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Developments in Poetry - Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries
Innovations in Poetry in the Nineteenth century
Walt Whitman: (1819-1892) Born in New York, he is generally considered to be the father of
free verse. Influenced by Transcendentalism. Leaves of Grass (1855) is the work which he
republished in expanded and revised versions throughout his life; an American epic. In “Song
of Myself” the first-person speaker is one of the common people: the poet’s close relationship
to society is also expressed. Whitman’s poems celebrate life, individuality, equality,
democratic views and progress. His poems are generally free-flowing, prose-like. He
composed a number of poems on the Civil War (Drum-Taps). He had, and still has, an
enormous influence on American poets. Whitman is the national poet of the U.S.
Emily Dickinson: (1830-1886) Born in Amherst Massachusetts, only few of her poems were
published during her lifetime. She wrote altogether 1775 poems on scraps of paper most of
which she later bound together in fascicles. Most of these poems were found after her death.
Dickinson’s poems are characterized by their economy, slant rhymes and slant (ambiguous)
meanings; the structure, syntax, imagery, vocabulary and punctuation is idiosyncratic.
Twentieth Century: The Chicago Literary Renaissance; Modern Poetry, New Criticism
(Sandburg, Pound, HD, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot, New
Critics);
The Chicago Literary Renaissance – Generally referring to the period between the 1910s
and 1920s. In poetry Mid-Western poets, such as Carl Sandburg, Harriet Monroe, Hilda
Doolittle, Edgar Lee Masters, and Vachel Lindsay, appeared on the literary scene. The most
important literary magazines of this period were Poetry (editor: Harriet Monroe) and The
Little Review. They presented the poems and writings of not just Chicago poets and writers,
but also the poems of some expatriates; Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, including the works of
British writers (Joyce, Yeats, Lawrence).
Edgar Lee Masters (1868-1950) – best known for his Spoon River Anthology (1915), a series
of short epitaphs of the dead citizens of a small town. Fictitious, dead townspeople speak out
to readers about their life. The epitaphs present the narrow-mindedness, hypocrisy of smalltown life. All the characters are interlinked with one another.
Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) – best known for his Chicago Poems and the biography of
Abraham Lincoln. In the poem “Chicago” (1912) he describes the city as “Hog Butcher for
the World/Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat/Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight
Handler,/Stormy, Husky, Brawling, City of the Big Shoulders.”
Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931) – the “Prairie Troubadour” using themes from the Mid-West as
in the poem “Kalamazoo.”
Ezra Pound (1885-1972) – American expatriate, Modernist poet, translator, critic. He is
largely responsible for the cultural poetic exchange between England and the U.S. in the first
half of the twentieth century. He encouraged other American poets and writers, such as
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Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, H.D., Marianne Moore, T.S. Eliot, Amy Lowell.
Launched the Imagist movement.
Imagism – Japanese poetry was one of the sources of Imagist poetry. Economic in form, it
stressed the importance of clarity and precision of expression. Pound’s definition of the
image: “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.”
Main tenets of Imagism:
1. Direct treatment of the “thing,” whether subjective or objective.
2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence
of the metronome. (Pound)
Pound’s most famous Imagist poem is “In a Station of the Metro”
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
William Carlos Williams (1883 – 1863) – he disliked the intellectual poetry of former
friends, Eliot and Pound, and preferred to focus on the “local” as in the poem Paterson. An
early imagist poem:
The Red Wheelbarrow
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
Robert Frost (1874-1963) was also a major American poet from the 1920s until his death in
1963, but he did not belong to any particular movement. His poems reflect his love for nature
and many are metaphorically philosophical in content. The loneliness of existence is a major
theme. In “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” the speaker’s intentions are
ambiguous.
New Criticism – T.S. Eliot, I. A. Richards had a profound influence on New Criticism. The
critical movement advocated close reading of a text and dissociating it from external
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influences such as history, the author’s biography or the author’s intention. Some
representatives: John Crow Ransome, Cleanth Brooks, R.P. Blackmur.
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Edgar Lee Masters (from Spoon River Anthology)
Reuben Pantier
Well, Emily Sparks, your prayers
were not wasted,
Your love was not all in vain.
I owe whatever I was in life
To your hope that would not give me up,
To your love that saw me still as good.
Dear Emily Sparks, let me tell you the story.
I pass the effect of my father and mother;
The milliner’s daughter made me trouble
And out I went in the world,
Where I passed through every peril known
Of wine and women and joy of life.
One night, in a room in the Rue de Rivoli,
I was drinking wine with a nlack-eyed
cocotte,
And the tears swam into my eyes.
She thought they were amorous tears
and smiled
For thought of her conquest over me.
But my soul was three thousand miles away,
In the days when you taught me in Spoon
River.
And just because you could no more love
me,
Nor pray for me, nor write me letters,
The eternal silence of you spoke instead.
And the black-eyed cocotte took the tears for
hers,
As well as the deceiving kisses I gave her.
Somehow from that hour, I had a new
vision—
Dear Emily Sparks!
Emily Sparks
Where is my boy, my boy –
In what far part of the world?
The boy I loved best of all in the school?
I, the teacher, the old maid, the virgin
heart,
Who made them all my children.
Did I know my boy aright,
Thinking of him as a spirit aflame,
Active, ever aspiring?
Oh, boy, boy, for whom I prayed and
prayed
In many a watchful hour at night,
Do you remember the letter I wrote you
Of the beautiful love of Christ?
And whether you ever took it or not,
My boy, wherever you are,
Work for your soul's sake,
That all the clay of you, all of the dross
of you,
May yield to the fire of you,
Till the fire is nothing but light!...
Nothing but light!