Modernist Poetry

This is Unit Fourteen of American Literature, part two of two: the other side of the argument, and two procedures for a difficult poem. Part one ended with Stevens asking what supplies order now. This part opens on his answer and then turns to the fight that organizes the whole period, which is the unit's governing idea paying off. Modernism is an argument rather than a consensus. Eliot's line is learned, European and allusive, and it made difficulty a method. Against it stood William Carlos Williams, a New Jersey doctor who wrote between patients, thought *The Waste Land* was a disaster for American poetry, and insisted that a poem should reach its ideas through concrete particulars rather than state them. He wrote sixteen words about a wheelbarrow and built a long poem out of one American city as a direct rival to Eliot's. Around that quarrel sit Moore inventing syllabic stanzas and quoting prose inside her poems, cummings rearranging the page, Sandburg in Whitman's long line, Hart Crane answering Eliot's despair with a bridge, Millay keeping the sonnet, and Roethke's contested kitchen waltz. Then two procedures. By the end you will be able to state Stevens's question. To give Williams's quarrel and his poems. To place Moore, cummings and Sandburg. To account for Crane, Millay and Roethke. And to tell one modernist from another and read a difficult poem.

Six entries on the American line: a question about the mind, and the doctor who answered Eliot with an object and a city.

The poem must find what suffices.

AML 1326 Imagination and Reality in Stevens

Stevens's recurring question is what the mind adds to the world and what it finds there, and his poems keep testing that border. "Of Modern Poetry" says the poem of the mind must find what will suffice, which is his statement of the job compressed into a line. The abstraction is the subject itself rather than a way of avoiding one.

A country doctor, writing between patients.

AML 1327 William Carlos Williams: The Doctor Poet

Williams practised medicine in Rutherford, New Jersey, for forty years and wrote between patients. He argued against Eliot's learned, European difficulty and for a poetry made from American speech and local material, which put him at the centre of the argument about what modernism should be. He treated *The Waste Land* as a disaster for poetry.

Sixteen words, and no explanation.

AML 1328 "The Red Wheelbarrow"

Sixteen words say that so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens. The poem gives no reason at all for the dependence, and its argument is that attention to an ordinary object is itself the poem's business. The line breaks do most of the work in it.

A note about plums, left out.

AML 1329 "This Is Just to Say"

The poem is written as a note left on an icebox, apologizing for eating plums somebody was saving for breakfast and adding that they were delicious, so sweet and so cold. Whether it is an apology or a boast is the question every reader asks, and the poem does not settle it.

Ideas, reached only through things.

AML 1330 "No ideas but in things"

Williams's formula holds that a poem should reach its ideas through concrete particulars rather than state them, which is the American line of modernism set against Eliot's learned allusion. The phrase appears on the exam attached to his name. It is a position in an argument rather than a neutral description of technique.

A city, written as a man.

AML 1331 *Paterson* and the American Local

Williams's long poem takes a New Jersey city as a man and as a subject, mixing verse with letters, newspaper extracts and historical documents. It is his answer to *The Waste Land*: a long modernist poem built from one American place rather than from European tradition. The book is a deliberate rival to Eliot's long poem.

Six entries on the poets around the quarrel: syllabics, a rearranged page, a city, a bridge, a sonnet and a waltz.

I, too, dislike it.

AML 1332 Marianne Moore and "Poetry"

Moore's poem "Poetry" opens by saying she too dislikes it, and argues that reading it with a perfect contempt one discovers a place in it for the genuine. She wrote in precise syllabic patterns and quoted prose sources inside her poems, with notes attached. The dislike is the start of the defence rather than a dismissal.

A page rearranged, an old subject.

AML 1333 e. e. cummings and the Typography

Cummings broke words across lines, dropped capitals, moved punctuation into the middle of words and let the arrangement on the page carry meaning. The tricks serve a fairly traditional lyric sensibility, and the poems are often about spring, love and individuality against the crowd. The experiment is in the typography rather than in the feeling.

Hog butcher for the world.

AML 1334 Carl Sandburg and the Chicago Poems

Sandburg wrote long-lined free verse in Whitman's line, and his "Chicago" of nineteen fourteen calls the city hog butcher for the world, stormy, husky and brawling, and answers those who call it wicked and crooked by admitting the charges and being proud anyway. The poem concedes and then boasts.

A bridge, addressed as harp and altar.

AML 1335 Hart Crane and *The Bridge*

Crane set out to answer *The Waste Land* with an affirmative long poem, taking the Brooklyn Bridge as the emblem of an American continuity. Its proem addresses the bridge as a harp and an altar, and the language is deliberately ecstatic where Eliot's is dry. The poem is written against Eliot's despair rather than in ignorance of it.

A candle burned at both ends.

AML 1336 Edna St. Vincent Millay and the Sonnet Revival

Millay wrote sonnets and formal lyrics while her contemporaries were dismantling the line, and she was enormously popular. "First Fig" burns its candle at both ends and declares that it gives a lovely light, four lines that carried a decade's idea of itself. That popularity kept her out of the modernist canon for a long time.

A kitchen waltz, remembered.

AML 1337 Theodore Roethke and "My Papa's Waltz"

Roethke's short poem has a boy waltzed round a kitchen by a father smelling of whiskey, with pans falling and a hand battered on one knuckle, clinging to his shirt as he is waltzed off to bed. Readers divide over whether the scene is affectionate or frightening, and the poem's tone is genuinely contested.

Three entries to close: one procedure separating the five major voices, one naming the causes of difficulty, and the capstone.

Five voices, five tests.

AML 1338 Telling One Modernist From Another

Five voices dominate the period and five tests separate them. Eliot: fragments, allusion, a speaker who cannot act, cities, and a dry ironic register. Frost: regular meter, rhyme, New England objects, a speaking neighbour, and a darkness under an even surface. Stevens: abstraction, gaudy vocabulary, tropical or invented names, and the word imagination somewhere near. Williams: very short lines, plain American words, one concrete object held up, and no classical reference at all. Moore: syllabic stanzas of odd shapes, animals described with precision, and quotation marks around borrowed prose. Pound sits behind the whole period as editor and provocateur, and his own signature is extreme compression or extreme accumulation with nothing in between. Frost is the trap, since a regular rhymed poem in a rural setting looks pre-modern; he is a contemporary of Eliot writing against the same century in the opposite direction.

Name the cause of the difficulty.

AML 1339 Reading a Modernist Poem Without Its Notes

Modernist difficulty has a small number of causes, and naming the cause makes an unfamiliar poem answerable. First, missing joins: the poem sets two images or two voices side by side without a connective and lets the reader supply the relation, which is what Imagism does in two lines and what *The Waste Land* does for four hundred. Second, unmarked allusion: a phrase carries a source the poem does not identify, and the exam will not require the source, only that you notice the borrowed register. Third, displaced grammar: the sentence is complete but rearranged, so finding the verb settles most confusion. Fourth, a speaker who is not reliable or not continuous, so the voice may change without warning. Questions on these poems test what the passage does, not what the allusion originally meant.

Attention to surface before meaning.

AML 1340 What Modernism Asked of the Reader

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, 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, juxtaposing voices, cities, languages and myths without supplying the joins, and gave criticism the objective correlative. 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 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 rhyme everyone else was dropping, put two farmers on either side of a wall and refused to say which was right. 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 point, and a willingness to hold two things side by side and let the relation happen.

That closes modernist poetry. The next unit is the fiction written in the same years. You can state Stevens's question about what the mind adds and what it finds, and quote his line that the poem of the mind must find what will suffice. You can give Williams's quarrel with Eliot, his insistence on no ideas but in things, his sixteen words about a wheelbarrow where the line breaks do the work, his note about plums that may or may not be an apology, and his long poem built from one New Jersey city as a rival to *The Waste Land*. You can place Moore, who opens by disliking poetry and then defends it in syllabic stanzas with quotation marks around her borrowings, cummings rearranging a page around an old subject, and Sandburg conceding the charges against Chicago and boasting anyway. You can account for Crane's bridge addressed as harp and altar, Millay's candle, and Roethke's contested waltz. And you can separate five voices by five tests, and name which of four difficulties a poem is using.