NORTH AMERICAL
LITERATURE
NORTH AMERICAN
LITERATURE
BOOKLET 2
Alessandra Quadros Zamboni
NORTH AMERICAN LITERATURE BOOKLET 2
ÍNDICE
INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................... 3
POETRY 1914-1945: EXPERIMENTS IN FORM ........................................... 5
Ezra Pound (1885-1972): ............................................................................ 5
T.S. Eliot (1888-1965): ................................................................................ 6
Robert Frost (1874-1963) ............................................................................ 7
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) ..................................................................... 8
William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)........................................................... 9
BETWEEN THE WARS ............................................................................... 10
Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) ................................................................... 10
Edward Estlin Cummings (1894-1962) ...................................................... 10
Hart Crane (1899-1932) ............................................................................ 11
Marianne Moore (1887-1972).................................................................... 11
Langston Hughes (1902-1967) .................................................................. 11
PROSE WRITING, 1914-1945: AMERICAN REALISM ................................ 12
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) ................................................................. 12
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) ................................................................ 13
William Faulkner (1897-1962) ................................................................... 14
NOVELS OF SOCIAL AWARENESS ........................................................... 15
Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) ........................................................................ 15
John Dos Passos (1896-1970) .................................................................. 16
John Steinbeck (1902-1968) ..................................................................... 16
SOME MODERNIST POETS ....................................................................... 17
Robert Frost (1874-1963) .......................................................................... 17
T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) .............................................................................. 18
Ezra Pound (1885 – 1972) ........................................................................ 27
e. e. cummings (1894-1962) ..................................................................... 36
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INTRODUCTION
"... the greatest single fact about our modern American writing is
our writers' absorption in every last detail of their American world
together with their deep and subtle alienation from it."
Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds, 1942
The Centers of Modernism
1. Stylistic innovations - disruption of traditional syntax and form.
2. Artist's self-consciousness about questions of form and structure.
3. Obsession with primitive material and attitudes.
4. International perspective on cultural matters.
Modern Attitudes
1. The artist is generally less appreciated but more sensitive, even more
heroic, than the average person.
2. The artist challenges tradition and reinvigorates it.
3. A breaking away from patterned responses and predictable forms.
Contradictory Elements
1. Democratic and elitist.
2. Traditional and anti-tradition.
3.
National jingoism and provinciality versus the celebration of
international culture.
4. Puritanical and repressive elements versus freer expression in sexual
and political matters.
Literary Achievements
1. Dramatization of the plight of women.
2. Creation of a literature of the urban experience.
3. Continuation of the pastoral or rural spirit.
4. Continuation of regionalism and local color.
Modern Themes
1. Collectivism versus the authority of the individual.
2. The impact of the 1918 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.
3. The Jazz Age.
4. The passage of 19th Amendment in 1920 giving women the right to vote.
5. Prohibition of the production, sale, and consumption of alcoholic
beverages, 1920-33.
6. The stock-market crash of 1929 and the Depression of the 1930s and
their impact.
In this period, the chief characteristic of the self is one of alienation. The
character belongs to a "lost generation" (Gertrude Stein), suffers from a
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"dissociation of sensibility" (T. S. Eliot), and who has "a Dream deferred"
(Langston Hughes).
Alienation led to an awareness about one's inner life.
The large cultural wave of Modernism, which gradually emerged in Europe
and the United States in the early years of the 20th century, expressed a
sense of modern life through art as a sharp break from the past, as well as
from Western civilization's classical traditions. Modern life seemed radically
different from traditional life -- more scientific, faster, more technological, and
more mechanized. Modernism embraced these changes.
In literature, Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) developed an analogue to modern
art. A resident of Paris and an art collector (she and her brother Leo
purchased works of the artists Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Pierre Auguste
Renoir, Pablo Picasso, and many others), Stein once explained that she and
Picasso were doing the same thing, he in art and she in writing. Using simple,
concrete words as counters, she developed an abstract, experimental prose
poetry. The childlike quality of Stein's simple vocabulary recalls the bright,
primary colors of modern art, while her repetitions echo the repeated shapes
of abstract visual compositions. By dislocating grammar and punctuation, she
achieved new "abstract" meanings as in her influential collection Tender
Buttons (1914), which views objects from different angles, as in a cubist
painting:
A Table A Table means does it not my
dear it means a whole steadiness.
Is it likely that a change. A table
means more than a glass even a
looking glass is tall.
Meaning, in Stein's work, was often subordinated to technique, just as subject
was less important than shape in abstract visual art. Subject and technique
became inseparable in both the visual and literary art of the period. The idea
of form as the equivalent of content, a cornerstone of post-World War II art
and literature, crystallized in this period.
Technological innovation in the world of factories and machines inspired new
attentiveness to technique in the arts. To take one example: Light, particularly
electrical light, fascinated modern artists and writers. Posters and
advertisements of the period are full of images of floodlit skyscrapers and
light rays shooting out from automobile headlights, moviehouses, and
watchtowers to illumine a forbidding outer darkness suggesting ignorance
and old-fashioned tradition.
Photography began to assume the status of a fine art allied with the latest
scientific developments. The photographer Alfred Stieglitz opened a salon in
New York City, and by 1908 he was showing the latest European works,
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including pieces by Picasso and other European friends of Gertrude Stein.
Stieglitz's salon influenced numerous writers and artists, including William
Carlos Williams, who was one of the most influential American poets of the
20th century. Williams cultivated a photographic clarity of image; his aesthetic
dictum was "no ideas but in things."
Vision and viewpoint became an essential aspect of the modernist novel as
well. No longer was it sufficient to write a straightforward third-person
narrative or (worse yet) use a pointlessly intrusive narrator. The way the story
was told became as important as the story itself.
Henry James, William Faulkner, and many other American writers
experimented with fictional points of view (some are still doing so). James
often restricted the information in the novel to what a single character would
have known. Faulkner's novel The Sound and the Fury (1929) breaks up the
narrative into four sections, each giving the viewpoint of a different character
(including a mentally retarded boy).
To analyze such modernist novels and poetry, a school of "new criticism"
arose in the United States, with a new critical vocabulary. New critics hunted
the "epiphany" (moment in which a character suddenly sees the transcendent
truth of a situation, a term derived from a holy saint's appearance to mortals);
they "examined" and "clarified" a work, hoping to "shed light" upon it through
their "insights."
POETRY 1914-1945: EXPERIMENTS IN FORM
Ezra Pound (1885-1972):
Ezra Pound was one of the most influential American poets of this century.
From 1908 to 1920, he resided in London, where he associated with many
writers, including William Butler Yeats, for whom he worked as a secretary,
and T.S. Eliot, whose Waste Land he drastically edited and improved. He
was a link between the United States and Britain, acting as contributing editor
to Harriet Monroe's important Chicago magazine Poetry and spearheading
the new school of poetry known as Imagism, which advocated a clear, highly
visual presentation. After Imagism, he championed various poetic
approaches. He eventually moved to Italy, where he became caught up in
Italian Fascism.
Pound furthered Imagism in letters, essays, and an anthology. In a letter to
Monroe in 1915, he argues for a modern-sounding, visual poetry that avoids
"clichés and set phrases." In "A Few Don'ts of an Imagiste" (1913), he
defined "image" as something that "presents an intellectual and emotional
complex in an instant of time." Pound's 1914 anthology of 10 poets, Des
Imagistes, offered examples of Imagist poetry by outstanding poets, including
William Carlos Williams, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), and Amy Lowell.
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Pound's interests and reading were universal. His adaptations and brilliant, if
sometimes flawed, translations introduced new literary possibilities from
many cultures to modern writers. His life-work was The Cantos, which he
wrote and published until his death. They contain brilliant passages, but their
allusions to works of literature and art from many eras and cultures make
them difficult. Pound's poetry is best known for its clear, visual images, fresh
rhythms, and muscular, intelligent, unusual lines, such as, in Canto LXXXI,
"The ant's a centaur in his dragon world," or in poems inspired by Japanese
haiku, such as "In a Station of the Metro" (1916):
The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.
T.S. Eliot (1888-1965):
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, to a well- to-do family
with roots in the northeastern United States. He received the best education
of any major American writer of his generation at Harvard College, the
Sorbonne, and Merton College of Oxford University. He studied Sanskrit and
Oriental philosophy, which influenced his poetry. Like his friend Pound, he
went to England early and became a towering figure in the literary world
there. One of the most respected poets of his day, his modernist, seemingly
illogical or abstract iconoclastic poetry had revolutionary impact. He also
wrote influential essays and dramas, and championed the importance of
literary and social traditions for the modern poet.
As a critic, Eliot is best remembered for his formulation of the "objective
correlative," which he described, in The Sacred Wood, as a means of
expressing emotion through "a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events"
that would be the "formula" of that particular emotion. Poems such as "The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915) embody this approach, when the
ineffectual, elderly Prufrock thinks to himself that he has "measured out his
life in coffee spoons," using coffee spoons to reflect a humdrum existence
and a wasted lifetime.
The famous beginning of Eliot's "Prufrock" invites the reader into tawdry
alleys that, like modern life, offer no answers to the questions of life:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question...
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
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Let us go and make our visit.
Similar imagery pervades The Waste Land (1922), which echoes Dante's
Inferno to evoke London's thronged streets around the time of World War I:
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many
I had not thought death had undone so many... (I, 60-63)
The Waste Land's vision is ultimately apocalyptic and worldwide:
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal (V, 373-377)
Eliot's other major poems include "Gerontion" (1920), which uses an elderly
man to symbolize the decrepitude of Western society; "The Hollow Men"
(1925), a moving dirge for the death of the spirit of contemporary humanity;
Ash-Wednesday (1930), in which he turns explicitly toward the Church of
England for meaning in human life; and Four Quartets (1943), a complex,
highly subjective, experimental meditation on transcendent subjects such as
time, the nature of self, and spiritual awareness. His poetry, especially his
daring, innovative early work, has influenced generations.
Robert Frost (1874-1963)
Robert Lee Frost was born in California but raised on a farm in the
northeastern United States until the age of 10. Like Eliot and Pound, he went
to England, attracted by new movements in poetry there. A charismatic public
reader, he was renowned for his tours. He read an original work at the
inauguration of President John F. Kennedy in 1961 that helped spark a
national interest in poetry. His popularity is easy to explain: He wrote of
traditional farm life, appealing to a nostalgia for the old ways. His subjects are
universal -- apple picking, stone walls, fences, country roads. Frost's
approach was lucid and accessible: He rarely employed pedantic allusions or
ellipses. His frequent use of rhyme also appealed to the general audience.
Frost's work is often deceptively simple. Many poems suggest a deeper
meaning. For example, a quiet snowy evening by an almost hypnotic rhyme
scheme may suggest the not entirely unwelcome approach of death. From:
"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" (1923):
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
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To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
Born in Pennsylvania, Wallace Stevens was educated at Harvard College
and New York University Law School. He practiced law in New York City from
1904 to 1916, a time of great artistic and poetic activity there. On moving to
Hartford, Connecticut, to become an insurance executive in 1916, he
continued writing poetry. His life is remarkable for its compartmentalization:
His associates in the insurance company did not know that he was a major
poet. In private he continued to develop extremely complex ideas of aesthetic
order throughout his life in aptly named books such as Harmonium (enlarged
edition 1931), Ideas of Order (1935), and Parts of a World (1942). Some of
his best known poems are "Sunday Morning," "Peter Quince at the Clavier,"
"The Emperor of Ice-Cream," "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," and
"The Idea of Order at Key West."
Stevens's poetry dwells upon themes of the imagination, the necessity for
aesthetic form, and the belief that the order of art corresponds with an order
in nature. His vocabulary is rich and various: He paints lush tropical scenes
but also manages dry, humorous, and ironic vignettes.
Some of Stevens's poems draw upon popular culture, while others poke fun
at sophisticated society or soar into an intellectual heaven. He is known for
his exuberant word play: "Soon, with a noise like tambourines / Came her
attendant Byzantines."
Stevens's work is full of surprising insights. Sometimes he plays tricks on the
reader, as in "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock" (1931):
The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
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Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.
This poem seems to complain about unimaginative lives (plain white
nightgowns), but actually conjures up vivid images in the reader's mind. At
the end a drunken sailor, oblivious to the proprieties, does "catch tigers" -- at
least in his dream. The poem shows that the human imagination -- of reader
or sailor -- will always find a creative outlet.
William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)
William Carlos Williams was a practicing pediatrician throughout his life; he
delivered over 2,000 babies and wrote poems on his prescription pads.
Williams was a classmate of poets Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle, and his
early poetry reveals the influence of Imagism. He later went on to champion
the use of colloquial speech; his ear for the natural rhythms of American
English helped free American poetry from the iambic meter that had
dominated English verse since the Renaissance. His sympathy for ordinary
working people, children, and everyday events in modern urban settings
make his poetry attractive and accessible. "The Red Wheelbarrow" (1923),
like a Dutch still life, finds interest and beauty in everyday objects.
Williams cultivated a relaxed, natural poetry. In his hands, the poem was not
to become a perfect object of art as in Stevens, or the carefully re-created
Wordsworthian incident as in Frost. Instead, the poem was to capture an
instant of time like an unposed snapshot -- a concept he derived from
photographers and artists he met at galleries like Stieglitz's in New York City.
Like photographs, his poems often hint at hidden possibilities or attractions,
as in "The Young Housewife" (1917).
He termed his work "objectivist" to suggest the importance of concrete, visual
objects. His work often captured the spontaneous, emotive pattern of
experience, and influenced the "Beat" writing of the early 1950s.
Like Eliot and Pound, Williams tried his hand at the epic form, but while their
epics employ literary allusions directed to a small number of highly educated
readers, Williams instead writes for a more general audience. Though he
studied abroad, he elected to live in the United States. His epic, Paterson
(five vols., 1946-58), celebrates his hometown of Paterson, New Jersey, as
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seen by an autobiographical "Dr. Paterson." In it, Williams juxtaposed lyric
passages, prose, letters, autobiography, newspaper accounts, and historical
facts. The layout's ample white space suggests the open road theme of
American literature and gives a sense of new vistas even open to the poor
people who picnic in the public park on Sundays. Like Whitman's persona in
Leaves of Grass, Dr. Paterson moves freely among the working people.
-late spring,
a Sunday afternoon!
- and goes by the footpath to the cliff (counting: the proof)
himself among others - treads there the same stones
on which their feet slip as they climb, paced by their dogs!
laughing, calling to each other - Wait for me!
(II, i, 14-23)
BETWEEN THE WARS
Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962)
Numerous American poets of stature and genuine vision arose in the years
between the world wars, among them poets from the West Coast, women,
and African-Americans. Like the novelist John Steinbeck, Robinson Jeffers
lived in California and wrote of the Spanish rancheros and Indians and their
mixed traditions, and of the haunting beauty of the land. Trained in the
classics and well-read in Freud, he re-created themes of Greek tragedy set in
the rugged coastal seascape. He is best known for his tragic narratives such
as Tamar (1924), Roan Stallion (1925), The Tower Beyond Tragedy (1924) -a re-creation of Aeschylus's Agamemnon - - and Medea (1946), a re-creation
of the tragedy by Euripides.
Edward Estlin Cummings (1894-1962)
Edward Estlin Cummings, commonly known as e.e. cummings, wrote
attractive, innovative verse distinguished for its humor, grace, celebration of
love and eroticism, and experimentation with punctuation and visual format
on the page. A painter, he was the first American poet to recognize that
poetry had become primarily a visual, not an oral, art; his poems used much
unusual spacing and indentation, as well as dropping all use of capital letters.
Like Williams, Cummings also used colloquial language, sharp imagery, and
words from popular culture. Like Williams, he took creative liberties with
layout. His poem "in Just " (1920) invites the reader to fill in the missing
ideas:
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Spring when the world is mudluscious the little
lame balloonman
whistles far and wee
and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring...
Hart Crane (1899-1932)
Hart Crane was a tormented young poet who committed suicide at age 33 by
leaping into the sea. He left striking poems, including an epic, The Bridge
(1930), which was inspired by the Brooklyn Bridge, in which he ambitiously
attempted to review the American cultural experience and recast it in
affirmative terms. His luscious, overheated style works best in short poems
such as "Voyages" (1923, 1926) and "At Melville's Tomb" (1926), whose
ending is a suitable epitaph for Crane:
monody shall not wake the mariner.
This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.
Marianne Moore (1887-1972)
Marianne Moore once wrote that poems were "imaginary gardens with real
toads in them." Her poems are conversational, yet elaborate and subtle in
their syllabic versification, drawing upon extremely precise description and
historical and scientific fact. A "poet's poet," she influenced such later poets
as her young friend Elizabeth Bishop.
Langston Hughes (1902-1967)
One of many talented poets of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s -- in the
company of James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, and
others -- was Langston Hughes. He embraced African- American jazz
rhythms and was one of the first black writers to attempt to make a profitable
career out of his writing. Hughes incorporated blues, spirituals, colloquial
speech, and folkways in his poetry.
An influential cultural organizer, Hughes published numerous black
anthologies and began black theater groups in Los Angeles and Chicago, as
well as New York City. He also wrote effective journalism, creating the
character Jesse B. Semple ("simple") to express social commentary. One of
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his most beloved poems, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" (1921, 1925),
embraces his African -- and universal - - heritage in a grand epic catalogue.
The poem suggests that, like the great rivers of the world, African culture will
endure and deepen:
I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human
blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the
singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans,
and I've seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset I've known rivers
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
PROSE WRITING, 1914-1945: AMERICAN REALISM
Although American prose between the wars experimented with viewpoint and
form, Americans wrote more realistically, on the whole, than did Europeans.
Novelist Ernest Hemingway wrote of war, hunting, and other masculine
pursuits in a stripped, plain style; William Faulkner set his powerful southern
novels spanning generations and cultures firmly in Mississippi heat and dust;
and Sinclair Lewis delineated bourgeois lives with ironic clarity.
The importance of facing reality became a dominant theme in the 1920s and
1930s: Writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and the playwright Eugene O'Neill
repeatedly portrayed the tragedy awaiting those who live in flimsy dreams.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald's life resembles a fairy tale. During World War I,
Fitzgerald enlisted in the U.S. Army and fell in love with a rich and beautiful
girl, Zelda Sayre, who lived near Montgomery, Alabama, where he was
stationed. Zelda broke off their engagement because he was relatively poor.
After he was discharged at war's end, he went to seek his literary fortune in
New York City in order to marry her.
His first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), became a best- seller, and at 24
they married. Neither of them was able to withstand the stresses of success
and fame, and they squandered their money. They moved to France to
economize in 1924 and returned seven years later. Zelda became mentally
unstable and had to be institutionalized; Fitzgerald himself became an
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alcoholic and died young as a movie screenwriter.
Fitzgerald's secure place in American literature rests primarily on his novel
The Great Gatsby (1925), a brilliantly written, economically structured story
about the American dream of the self-made man. The protagonist, the
mysterious Jay Gatsby, discovers the devastating cost of success in terms of
personal fulfillment and love. Other fine works include Tender Is the Night
(1934), about a young psychiatrist whose life is doomed by his marriage to an
unstable woman, and some stories in the collections
Flappers and Philosophers (1920), Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), and All the
Sad Young Men (1926). More than any other writer, Fitzgerald captured the
glittering, desperate life of the 1920s; This Side of Paradise was heralded as
the voice of modern American youth. His second novel, The Beautiful and the
Damned (1922), continued his exploration of the self-destructive
extravagance of his times.
Fitzgerald's special qualities include a dazzling style perfectly suited to his
theme of seductive glamour. A famous section from The Great Gatsby
masterfully summarizes a long passage of time: "There was music from my
neighbor's house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and
girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne
and the stars."
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
Few writers have lived as colorfully as Ernest Hemingway, whose career
could have come out of one his adventurous novels. Like Fitzgerald, Dreiser,
and many other fine novelists of the 20th century, Hemingway came from the
U.S. Midwest. Born in Illinois, Hemingway spent childhood vacations in
Michigan on hunting and fishing trips. He volunteered for an ambulance unit
in France during World War I, but was wounded and hospitalized for six
months. After the war, as a war correspondent based in Paris, he met
expatriate American writers Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound, F. Scott
Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein. Stein, in particular, influenced his spare style.
After his novel The Sun Also Rises (1926) brought him fame, he covered the
Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the fighting in China in the 1940s. On a
safari in Africa, he was badly injured when his small plane crashed; still, he
continued to enjoy hunting and sport fishing, activities that inspired some of
his best work. The Old Man and the Sea (1952), a short poetic novel about a
poor, old fisherman who heroically catches a huge fish devoured by sharks,
won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1953; the next year he received the Nobel Prize.
Discouraged by a troubled family background, illness, and the belief that he
was losing his gift for writing, Hemingway shot himself to death in 1961.
Hemingway is arguably the most popular American novelist of this century.
His sympathies are basically apolitical and humanistic, and in this sense he is
universal. His simple style makes his novels easy to comprehend, and they
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are often set in exotic surroundings. A believer in the "cult of experience,"
Hemingway often involved his characters in dangerous situations in order to
reveal their inner natures; in his later works, the danger sometimes becomes
an occasion for masculine assertion.
Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway became a spokesperson for his generation. But
instead of painting its fatal glamour as did Fitzgerald, who never fought in
World War I, Hemingway wrote of war, death, and the "lost generation" of
cynical survivors. His characters are not dreamers but tough bullfighters,
soldiers, and athletes. If intellectual, they are deeply scarred and
disillusioned.
His hallmark is a clean style devoid of unnecessary words. Often he uses
understatement: In A Farewell to Arms (1929) the heroine dies in childbirth
saying "I'm not a bit afraid. It's just a dirty trick." He once compared his writing
to icebergs: "There is seven-eighths of it under water for every part that
shows."
Hemingway's fine ear for dialogue and exact description shows in his
excellent short stories, such as "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and "The Short
Happy Life of Francis Macomber." Critical opinion, in fact, generally holds his
short stories equal or superior to his novels. His best novels include The Sun
Also Rises, about the demoralized life of expatriates after World War I; A
Farewell to Arms, about the tragic love affair of an American soldier and an
English nurse during the war; For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), set during the
Spanish Civil War; and The Old Man and the Sea.
William Faulkner (1897-1962)
Born to an old southern family, William Harrison Faulkner was raised in
Oxford, Mississippi, where he lived most of his life. Faulkner created an entire
imaginative landscape, Yoknapatawpha County, mentioned in numerous
novels, along with several families with interconnections extending back for
generations. Yoknapatawpha County, with its capital, "Jefferson," is closely
modeled on Oxford, Mississippi, and its surroundings. Faulkner re-creates
the history of the land and the various races -- Indian, African-American,
Euro-American, and various mixtures -- who have lived on it. An innovative
writer, Faulkner experimented brilliantly with narrative chronology, different
points of view and voices (including those of outcasts, children, and
illiterates), and a rich and demanding baroque style built of extremely long
sentences full of complicated subordinate parts.
The best of Faulkner's novels include The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As
I Lay Dying (1930), two modernist works experimenting with viewpoint and
voice to probe southern families under the stress of losing a family member;
Light in August (1932), about complex and violent relations between a white
woman and a black man; and Absalom, Absalom! (1936), perhaps his finest,
about the rise of a self-made plantation owner and his tragic fall through
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racial prejudice and a failure to love.
Most of these novels use different characters to tell parts of the story and
demonstrate how meaning resides in the manner of telling, as much as in the
subject at hand. The use of various viewpoints makes Faulkner more selfreferential, or "reflexive," than Hemingway or Fitzgerald; each novel reflects
upon itself, while it simultaneously unfolds a story of universal interest.
Faulkner's themes are southern tradition, family, community, the land, history
and the past, race, and the passions of ambition and love. He also created
three novels focusing on the rise of a degenerate family, the Snopes clan:
The Hamlet (1940), The Town (1957), and The Mansion (1959).
NOVELS OF SOCIAL AWARENESS
Since the 1890s, an undercurrent of social protest had coursed through
American literature, welling up in the naturalism of Stephen Crane and
Theodore Dreiser and in the clear messages of the muckraking novelists.
Later socially engaged authors included Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck, John
Dos Passos, Richard Wright, and the dramatist Clifford Odets. They were
linked to the 1930s in their concern for the welfare of the common citizen and
their focus on groups of people -- the professions, as in Sinclair Lewis's
archetypal Arrowsmith (a physician) or Babbitt (a local businessman);
families, as in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath; or urban masses, as Dos
Passos accomplishes through his 11 major characters in his U.S.A. trilogy.
Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)
Harry Sinclair Lewis was born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, and graduated
from Yale University. He took time off from school to work at a socialist
community, Helicon Home Colony, financed by muckraking novelist Upton
Sinclair. Lewis's Main Street (1920) satirized monotonous, hypocritical smalltown life in Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. His incisive presentation of American
life and his criticism of American materialism, narrowness, and hypocrisy
brought him national and international recognition. In 1926, he was offered
and declined a Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith (1925), a novel tracing a doctor's
efforts to maintain his medical ethics amid greed and corruption. In 1930, he
became the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Lewis's other major novels include Babbitt (1922). George Babbitt is an
ordinary businessman living and working in Zenith, an ordinary American
town. Babbitt is moral and enterprising, and a believer in business as the new
scientific approach to modern life. Becoming restless, he seeks fulfillment but
is disillusioned by an affair with a bohemian woman, returns to his wife, and
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"babbittry," meaning narrow-minded, complacent, bourgeois ways. Elmer
Gantry (1927) exposes revivalist religion in the United States, while Cass
Timberlane (1945) studies the stresses that develop within the marriage of an
older judge and his young wife.
John Dos Passos (1896-1970)
Like Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos began as a left-wing radical but moved
to the right as he aged. Dos Passos wrote realistically, in line with the
doctrine of socialistrealism. His best work achieves a scientific objectivism
and almost documentary effect. Dos Passos developed an experimental
collage technique for his masterwork U.S.A., consisting of The 42nd Parallel
(1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936). This sprawling collection
covers the social history of the United States from 1900 to 1930 and exposes
the moral corruption of materialistic American society through the lives of its
characters.
Dos Passos's new techniques included "newsreel" sections taken from
contemporary headlines, popular songs, and advertisements, as well as
"biographies" briefly setting forth the lives of important Americans of the
period, such as inventor Thomas Edison, labor organizer Eugene Debs, film
star Rudolph Valentino, financier J.P. Morgan, and sociologist Thorstein
Veblen. Both the newsreels and biographies lend Dos Passos's novels a
documentary value; a third technique, the "camera eye," consists of stream of
consciousness prose poems that offer a subjective response to the events
described in the books.
John Steinbeck (1902-1968)
Like Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck is held in higher critical esteem outside
the United States than in it today, largely because he received the Nobel
Prize for Literature in 1963 and the international fame it confers. In both
cases, the Nobel Committee selected liberal American writers noted for their
social criticism.
Steinbeck, a Californian, set much of his writing in the Salinas Valley near
San Francisco. His best known work is the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The
Grapes of Wrath (1939), which follows the travails of a poor Oklahoma family
that loses its farm during the Depression and travels to California to seek
work. Family members suffer conditions of feudal oppression by rich
landowners. Other works set in California include Tortilla Flat (1935), Of Mice
and Men (1937), Cannery Row(1945), and East of Eden (1952).
Steinbeck combines realism with a primitivist romanticism that finds virtue in
poor farmers who live close to the land. His fiction demonstrates the
vulnerability of such people, who can be uprooted by droughts and are the
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first to suffer in periods of political unrest and economic depression.
SOME MODERNIST POETS
Robert Frost (1874-1963)
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
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Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Dust Of Snow
The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.
In A Disused Graveyard
The living come with grassy tread
To read the gravestones on the hill;
The graveyard draws the living still,
But never anymore the dead.
The verses in it say and say:
"The ones who living come today
To read the stones and go away
Tomorrow dead will come to stay."
So sure of death the marbles rhyme,
Yet can't help marking all the time
How no one dead will seem to come.
What is it men are shrinking from?
It would be easy to be clever
And tell the stones: Men hate to die
And have stopped dying now forever.
I think they would believe the lie.
T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
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Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.
LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room the women come and go
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Talking of Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
[They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
It is perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
.....
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?…
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I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
.....
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a
platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.”
And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the
floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
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“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”
.....
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.
I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
The Waste Land
V. WHAT THE THUNDER SAID
AFTER the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
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The shouting and the crying
Prison and place and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience
Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain
There is not even solitude in the mountains
But red sullen faces sneer and snarl
From doors of mudcracked houses
If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
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—But who is that on the other side of you?
What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal
A woman drew her long black hair out tight
And fiddled whisper music on those strings
And bats with baby faces in the violet light
Whistled, and beat their wings
And crawled head downward down a blackened wall
And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.
In this decayed hole among the mountains
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, only the wind's home.
It has no windows, and the door swings,
Dry bones can harm no one.
Only a cock stood on the rooftree
Co co rico co co rico
In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust
Bringing rain
Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves
Waited for rain, while the black clouds
Gathered far distant, over Himavant.
The jungle crouched, humped in silence.
Then spoke the thunder
DA
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
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By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms
DA
Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison
Only at nightfall, aetherial rumours
Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus
DA
Damyata: The boat responded
Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar
The sea was calm, your heart would have responded
Gaily, when invited, beating obedient
To controlling hands
I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam ceu chelidon—O swallow swallow
Le Prince d'Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih
Notes
V. WHAT THE THUNDER SAID
In the first part of Part V three themes are employed: the journey to Emmaus,
the approach to the Chapel Perilous (see Miss Weston's book), and the
present decay of eastern Europe.
357. This is Turdus aonalaschkae pallasii, the hermit-thrush which I have
heard in Quebec County. Chapman says (Handbook of Birds in Eastern
North America) 'it is most at home in secluded woodland and thickety
retreats.... Its notes are not remarkable for variety or volume, but in purity and
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NORTH AMERICAN LITERATURE BOOKLET 2
sweetness of tone and exquisite modulation they are unequalled.' Its 'waterdripping song' is justly celebrated.
360. The following lines were stimulated by the account of one of the
Antarctic expeditions (I forget which, but I think one of Shackleton's): it was
related that the party of explorers, at the extremity of their strength, had the
constant delusion that there was one more member than could actually be
counted.
367–77. Cf. Hermann Hesse, Blick ins Chaos:
Schon ist halb Europa, schon ist zumindest der halbe Osten Europas auf
dem Wege zum Chaos, fährt betrunken im heiligen Wahn am Abgrund
entlang und singt dazu, singt betrunken und hymnisch wie Dmitri Karamasoff
sang. Ueber diese Lieder lacht der Bürger beleidigt, der Heilige und Seher
hört sie mit Tränen.
401. 'Datta, dayadhvam, damyata' (Give, sympathize, control). The fable of
the meaning of the Thunder is found in the Brihadaranyaka--Upanishad, 5, 1.
A translation is found in Deussen's Sechzig Upanishads des Veda, p. 489.
407. Cf. Webster, The White Devil, V, vi:
...they'll remarry
Ere the worm pierce your winding-sheet, ere the spider
Make a thin curtain for your epitaphs.
411. Cf. Inferno, xxxiii. 46:
ed io sentii chiavar l'uscio di sotto
all'orribile torre.
Also F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 346:
My external sensations are no less private to myself than
are my thoughts or my feelings. In either case my experience
falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside; and,
with all its elements alike, every sphere is opaque to the
others which surround it.... In brief, regarded as an existence
which appears in a soul, the whole world for each is peculiar
and private to that soul.
424. V. Weston, From Ritual to Romance; chapter on the Fisher King.
427. V. Purgatorio, xxvi. 148.
'Ara vos prec per aquella valor
'que vos guida al som de l'escalina,
'sovegna vos a temps de ma dolor.
' Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina.
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428. V. Pervigilium Veneris. Cf. Philomela in Parts II and III.
429. V. Gerard de Nerval, Sonnet El Desdichado.
431. V. Kyd's Spanish Tragedy.
433. Shantih. Repeated as here, a formal ending to an Upanishad. 'The
Peace which passeth understanding' is a feeble translation of the conduct of
this word.
Ezra Pound (1885 – 1972)
In a Station of the Metro (1913)
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Meditatio
When I carefully consider the curious habits of dogs
I am compelled to conclude
That man is the superior animal.
When I consider the curious habits of man
I confess, my friend, I am puzzled.
CANTO 1
And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward
Bore us onward with bellying canvas,
Crice's this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.
Then sat we amidships, wind jamming the tiller,
Thus with stretched sail, we went over sea till day's end.
Sun to his slumber, shadows o'er all the ocean,
Came we then to the bounds of deepest water,
To the Kimmerian lands, and peopled cities
Covered with close-webbed mist, unpierced ever
With glitter of sun-rays
Nor with stars stretched, nor looking back from heaven
Swartest night stretched over wreteched men there.
The ocean flowing backward, came we then to the place
Aforesaid by Circe.
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Here did they rites, Perimedes and Eurylochus,
And drawing sword from my hip I dug the ell-square pitkin;
Poured we libations unto each the dead,
First mead and then sweet wine, water mixed with white flour
Then prayed I many a prayer to the sickly death's-heads;
As set in Ithaca, sterile bulls of the best
For sacrifice, heaping the pyre with goods,
A sheep to Tiresias only, black and a bell-sheep.
Dark blood flowed in the fosse,
Souls out of Erebus, cadaverous dead, of brides
Of youths and of the old who had borne much;
Souls stained with recent tears, girls tender,
Men many, mauled with bronze lance heads,
Battle spoil, bearing yet dreory arms,
These many crowded about me; with shouting,
Pallor upon me, cried to my men for more beasts;
Slaughtered the herds, sheep slain of bronze;
Poured ointment, cried to the gods,
To Pluto the strong, and praised Proserpine;
Unsheathed the narrow sword,
I sat to keep off the impetuous impotent dead,
Till I should hear Tiresias.
But first Elpenor came, our friend Elpenor,
Unburied, cast on the wide earth,
Limbs that we left in the house of Circe,
Unwept, unwrapped in the sepulchre, since toils urged other.
Pitiful spirit. And I cried in hurried speech:
"Elpenor, how art thou come to this dark coast?
"Cam'st thou afoot, outstripping seamen?
" And he in heavy speech:
"Ill fate and abundant wine. I slept in Crice's ingle.
"Going down the long ladder unguarded,
"I fell against the buttress,
"Shattered the nape-nerve, the soul sought Avernus.
"But thou, O King, I bid remember me, unwept, unburied,
"Heap up mine arms, be tomb by sea-bord, and inscribed:
"A man of no fortune, and with a name to come.
"And set my oar up, that I swung mid fellows."
And Anticlea came, whom I beat off, and then Tiresias Theban,
Holding his golden wand, knew me, and spoke first:
"A second time? why? man of ill star,
"Facing the sunless dead and this joyless region?
"Stand from the fosse, leave me my bloody bever
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"For soothsay."
And I stepped back,
And he strong with the blood, said then:
"Odysseus "Shalt return through spiteful Neptune, over dark seas,
"Lose all companions." Then Anticlea came.
Lie quiet Divus. I mean, that is Andreas Divus,
In officina Wecheli, 1538, out of Homer.
And he sailed, by Sirens and thence outwards and away
And unto Crice.
Venerandam,
In the Cretan's phrase, with the golden crown, Aphrodite,
Cypri munimenta sortita est, mirthful, oricalchi, with golden
Girdle and breat bands, thou with dark eyelids
Bearing the golden bough of Argicidia. So that:
HUGH SELWYN MAUBERLY (PART I)
"Vocat aestus in umbram"
Nemesianus Es. IV.
E. P. Ode pour l'élection de son sepulcher
For three years, out of key with his time,
He strove to resuscitate the dead art
Of poetry; to maintain "the sublime"
In the old sense. Wrong from the start -No, hardly, but, seeing he had been born
In a half savage country, out of date;
Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn;
Capaneus; trout for factitious bait:
"Idmen gar toi panth, os eni Troie
Caught in the unstopped ear;
Giving the rocks small lee-way
The chopped seas held him, therefore, that year.
His true Penelope was Flaubert,
He fished by obstinate isles;
Observed the elegance of Circe's hair
Rather than the mottoes on sun-dials.
Unaffected by "the march of events",
He passed from men's memory in l'an trentiesme
De son eage; the case presents
No adjunct to the Muses' diadem.
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II.
The age demanded an image
Of its accelerated grimace,
Something for the modern stage,
Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;
Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries
Of the inward gaze;
Better mendacities
Than the classics in paraphrase!
The "age demanded" chiefly a mould in plaster,
Made with no loss of time,
A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster
Or the "sculpture" of rhyme.
III.
The tea-rose, tea-gown, etc.
Supplants the mousseline of Cos,
The pianola "replaces"
Sappho's barbitos.
Christ follows Dionysus,
Phallic and ambrosial
Made way for macerations;
Caliban casts out Ariel.
All things are a flowing,
Sage Heracleitus says;
But a tawdry cheapness
Shall reign throughout our days.
Even the Christian beauty
Defects -- after Samothrace;
We see to kalon
Decreed in the market place.
Faun's flesh is not to us,
Nor the saint's vision.
We have the press for wafer;
Franchise for circumcision.
All men, in law, are equals.
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Free of Peisistratus,
We choose a knave or an eunuch
To rule over us.
A bright Apollo,
tin andra, tin eroa, tina theon,
What god, man, or hero
Shall I place a tin wreath upon?
IV.
These fought, in any case,
and some believing, pro domo, in any case ..
Some quick to arm,
some for adventure,
some from fear of weakness,
some from fear of censure,
some for love of slaughter, in imagination,
learning later ...
some in fear, learning love of slaughter;
Died some pro patria, non dulce non et decor" ..
walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men's lies, then unbelieving came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;
usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.
Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
Young blood and high blood,
Fair cheeks, and fine bodies;
fortitude as never before
frankness as never before,
disillusions as never told in the old days,
hysterias, trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies.
V.
There died a myriad,
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And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization.
Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth's lid,
For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.
Yeux Glauques
Gladstone was still respected,
When John Ruskin produced
"Kings Treasuries"; Swinburne
And Rossetti still abused.
Fœtid Buchanan lifted up his voice
When that faun's head of hers
Became a pastime for
Painters and adulterers.
The Burne-Jones cartons
Have preserved her eyes;
Still, at the Tate, they teach
Cophetua to rhapsodize;
Thin like brook-water,
With a vacant gaze.
The English Rubaiyat was still-born
In those days.
The thin, clear gaze, the same
Still darts out faun-like from the half-ruin'd face,
Questing and passive ....
"Ah, poor Jenny's case" ...
Bewildered that a world
Shows no surprise
At her last maquero's
Adulteries.
"Siena Mi Fe', Disfecemi Maremma"
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NORTH AMERICAN LITERATURE BOOKLET 2
Among the pickled fœtuses and bottled bones,
Engaged in perfecting the catalogue,
I found the last scion of the
Senatorial families of Strasbourg, Monsieur Verog.
For two hours he talked of Gallifet;
Of Dowson; of the Rhymers' Club;
Told me how Johnson (Lionel) died
By falling from a high stool in a pub ...
But showed no trace of alcohol
At the autopsy, privately performed –
Tissue preserved -- the pure mind
Arose toward Newman as the whiskey warmed.
Dowson found harlots cheaper than hotels;
Headlam for uplift; Image impartially imbued
With raptures for Bacchus, Terpsichore and the Church.
So spoke the author of "The Dorian Mood",
M. Verog, out of step with the decade,
Detached from his contemporaries,
Neglected by the young,
Because of these reveries.
Brennbaum.
The sky-like limpid eyes,
The circular infant's face,
The stiffness from spats to collar
Never relaxing into grace;
The heavy memories of Horeb, Sinai and the forty years,
Showed only when the daylight fell
Level across the face
Of Brennbaum "The Impeccable".
Mr. Nixon
In the cream gilded cabin of his steam yacht
Mr. Nixon advised me kindly, to advance with fewer
Dangers of delay. "Consider
Carefully the reviewer.
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NORTH AMERICAN LITERATURE BOOKLET 2
"I was as poor as you are;
"When I began I got, of course,
"Advance on royalties, fifty at first", said Mr. Nixon,
"Follow me, and take a column,
"Even if you have to work free.
"Butter reviewers. From fifty to three hundred
"I rose in eighteen months;
"The hardest nut I had to crack
"Was Dr. Dundas.
"I never mentioned a man but with the view
"Of selling my own works.
"The tip's a good one, as for literature
"It gives no man a sinecure."
And no one knows, at sight a masterpiece.
And give up verse, my boy,
There's nothing in it."
***
Likewise a friend of Bloughram's once advised me:
Don't kick against the pricks,
Accept opinion. The "Nineties" tried your game
And died, there's nothing in it.
X.
Beneath the sagging roof
The stylist has taken shelter,
Unpaid, uncelebrated,
At last from the world's welter
Nature receives him,
With a placid and uneducated mistress
He exercises his talents
And the soil meets his distress.
The haven from sophistications and contentions
Leaks through its thatch;
He offers succulent cooking;
The door has a creaking latch.
XI.
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NORTH AMERICAN LITERATURE BOOKLET 2
"Conservatrix of Milésien"
Habits of mind and feeling,
Possibly. But in Ealing
With the most bank-clerkly of Englishmen?
No, "Milésian" is an exaggeration.
No instinct has survived in her
Older than those her grandmother
Told her would fit her station.
XII.
"Daphne with her thighs in bark
Stretches toward me her leafy hands", -Subjectively. In the stuffed-satin drawing-room
I await The Lady Valentine's commands,
Knowing my coat has never been
Of precisely the fashion
To stimulate, in her,
A durable passion;
Doubtful, somewhat, of the value
Of well-gowned approbation
Of literary effort,
But never of The Lady Valentine's vocation:
Poetry, her border of ideas,
The edge, uncertain, but a means of blending
With other strata
Where the lower and higher have ending;
A hook to catch the Lady Jane's attention,
A modulation toward the theatre,
Also, in the case of revolution,
A possible friend and comforter.
***
Conduct, on the other hand, the soul
"Which the highest cultures have nourished"
To Fleet St. where
Dr. Johnson flourished;
Beside this thoroughfare
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NORTH AMERICAN LITERATURE BOOKLET 2
The sale of half-hose has
Long since superseded the cultivation
Of Pierian roses.
e. e. cummings (1894-1962)
r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r
r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r
who
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eringint(oaThe):l
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a
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rIvInG .gRrEaPsPhOs)
to
rea(be)rran(com)gi(e)ngly
,grasshopper;
Buffalo Bill's
Buffalo Bill's
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death
anyone lived in a pretty how town
anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn't he danced his did
Women and men(both little and small)
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NORTH AMERICAN LITERATURE BOOKLET 2
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn't they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain
children guessed(but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew
autumn winter spring summer)
that noone loved him more by more
when by now and tree by leaf
she laughed his joy she cried his grief
bird by snow and stir by still
anyone's any was all to her
someones married their everyones
laughed their cryings and did their dance
(sleep wake hope and then)they
said their nevers they slept their dream
stars rain sun moon
(and only the snow can begin to explain
how children are apt to forget to remember
with up so floating many bells down)
one day anyone died i guess
(and noone stooped to kiss his face)
busy folk buried them side by side
little by little and was by was
all by all and deep by deep
and more by more they dream their sleep
noone and anyone earth by april
wish by spirit and if by yes.
Women and men(both dong and ding)
summer autumn winter spring
reaped their sowing and went their came
sun moon stars rain
Spring is like a perhaps hand
Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)arranging
a window,into which people look(while
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NORTH AMERICAN LITERATURE BOOKLET 2
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here)and
changing everything carefully
spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things,while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there)and
without breaking anything.
maggie and milly and molly and may
maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach(to play one day)
and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn't remember her troubles, and
milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;
and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and
may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.
For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
it's always ourselves we find in the sea
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