The Modernist Transformation

 

Crane attempts to rise above his own complexities in an effort to distill an image of America beyond space and time.  He sees all things—bridge, sea, river, ash can—as being on the verge of transformation, and attempts a poetry close to speech yet many-layered in meaning.  Much of his verse includes the pursuit of unconscious interconnections of “emotional dynamics” which work through abbreviated thoughts by sudden, forced conjunctions which find their justification below rather than above the surface.

Hart Crane, “To Brooklyn Bridge”

Hart Crane, “Chaplinesque”

 

E. E. Cummings is one of the most innovative of modern poets, but it is a sense of innovation on a different plane.  Though Cummings drops most punctuation and capitalization, and deliberately distorts syntax, and alters parts of speech, and makes verbs into nouns and nouns into verbs—he does so chiefly to express feelings whose simplicity belies all this complication. His poetry is written with a childlike wonder and humor, and attacks the negative worlds that are full of prohibitions, taboos, and manunkindness.

E.E. Cummings, “anyone lived in a pretty how town”

E.E. Cummings, “i thank you God for most this amazing”

E.E. Cummings, “pity this busy monster,manunkind”

E.E. Cummings, “when god decided to invent”

E.E. Cummings, “the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls”

 

The use of traditional stylistics like rhythm and meter in the poetry of Emily Dickinson is recognized for revolutionizing readers’ perceptions of literary structures.  Feminist scholarship has convincingly demonstrated her resistance to patriarchal authority and stimulated interest in the enlightened nature of the self presented in her work.       

Emily Dickinson, “After Great Pain, A Formal Feeling Comes”

Emily Dickinson, “Wild Nights”

 

Not many poets have been able to encompass so much material with so much dexterity, or to express the listlessness and the horror of so many aspects of the modern world, as does T. S. Eliot.  He incorporates a notion that poetry could carry considerable intellectual as well as emotional content, and that it might be—and, as he thinks, in the modern world has to be—exceedingly complex in expression.

T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”

 

The simplicity through which Robert Frost divulges his narrative is regarded as the first step toward his experiments with “the sound of sense.”  Existence, for Frost, is typically uncovered through struggle and sometimes seen through darkness.  His mainstay is irony—the art of sustaining the self between extremes.

Robert Frost, “Acquainted With the Night”

Robert Frost, “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening”

Robert Frost, “The Mending Wall”

Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken”

 

D. H. Lawrence sees man as imprisoned within his body.  To shed involvement, to diminish mind, is the way for western man, at least, to achieve a secular beatitude.  In the immediate present there is no perfection for Lawrence, no consummation, nothing finished—life, the ever present, knows no finality, no finished crystallization.  It is only when we pry open the lid, and see what the box may hold, does one gain insight into the concentrated apprehension of inner beings.

D.H. Lawrence, “Love on the Farm”

D.H. Lawrence, “Snake”

D.H. Lawrence, “The Wild Common”

 

The fact that Marianne Moore’s verse is patently verse, yet embraces many characteristics of prose, is enlightening.  Her “predilection” is for grace and neatness.  Poetry is for her the result of a “heightened consciousness,” where the originality of perception investigates the physical universe—consisting of animals, birds, and plants—and can be described in its own right, apart from the metaphysical condition.

Marianne Moore, “The Fish”

Marianne Moore, “A Grave”

 

Ezra Pound’s purpose is to sanction experimentation in verse form and to aim at new modes of perception.  He finds himself on a constant search for the best, individual, revolutionary idea—to bring incandescent moments (“magic moments”) out of seeming welter, precision out of seeming improvisation, the abundant and passionate out of the passive and logical—the most telling English out of conversational or prosy details.

Ezra Pound, “Portrait d’une Femme”

Ezra Pound, “The Return”

Ezra Pound, “In a Station of the Metro”

 

Modern before modernism, Gertrude Stein’s work stands at one extreme of twentieth-century literature.  Her experimentalism of modern art, much like how her friend Pablo Picasso abstracted shapes, colors, and materials from his painting, attempts to draw language away from its representational function, in order to create a verse that is deliberately open-ended.   Her poetry is an attempt to recapture the value of the individual word—find out what it means and act within it. 

Gertrude Stein, “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso”

Gertrude Stein, “Tender Buttons”

 

An extraordinarily self-effacing poet, Wallace Stevens constructs a verse that is prodigiously exciting and unexpectable.  His writing possesses an evolving relation of image to fact, where the beauty in poetry lies in the discovery between the gap of the real and the imaginary.  Stevens claims what makes the poet a potent figure is that he creates the world to which we turn incessantly and without knowing it and that he gives to life the supreme fictions without which we are unable to conceive of it.

Wallace Stevens, “A Postcard from the Volcano”

Wallace Stevens, “A Quiet Normal Life”

Wallace Stevens, “Autumn Refrain”

Wallace Stevens, “Domination of Black”

Wallace Stevens, “Of Mere Being”

Wallace Stevens, “Of Modern Poetry”

Wallace Stevens, “Re-statement of Romance”

Wallace Stevens, “The Idea of Order at Key West”

Wallace Stevens, “The Poems of Our Climate”

Wallace Stevens, “The Reader

Wallace Stevens, “The Snow Man”

Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”

 

Walt Whitman’s democratic and innovative style has been said to have transformed modern thinking as it relates to literature and poetic form.  His free verse and non-restrictive style encourages an odd journey, where the scriptural is juxtaposed with the vernacular, the transcendent and the mundane—simultaneously capturing the magical and the commonplace, the sublime and the prosaic.  Whitman’s poetic exploration attempts to merge the reader and the poetic experience.

Walt Whitman, “1-6” from Song of Myself

Walt Whitman, “A Clear Midnight”

Walt Whitman, “A Farm Picture”

Walt Whitman, “I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing”

 

William Carlos Williams believes poetry to be the juxtaposition of humility and assertiveness, where life is above all things else at any moment subversive of life as it was the moment before—always new, irregular.  Verse to be alive must have infused into it something of the same order, some tincture of disestablishment.  Williams attempts to communicate through verse directly, to address the barrier between the reader and his consciousness of immediate contact with the world—those things which lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses. 

William Carlos Williams, “Nantucket”

William Carlos Williams, “Pastoral”

William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow”

William Carlos Williams, “This Is Just to Say”

 

W. B. Yeats incorporates a strong adherence to symbolism that has provided critics multitudinous meanings for interpreting his work.  He takes an intermediate form with his poetry, which dwells upon the battle within each individual mind, between what one is and what one would like to be.

W.B Yeats, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”

W.B Yeats, “The Second Coming”

 

Miscellaneous:

Guillaume Apollinaire,  “The Festival”

Charles Baudelaire , “The Stranger”

Paul Celán, “Aspen Tree”

Paul Celán, “Corona”

Paul Celán, “Fugue of Death”

Jean Follain, “Signs”

Judson Micham, “Etiquette”

Czeslaw Milosz, “Window”

Rainer Maria Rilke, “From a Childhood”

Arthur Rimbaud, “Departure”

Arthur Rimbaud, “Marine”

 

The Harlem Renaissance.  In the first half of the twentieth century, the Great Migration brought millions of African Americans from the rural south to northern cities in search of not only economic opportunity and racial tolerance, but more importantly—cultural identification.  This massive influx helped precipitate a burst of creativity in African American art, song, and letters in the 1920s and early 1930s.  Though not exclusive to Harlem, this movement was called the Harlem Renaissance.

Countee Cullen, “Heritage”

Countee Cullen, “Incident”

Countee Cullen, “Yet Do I Marvel”

Langston Hughes, “Dream Boogie”

Langston Hughes, “Harlem”

Langston Hughes, “Jazzonia”

Langston Hughes, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”

Langston Hughes, “The Weary Blues”

Claude McKay, “The Harlem Dancer”

Claude McKay, “Harlem Shadows”

Claude McKay, “The Tropics in New York”

 

The Deep Image Poets. Surrealism, a mental model that uses the unconscious and its distortion of reality, had through the early twentieth century been more common to visual arts, than to poetry.  However, a small group of Spanish writers utilized this abstract imagery and became a central influence on another group of lyricists, known as the Deep Image poets.  They drew on the workings of the subconscious and fantastic imagery to compose elemental, psychologically archetypal poems.

Pablo Neruda, “Body of a Woman”

Pablo Neruda, “Here I Love You”

Pablo Neruda, “Ode to My Suit“

Pablo Neruda, “Ode to the Tomato“

Pablo Neruda, ”Some Beasts”

Pablo Neruda, ”White Bee”

César Vallejo, ”Huaco”

César Vallejo, “Prayer of the Road”

 

The Fugitives.  In 1922, a group of teachers and students at Nashville’s Vanderbilt University brought out a literary magazine called The Fugitive, in which they published their own and others’ poems and urged an alternative to the cosmopolitan modernism created in London.  These writers saw their southern identity, defined in part by their provincial remoteness from metropolitan culture, and their sense of rootedness in time and place as sources of strength for their writing.  They cultivated an astringent wit as an antidote to southern nostalgia, and hoped to keep for the south some of its traditional values.

Randall Jarrell, “Next Day”

John Crowe Ransom, “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter”

James Tate, “The Lost Pilot”

Robert Penn Warren, “Bearded Oaks”

 

The Black Mountain School & The Projectivists. An experimental and unaccredited school in North Carolina, the Black Mountain College became one of the centers of new American poetry in the 1950s.  Drawing on the strength from their association with the old impresario of experimental verse, Charles Olsen and the Black Mountain “projectivists” offered a conception of “open-field” form and championed a dynamism that was set forth by early modern poets like Pound and Williams.

Robert Creeley, “A Picture”

Robert Creeley, “A Wicker Basket”

Robert Creeley, “The Hill”

Robert Creeley, “The Rain”

Robert Duncan, “Poetry, a Natural Thing”

Denise Levertov, “Aware”

Denise Levertov, “Pleasures”

Denise Levertov, “Sunday Afternoon”

 

The Beat Poets.  The Beat poets, like the Black Mountain School, aligned themselves with the “open” prosody of Pound and especially of Williams.  They tended to oppose authority, which made their poetry the most conspicuous of the 1950s.  The Beats rejected the stuffy majority culture, the anti-communist inquisitions, and the formalist poetry of the times, and decided to create among themselves a counterculture based on inspired improvisation, whether through jazz, drugs, or East Asian mysticism.

Gregory Corso, “Poets Hitchhiking on the Highway”

Allen Ginsberg, “A Supermarket in California”

Allen Ginsberg, “Howl”

 

The Confessionalists.  The term, “confessionalism,” was first applied to the verse of Robert Lowell in 1959, but soon became a general label for intensely personal poetry about once-taboo subjects.  The Confessionalist poets harnessed a mode of expressing feelings and insights that violated literary and social structures; they wrote about key moments of revelatory pain more often than of pleasure, and they saw such moments as epitomizing the general condition of their time.

John Berryman, ”The Ball Poem”

John Berryman, “1” from The Dream Songs

John Berryman, “4” from The Dream Songs

John Berryman, “22” from The Dream Songs

John Berryman, “76” from The Dream Songs

Elizabeth Bishop, ”The Armadillo”

Elizabeth Bishop, ”The Fish”

Elizabeth Bishop,  “At the Fishhouses”

Elizabeth Bishop, ”Florida”

Elizabeth Bishop, ”The Moose”

Elizabeth Bishop, ”The Sandpiper”

Robert Lowell, ”Mr. Edwards and the Spider”

Robert Lowell, ”Skunk Hour”

Sylvia Plath, ”Ariel”

Sylvia Plath, ”Daddy”

Sylvia Plath, “Poppies in July”

 

Contemporary World.  Poets who emerged post-World War II have evolved in response to the “age of anxiety,” as W.H. Auden called it.  Their verse at times was vehement and extreme, favored wit and reality over prophecy and extravagance; these poets of the contemporary age elicited verse that both attempted to forge afresh a dream of a common language and used language as a notion of expressing lyric feelings and subjectivity.  After the late 1970s, the modes of verse splintered anew and were seen as both “experimental” and “personal,” “avant-garde” and “formal.”

Stanley Kunitz, “King of the River”

Stanley Kunitz, “The Layers”

Stanley Kunitz, ”The Portrait”

Stanley Kunitz, ”The Snakes of September”

Stanley Kunitz, ”The Testing-Tree”

Philip Larkin, ”Church Going”

Philip Larkin, ”Coming”

Kenneth Rexroth, “Andree Rexroth”

Kenneth Rexroth, “Coming”

Kenneth Rexroth, “Confusion of the Senses”

Kenneth Rexroth, “Confusion”

Kenneth Rexroth, “Floating”

Kenneth Rexroth, “Me”

Kenneth Rexroth, “Red Maple Leaves”

Kenneth Rexroth, “Requiem”

Kenneth Rexroth, “Runaway”

Kenneth Rexroth, “Star and Crescent”

Kenneth Rexroth, “The Signature of All Things”

Kenneth Rexroth, “Your Birthday in the California Mountains”

Theodore Roethke, ”The Waking”

Theodore Roethke, ”The Far Field”

William Stafford, “Traveling through the Dark”

Dylan Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night”

James Wright, “A Fishing Song”

James Wright, “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota”

James Wright, “Milkweed”

James Wright, “Outside Fargo, North Dakota”

 

Modern Women. The female poets of the last century attempted to examine both the personal and political voice in their respective verse.  More had to be discovered than simply the individual speaking from her inner self—roles needed to be identified and developed in both the personal, public, and natural realms of society and culture.  In the poetry of the contemporary women, one found mothers, daughters, wives, friends, lovers, and patrons.

Jane Kenyon, “Happiness”

Mary Oliver, “August”

Mary Oliver, “Entering the Kingdom”

Mary Oliver,  “Percy (Two)”

Mary Oliver, “Sleeping in the Forrest”

Mary Oliver, “Spring”

Mary Oliver, “The Black Snake”

Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese”

Adrienne Rich, “Diving into the Wreck”

 

The Black Arts Movement.  Poets of the Black Arts movement, which gained momentum in the late 1960s and 1970s, focused their verse on agony, rage, and love, but these emotions had a stronger political dimension in their openly polemical and revolutionary work.  These African American poets were inspired by the Black Power movement, whose leaders had grown impatient with the integrationist, nonviolent ethos of the civil rights movement and emphasized instead black nationalism, economic power, and self-determination.

Audre Lorde, “Coal”

Gwendolyn Brooks, “The Blackstone Rangers”                               

Gwendolyn Brooks, “We Real Cool”

Dudley Randall, “A Poet Is Not a Jukebox”

 

The New York School.  Inspired by the paintings of abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock and William de Kooning, a group of poets collected in New York City in the 1960s to immerse themselves in contemporary art.  They represented art not as a finished product but as a process, where the work is a sort of record of its own coming-into-existence; they spoke not in prophetic or religiously ecstatic tones but through layers of irony.  The New York poets practiced in their sometimes montagelike verse a calculated diffidence and discontinuity of perception.

John Ashbery, “Mottled Tuesday”

John Ashbery, “Paradoxes and Oxymorons”

Kenneth Koch, “Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams”

Frank O’Hara, “Les Étiquettes Jaunes”

Frank O’Hara, “Why I Am Not a Painter”

 

 

 

English 1 & 2  ♦ West Morris Central

Mr. David Crews