's Form: The Sound of Sense

Frost argued that a poem's music comes from the sound of ordinary speech played against a regular meter, so that a reader hears both the sentence and the beat at once. He called free verse playing tennis with the net down, which is his whole position compressed into a sentence. The tennis remark is an argument rather than a joke.

Four entries on Stevens: a Hartford executive who wrote in the evenings, and four poems about what supplies order.

An insurance man, writing strangely.

AML 1322 Wallace Stevens: The Insurance Executive

Stevens spent his working life as an insurance executive in Hartford and wrote some of the century's strangest poetry in the evenings. His subject is the relation between imagination and reality, and his surfaces are gaudy, comic and abstract at once. The day job is not a joke, and it shaped the work's privacy.

A wake, and a bowl of ice-cream.

AML 1323 "The Emperor of Ice-Cream"

A kitchen full of noise and cheap finery sits beside a room where a dead woman lies with her feet protruding, and the poem twice declares that the only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. The reading turns on whether that line celebrates appetite or dismisses consolation. The famous line is a repeated riddle.

One bird, thirteen positions.

AML 1324 "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"

Thirteen short numbered sections circle one bird from different angles, some descriptive, some aphoristic, some almost jokes, without building toward a conclusion. The poem is a demonstration that a subject changes with the position of the mind looking at it. The sections do not resolve into an argument.

A jar on a hill, a Sunday.

AML 1325 "Anecdote of the Jar" and "Sunday Morning"

A jar placed on a hill in Tennessee makes the wilderness surround it, so that an object organizes a whole landscape. "Sunday Morning" has a woman at home weigh the comforts of the world against a religion she no longer holds. Both poems ask what supplies order now that the old sources have gone.

That is the break, its organizer, and three of its major poets. Part two takes the rest. You can state what modernism broke with, regular meter and decorative diction and the comfortable speaking voice, and what the slogan meant, renovation by reaching further back. You can give Imagism's three rules and read the two-line poem with no verb in it, and name H.D., whose initials were Pound's editorial act. You can account for a poem worked on for fifty years without a spine, and report the quarrel over a prize given to a man confined after wartime broadcasts, without judging it. You can read Eliot's timid monologue that is never sung to anyone, his poem of an exhausted civilization cut sharply by Pound, and define the objective correlative as a set of objects that will be the formula of a feeling. You can place Frost's kept meter holding dark material, a famous line that belongs to a neighbour, and free verse called tennis with the net down. And you can place Stevens's jar on a hill.