Modernist poetry in English
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Modernist poetry in English started in the early years of the 20th century with the appearance of the Imagists. Like other modernists, Imagist poets wrote in reaction to the perceived excesses of Victorian poetry, and its emphasis on traditional formalism and ornate diction.
In Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, published in 1800, William Wordsworth cricitised what he perceived to be the gauche and pompous nature of British poetry over a century earlier, and instead sought to bring poetry to the layman. Modernists saw themselves as looking back to the best practices of poets in earlier periods and other cultures. Their models included ancient Greek literature, Chinese and Japanese poetry, the troubadours, Dante and the medieval Italian philosophical poets, such as Guido Cavalcanti, and the English Metaphysical poets.[citation needed]
Much of early modernist poetry took the form of short, compact lyrics. Ultimately, however, longer poems gained in favor, representing the modernist movement of the 20th-century.
English-language modernism
The roots of English-language poetic modernism can be traced back to the works of a number of earlier writers, including
Imagism
The origins of
The American poet Ezra Pound was introduced to this group and they found that their ideas resembled his.[citation needed]
In 1911, Pound introduced two other poets, H.D. and Richard Aldington, to the Eiffel Tower group. Both of these poets were students of the early Greek lyric poetry, especially the works of Sappho.[1]
In October 1912, he submitted three poems each by H.D. and Aldington under the rubric Imagiste to Poetry magazine.[citation needed] That month Pound's book Ripostes was published with an appendix called The Complete Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme, which carried a note that saw the first appearance of the word Imagiste in print. Aldington's poems were in the November issue of Poetry and H.D.'s in January 1913 and Imagism as a movement was launched. The March issue contained Pound's A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste and Flint's Imagisme. The latter contained this succinct statement of the group's position:
- Direct treatment of the "thing", whether subjective or objective.
- To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
- As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome.
- Complete freedom of subject matter.
- Free verse was encouraged along with other new rhythms.
- Common speech language was used, and the exact word was always to be used, as opposed to the almost exact word.
In setting these criteria for poetry, the Imagists saw themselves as looking backward to the best practices of pre-Romantic writing. Imagistic poets used sharp language and embraced imagery. Their work, however, was to have a revolutionary impact on English-language writing for the rest of the 20th century.
In 1913, Pound was contacted by the widow of the recently deceased Orientalist
mistress hair first cover brow
In his resulting 1915 Cathay
While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
Between 1914 and 1917, four anthologies of Imagist poetry were published. In addition to Pound, Flint, H.D. and Aldington, these included work by Skipwith Cannell, Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, Allen Upward, John Cournos, D. H. Lawrence and Marianne Moore. With a few exceptions, this represents a roll-call of English-language modernist poets of the time. After the 1914 volume, Pound distanced himself from the group and the remaining anthologies appeared under the editorial control of Amy Lowell.
Lowell expressed her extreme debt to the French, to what she preferred to call "unrhymed cadence" instead of the more common "verse libre."[2]
Henry Gore (1902–1956), whose work is undergoing something of a revival was also heavily influenced by the Imagist movement, although from a different generation from H.D., Flint, and others.[citation needed]
World War I and after
The outbreak of
The war also tended to undermine the optimism of the Imagists. This was reflected in a number of major poems written in its aftermath. Pound's "Homage to Sextus Propertius" (1919) uses the loose translations and transformations of the Latin poet Propertius to ridicule war propaganda and the idea of empire. His Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, published in (1921, represents his farewell to Imagism and lyric poetry in general. The writing of these poems coincided with Pound's decision to abandon London permanently.
The most famous English-language modernist work arising out of this post-war disillusionment is T. S. Eliot's epic "The Waste Land" (1922). Eliot was an American poet who had been living in London for some time. Although he was never formally associated with the Imagist group, his work was admired by Pound, who, in 1915, helped him publish "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", which brought him to prominence. When Eliot had completed his original draft of a long poem based on both the disintegration of his personal life and mental stability, and the culture around him, he gave the manuscript, provisionally titled "He Do the Police in Different Voices", to Pound for comment. After some heavy editing, "The Waste Land" in the form in which we now know it was published, and Eliot came to be seen as the voice of a generation. The addition of notes to the published poem served to highlight the use of collage as a literary technique, paralleling similar practice by the cubists and other visual artists. From this point on, modernism in English tended towards a poetry of the fragment that rejected the idea that the poet could present a comfortingly coherent view of life.
T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" is a foundational text of modernism, representing the moment at which Imagism moves into modernism proper. Broken, fragmented and seemingly unrelated slices of imagery come together to form a disjunctive anti-narrative. The motif of sight and vision is as central to the poem as it is to modernism; the omni-present character Tiresias acting as a unifying theme. The reader is thrown into confusion, unable to see anything but a heap of broken images. The narrator, however (in "The Waste Land" as in other texts), promises to show the reader a different meaning; that is, how to make meaning from dislocation and fragmentation. This construction of an exclusive meaning is essential to modernism.
Others and others and brother and mothers
Although London and Paris were key centres of activity for English-language modernists, much important activity took place elsewhere, including early publication in
The U.S. modernist poets were concerned to create work in a distinctively American idiom. Williams, a doctor who worked in general practice in a working-class area of Rutherford, New Jersey, explained this approach by saying that he made his poems from 'the speech of Polish mothers'. In this, they were placing themselves in a tradition stretching back to Whitman.
After her initial association with the Imagists, Marianne Moore carved out a niche for herself among 20th-century poets. Much of her poetry is written in syllabic verse, repeating the number of syllables rather than stresses or beats, per line. She also experimented with stanza forms borrowed from troubadour poetry.
Wallace Stevens' work falls somewhat outside this mainstream of modernism. Indeed, he deprecated the work of both Eliot and Pound as "mannered." His poetry is a complex exploration of the relationship between imagination and reality. Unlike many other modernists, but like the English Romantics, by whom he was influenced, Stevens thought that poetry was what all humans did; the poet was merely self-conscious about the activity.
In Scotland, the poet Hugh MacDiarmid formed something of a one-man modernist movement. An admirer of Joyce and Pound, MacDiarmid wrote much of his early poetry in anglicised Lowland Scots, a literary dialect which had also been used by Robert Burns. He served in the Royal Army Medical Corps during World War I and was invalided out in 1918. After the war, he set up a literary magazine, Scottish Chapbook, with 'Not traditions - Precedents!' as its motto. His later work reflected an increasing interest in found poetry and other formal innovations.
In Canada, the Montreal Group of modernist poets, including A.M. Klein, A.J.M. Smith, and F.R. Scott, formed at that city's McGill University in the mid-1920s. Though the poets of the group made little headway for the next twenty years, they were ultimately successful in establishing a modernist hegemony and canon in that country that would endure until at least the end of the 20th century.[6]
Wallace Stevens' Of Modern Poetry
Wallace Stevens' essential modernist poem, "Of Modern Poetry"(1942) sounds as if the verbs are left out. The verb 'to be' is omitted from the first and final lines. The poem itself opens and closes with the act of finding. The poem and the mind become synonymous: a collapse between the poem, the act, and the mind. In the poem, the dyad becomes further collapsed into one: a spatial and a temporal collapse between the subject and the object; form and content equal each other; form becomes not simply expressive of, but constitutive of. The poem goes from being a static object to being an action. The poem of the mind has to be alternative and listening; it is experimental. The poem resists and refuses transcendentalism, but remains within the conceptual limits of the mind and the poem.
Maturity
With the publication of The Waste Land, modernist poetry appeared to have made a breakthrough into wider critical discourse and a broader readership. However, the economic collapse of the late 1920s and early 1930s had a serious negative impact on the new writing. For American writers, living in Europe became more difficult as their incomes lost a great deal of their relative value. Gertrude Stein, Barney, and Joyce remained Paris, where much of the scene they had presided over began to scatter. Pound left for Italy. Eliot left for London. H.D. moved between London and Switzerland, and many of the other writers associated with the movement were then living in the United States.
The economic depression, combined with the impact of the Spanish Civil War, also saw the emergence, in the Britain of the 1930s, of a more overtly political poetry, as represented by such writers as W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender. Although nominally admirers of Eliot, these poets tended towards a poetry of radical content but formal conservativeness. For example, they rarely wrote free verse, preferring rhyme and regular stanza patterns in much of their work.
1930s modernism
Modernism in English remained in the role of an avant garde movement, depending on little presses and magazines and a small but dedicated readership. The key group to emerge during this time were the
A number of Irish poets and writers moved to Paris in the early 1930s to join the circle around James Joyce. These included
Long poems
Pound's Homage to Sextus Propertius and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and Eliot's The Waste Land marked a transition from the short imagistic poems that were typical of earlier modernist writing towards the writing of longer poems or poem-sequences. A number of
One of the most influential of all the modernist long poems was Pound's
Other Imagist-associated poets also went on to write long poems.
A long poem that is often overlooked, because it first appeared in the commercially unsuccessful
Politics
Poetic modernism was an overtly revolutionary literary movement, a revolution of the word, and, for a number of its practitioners, this interest in radical change spilled over into politics. A number of the leading early modernists became known for their right-wing views; these included Eliot, who once described himself as a
A number of leading modernists took a more left-wing political view.
Other modernists took up political positions that did not fit neatly into the traditional left vs. right model.
Although many modernist poets were politically engaged, there is no single political position that can be said to be closely allied to the modernist movement in English-language poetry. These poets came from a wide range of backgrounds and had a wide range of personal experiences and their political stances reflect these facts.
Legacy
The modernist revolution of the word was not universally welcomed by readers or writers. By the 1930s, a new generation of poets had emerged who looked to more formally conservative poets like Thomas Hardy and W. B. Yeats as models, and these writers struck a chord with a readership who were uncomfortable with the experimentation and uncertainty preferred by the modernists. Notwithstanding, modernist poetry cannot be positively characterised, there being no mainstream or dominant mode.[7]
However, the 1950s saw the emergence, particularly in the United States, of a new generation of poets who looked to the modernists for inspiration. The influence of modernism can be seen in these poetic groups and movements, especially those associated with the
Among the Beats, Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg studied Pound closely and were heavily influenced by his interest in Chinese and Japanese poetry and the ecological concerns evident in the later Cantos. William Carlos Williams was another who had a strong impact on the Beat poets, encouraging poets like Lew Welch and writing an introduction for the book publication of Ginsberg's seminal poem, Howl. Many of these writers found a major platform for their work in Cid Corman's Origin magazine and press. Origin also published work by Louis Zukofsky, Lorine Niedecker and Wallace Stevens, helping to revive interest in these early modernist writers. The Objectivists, especially the strict formal experimentation of Zukofsky's later works, were also formative for the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets.
As the Beats and other American poets began to find readers in the UK and Ireland, a new generation of British poets with an interest in modernist experimentation began to appear. These poets, who included Tom Raworth, Bob Cobbing, Gael Turnbull, Tom Pickard and others formed the nucleus of the British Poetry Revival. This new generation helped bring about a renewed interest in the writings of Bunting, MacDiarmid, David Jones and David Gascoyne. Current practice includes the enormously influential canon of Roy Fisher (also a major player in the Revival).[8]
Contemporary poets associated with Irish modernism include those associated with
See also
- Free verse
- Modernism
- Modernist poetry
- Post-modernism
- Scottish Renaissance
- Vers libre
References
Notes
- ^ "Imagism: Poetry of Directness, Distillation, Tradition". about.com.
- ^ Lowell, Amy. “Sword Blades and Poppy Seed". The Macmillan Company, New York; and Macmillan & Co., London, 1914, 7-8.
- ^ Gammel, Irene and Suzanne Zelazo. “Harpsichords Metallic Howl—“: The Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven’s Sound Poetry.” Modernism/modernity (Johns Hopkins UP), 18.2 (April 2011), 259.
- ^ Gammel, Irene and Suzanne Zelazo. “Introduction: The First American Dada.” Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Ed. Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011, 16.
- ^ Gammel, Irene. Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada and Everyday Modernity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002, 243.
- ^ Ken Norris, "The Beginnings of Canadian Modernism," Canadian Poetry: Studies/Documents/Reviews, No. 11 (Fall/Winter, 1982), Canadian Poetry, UWO.ca, Web, Mar. 25, 2011.
- ISBN 9780415015691
- ^ Greene 2012, p. 426.
Bibliography
- Coughlan, Patricia & Davis, Alec eds. Modernism and Ireland: The Poetry of the 1930s (Cork University Press, 1995) ISBN 1-85918-061-2
- ISBN 978-0-691-15491-6.
- Guest, Barbara. Herself Defined: The Poet H.D. and Her World. (Collins, 1985) ISBN 0-385-13129-1
- Jones, Peter (ed.). Imagist Poetry (Penguin, 1972).
- Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era. (Faber & Faber, 1973).
- Perloff, Marjorie. The Poetics of Indeterminacy. (Northwestern University Press, 1999). ISBN 0-8101-1764-9
- Redman, Tim. Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
- ISBN 0-8112-1605-5 Introduction, with translations by William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, and David Hinton.
- Gammel, Irene. Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada and Everyday Modernity (MIT Press, 2002).
- Freytag-Loringhoven, Elsa von. Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (MIT Press, 2011). Introduction and edited by Irene Gammeland Suzanne Zelazo.
External links
- Expatriate Literary Circle Magazine designed to bring together a group of intellects looking to share good classic reads and stimulating discussions. The website has been set up to simulate the same Parisian cafe atmosphere of the 1920s as experienced by E. E. Cummings, Hemingway and their fellow Expats.
- Modern American Poetry Captured 18 November 2004.
- Imagists.org Captured 18 November 2004.
- The Objectivist Timeline Project Captured 24 November 2004.
- Modernist poetry: audio & print archives of innovative British poetry Captured March 9.
- The Electronic Poetry Center Captured 24 November 2004.
- Modern Poetry Captured 23 June 2005 Includes audio discussion of major modern poets
- In Search of David Jones: Artist, Soldier, Poet (2008) The first in a trilogy of documentaries about David Jones, artist and modernist poet.