Chapter Ten
Poetry from 1900 through the 1930s
Social Background of This Period
There were at least two important factors that made this period different from
both preceding and following it: the First World War, and the sense of life being
dislocated and fragmented which was more keenly felt in the first year of the
present century. The war was the biggest event that had a profound impact on
the period. Meanwhile, the loss of faith, which began noticeably with Darwin’s
theories of evolution and was intensified by the development of modern science,
continued with a greater intensity into this century.
In the early twentieth century, American poetry began experimenting with new
forms and content. The new age demanded proper literary expression. Between
1912 and 1922 there came a great poetry boom in which about 1000 poets
published over 1000 volumes of poetry. Indeed, to express the modern spirit, the
sense of fragmentation and dislocation, was in large measure the aim of quite a
few modern literary movements.
Exit
Forward
Most of the first modernists became, even earlier than
the novelists of the twenties, expatriates, and all were
more influenced by the French symbolists and the
great Italian poet Dante, than by English or American
forebears. Those living in Europe, like Pound and T. S.
Eliot, were naturally more immediately affected by
the postwar disillusionment and loss of faith than
were the poets at home. There was among the
Americans nothing like the lyrical outpouring of
personal loss and anguish of such English soldierpoets — many of them themselves killed before the
armistice — as Edmund Blunt, Wilfred Owen and
Siegfried Sassoon. But the less personal, more
political, links the meaningless destruction of young
lives in the war with the bankruptcy of the rotten
civilization it was supposed to defend.
The Major Writers
Robert Frost (1874-1963)
Carl Sandburg (1878－1967)
Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)
T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)
Robert Frost (1874-1963)
Life and Career:
Frost was born in San Francisco, he did not move East with
his windowed mother until he was eleven, and he spent most of
his adolescence in Lawrence. Between 1892 and 1900 he
married Elinor Miriam White and began raising his family
while he worked in mills, taught school, and attended
Dartmouth College and Harvard University.
In 1900 he moved to a farm in Derry, New Hampshire. At Derry, Frost was a
part-time farmer and he taught English at a private school, the Pinkerton
Academy, from 1906 to 1911. He sold the Derry farm in 1911 and moved with
his family to England the following year where he met the English Georgian
poets Wilfred Gibson, Lascelles Abercrombie, and Edward Thomas and began
writing poetry full-time. By then Frost had adopted rural New England life as
his special subject matter, yet his first two books, A Boy’s Will (1913) and
North of Boston (1914), were published in London before they appeared in the
United States. Frost was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1924, 1931,
1937, and 1943.
The United States Senate extended its felicitations to him on his birthday in
1950; a mountain in Vermont was named after him in 1955; the State
Department sent him to South America, England, and Russia on good-will
missions in 1954, 1957, and 1962; and in 1961 he was invited to read a poem
as John F. Kennedy’s inaugural ceremonies.
The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And about that morning equally lay
And sorry I could not travel both
In leaves no step had trodden black,
And be one traveler, long I stood
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
And looked down one as far as I could
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
I doubted if I should ever come back.
Then took the other, as just as fair,
I shall be telling this with a sigh
And having perhaps the better claim,
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
Though as for that the passing there
I took the one less traveled by,
Had worn them really about the same,
And that has made all the difference.
1916
A Simple Analysis:
The inspiration for The Road Not Taken came from Frost’s amusement
over a familiar mannerism of his closest friend in England, Edward
Thomas. While living in Gloucestershire in 1914, Frost frequently took
long walks with Thomas through the countryside. Repeatedly Thomas
would choose a route which might enable him to show his American
friend a rare plant or a special vista; but it often happened that before the
end of such a walk Thomas would regret the choice he had made and
would sigh over what he might have shown Frost if they had taken a
better direction. More than once, on such occasions, the New Englander
had teased his Welsh-English friend for those wasted regrets.
Disciplined by the austere biblical notion that a man, having put his hand to
the plow, should not look back, Frost found something quaintly romantic in
sighing over what might have been. Such a course of action was a road never
taken by Frost, a road he had been taught to avoid. In a reminiscent mood, not
very long after his return to America as a successful, newly discovered poet,
Frost pretended to carry himself in the manner of Edward Thomas just long
enough to write "The Road Not Taken". Immediately, he sent a manuscript
copy of the poem to Thomas, without comment, and yet with the expectation
that his friend would notice how the poem pivots ironically on the un-Frostian
phase,
A short time later, when "The Road Not Taken" was published in the Atlantic
Monthly for August 1915, Frost hoped that some of his American readers
would recognize the pivotal irony of the poem; but again he was disappointed.
Never did he admit that he carried himself and his ironies too subtly in that
poem, but the circumstances are worth remembering here as an illustration.
Carl Sandburg (1878－1967)
Carl Sandburg was born in Galesburg, Illinois on January 6,
1878. After the age of thirteen, he dropped out of school
and became a day laborer. His numerous odd jobs helped
him gain experience as a writer and poet. He then served in
Puerto Rico in the Spanish-American war. After the war, he
practically forced himself through Lombard College, now
known as Knox College. Sandburg worked his way
through school, where he attracted the attention of
Professor Philip Green Wright In 1908, he married Lilian
Life and Career
Steichen and settled in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He established his reputation
with Chicago Poems (1916), and then Cornhuskers (1918). Soon after the
publication of these volumes Sandburg wrote Smoke and Steel (1920), his first
prolonged attempt to find beauty in modern industrialism.
His fame as a historian began when he wrote his great
six volume biography on Abraham Lincoln. He believed
that previous biographies had idealized Lincoln too
much. For these he received the Pulitzer Prize. He
collected his favorite songs in The American Songbag.
He also created countless more novels and poems
throughout his lifetime. His collected letters were
published in 1968. He was also a member of the
American Academy of Arts and Letters and received it a
gold medal for history in 1952 and later poetry in 1953.
He was also awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom
in 1964. This great novelist and poet died on July 22,
1967.
Chicago
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:
They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted
women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it
is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the
children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.
faces of women and
Introduction:
Carl Sandburg's first major volume of poems, Chicago Poems, published in
1916, offered the poem "Chicago," which would go on to be one of the most
famous poems that Sandburg wrote. It is a classic example of his form and
subject as it uses free verse to reveal, explore, and celebrate the lives of
common people. The themes of hard work, suffering, and survival are presented
alongside those of laughter and youth with an almost brutal honesty that
Sandburg extracted from the everyday language he listened to so closely
throughout his life. The opening lines set the poem apart from much of the
poetry of the time with "Hog Butcher of the World," and the list of epithets that
follow. Sandburg's poetry relied on themes of common, daily life in the same
way that the poems of Walt Whitman had. Using a major urban landscape as a
focus, the speaker goes on to mention the harsh yet vibrant aspects of American
progress. There is violence and hunger in the city, and also the pride of a city so
alive. The poem then offers another list, descriptions of work actions. The poem
finishes with a definite emphasis on the experience of laughter, which offers
another side of America often found in Sandburg's poetry, that of a country
worthy of joyous celebration and livelihood in the face of hardship and progress.
Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)
Life and Career
Born into a German-Jewish immigrant family in
Allegheny, Pennsylvania at the height of the
Victorian era, she lived in Gemunden and Vienna,
Austria; Passy, France; Baltimore, Maryland;
Oakland and San Francisco, California; Cambridge,
Massachusetts; and London, England, before settling
in Paris in 1903.
In the 1890s she studied philosophy and psychology at Harvard University with
William James, George Herbert Palmer, George Santayana, and Hugo
Munsterberg, and then went on to medical school at the Johns Hopkins
University. Initially Gertrude and Leo Stein shared the living and work space,
conducting their salon and building their fine collection of Matisse and Picasso
paintings. In the early years she worked, talked, and played with Pablo Picasso,
Guillaume Apollinaire and Natalie Barney.
Her unconventional, experimental work during the early years of the twentieth
century brought her to the attention of writers as diverse as Jean Cocteau and
Sherwood Anderson, both of whom testified to the liberating impact of Tender
Buttons (1912) on their own vision. In the 1920s she mentored Ernest
Hemingway, and over the years entertained and communicated with a number
of young writers, artists, and composers. In the mid-1930s after the popular
success of her readable The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1932), Stein
returned with Toklas to the United States for a triumphant coast-to-coast tour.
In 1946, at the height of her literary powers and recognition, Stein died quietly
of cancer in Paris with Toklas at her side.
In Useful Knowledge (1928), Stein makes this strange
but important statement: “ one and one and one and one
and one and one…”[1] She goes on counting this way.
She does not stop until she announces that we have
reached One Hundred. She is telling us that this is the
reality of the term, “One Hundred”. Each “one” is a
completely independent existence. In Stein’s writing,
each word has the same completely independent
existence. Therefore we must read her work word by
word. Each word must appear before the reader’s eye as
if it is new.
[1] Peter B. High, An Outline of American Literature
(London and New York: Longman, 1986), p130.
T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
Life and Career:
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Eliot was nonetheless
always aware of his New England heritage, an
awareness deepened by his mother’s tutelage, by regular
family summer vacation on Cape Ann, and by his
education at Milton Academy (1905-06) and Harvard
(1906-10, 1911-14).
Eliot chose to live almost his entire adult life abroad. In 1910 he went to the
Sorbonne for a year, and after three graduate years studying philosophy at
Harvard, he went to Merton College at Oxford on a fellowship. In September,
1914, he met Ezra Pound, to whom he read “The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock.” Pound immediately recognized its merit and persuaded Harriet
Monroe to publish it in Poetry in June 1915.
It was not until 1925 that, through the efforts of influential position as a director
at the publishing firm of Faber and Gwyer, a post he retained for the rest of his
life. Ultimately, the strongest force in keeping him abroad was his growing
reputation in literary London, a reputation enhanced by the publication of
Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) and Poems (1020). The first collection
of his essays, The Sacred Wood, also appeared in 1920. With the publication of
The Waste Land in 1922, he achieved the status he was to hold for the next two
decades as the most influential poet and critic writing in English. In 1935
“Burnt Norton” was published, followed by “East Coker” (1940), “The Dry
Salvages” (1941), and “Little Gidding” (1942). They were collected as Four
Quartets in 1943, the major opus of the last part of Eliot’s career. T. S. Eliot
received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948, and died in London in 1965.
About The Waste Land
The Waste Land, Eliot's first long philosophical poem, can now be
read simply as it was written, as a poem of radical doubt and
negation, urging that every human desire be stilled except the
desire for self-surrender, for restraint, and for peace. Following
Hugh Kenner's recommendation, we should lay to rest the
persistent error of reading The Waste Land as a poem in which five
motifs predominate: the nightmare journey, the Chapel, the
Quester, the Grail Legend, and the Fisher King.
It seems that only since Eliot's death is it possible to read his life forward-understanding The Waste Land as it was written, without being deflected by our
knowledge of the writer's later years. Before Eliot's death the tendency was to read
the poem proleptically--as if reflecting the poems of the later period.
Within ten years after finishing The Waste Land, Eliot recognized that the poem had
made him into the leader of a new way. His own words of 1931, however, require us
to read the poem as having pushed this roadway through to its end--for him. It was
no Grail quest. There could be no more decisive reference to the negative way he
had followed till 1922, and also to the impasse where it ended.
Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
Life and Career:
Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, and raised in Pennsylvania.
Pound was a student at the University of Pennsylvania in 1902
and he received his B. A. from Hamilton College in 1905; and
an M. A. in Romance Language from the University of
Pennsylvania in 1906.
In 1908, Pound arrived in Venice, where he arranged to have his first volume of
poems, A Lume Spento, published at his own expenxe. In “A Few Dont’s by an
Imagiste,” which appeared in Poetry in 1913, he announced the modernist
poetics of precision, concision, and metrical freedom which he had formulated
in conversation with H. D. and Richard Aldington. The poems of Lustra (1916)
reflect the range of Pound’s intellectual interests, the variety of his technical
experiments, and the extent of his artistic achievement in his London years.
Having entombed the aesthete figure of his early period in “Hugh Selwyn
Mauberley,” which was published in 1920, Pound departed for the Continent and
turned his main energies to writing his epic Cantos.
Insisting on the relationship between good
government, good art, and the good life, Pound
incorporated his social and economic views into the
works he published during the thirties, including A B
C of Economics (1933), Eleven New Cantos (1934),
Social Credit: An Impact (1935), and Jefferson
and/or Mussolini (1935). Unsuccessful with
American politicians, he returned to Italy, where in
1941 he began regularly broadcasting his ideas over
Rome Radio, in a program aimed at the Englishspeaking world. After being arrested in May, 1945, he
was incarcerated for six months in a wire cage in Pisa
before he was sent back to America to stand trial by a
team of psychologists, Pound was committed in 1946
to St. Elizabeths Hospital, where he remained until
the efforts of Archibald Macleish, Robert Frost,
Ernest Hemingway, and others led to his release in
1958 and he died in 1972.
A Brief Analysis of the Author’s Important Work:
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
1916
Pound and Modernism and Imagism:
Ezra Pound is one of the most interesting people in American literature. He left
the U.S. early in his adult life and went to Europe, where he remained, mostly,
for the rest of his life. In Europe, Pound became part of the exploding
Modernist movement; in fact, he became one of its most active and most vocal
organizers. Although his poetry, as W.B. Yeats said, doesn't quite get all of the
wine into the bottle, as it were, Pound was enormously helpful to other artists,
and offered lots of other practical (and theoretical) guidance to the entire
Modernist project.
Perhaps the most famous sub-movement of Modernism that Pound influenced
was something called Imagism. According to Pound, Imagism was meant to be
a new way of writing, a way of re-invigorating literature, of making it more
natural and less dependent on literary metaphors that only a few people would
understand.
According to Pound, Imagism was supposed to treat its poetic subject directly,
and avoid any word that does not contribute to the overall presentation; the
Imagist poem also was supposed to be composed in a musical sequence rather
than the sequence of the metronome.
A Simple Analysis:
Pound was fascinated by the idea of an alphabet that represented not only
sounds but images. He believed that it was possible to approximate the same
thing in English, and the Imagist poem "Metro" is an example of his attempt to
do so.
When the poet writes: "The apparition of these faces in the crowd," he is
speaking of a ghostly or ghostlike appearance of faces in a crowd somewhere.
We've all had moments when we didn't see reality exactly like it is, moments
when one thing looked like something else. Well, that's what's happening here.
The "metro" is the Paris subway; the speaker is painting us a picture of what
the people in the subway look like: "Petals on a wet, black bough." Now, the
"apparition" part is pretty simple, but what are these "petals" all about?
Probably the best explanation is that the faces that the narrator sees are faces
in the train windows. The "wet black bough" is the train, which is wet (maybe
it's raining) and, like a bough, has a sort of cylindrical shape. The faces look
ghostly because they are seen through the steamy surfaces of windows, and
look kind of like petals that are blooming on a bough.
William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)
Life and Career:
Born in Rutherford, New Jersey, Williams spent most of his
life there except for periods of education and travel. From
1897 to 1899 he studied with his younger brother at schools
near Geneva and in Paris. Home again, he commuted to the
Horace Mann School in New York until 1902.
Finally deciding a career in medicine would offer the support his writing
demanded, Williams attended the University of Pennsylvania Medical School,
graduating in 1906. After an internship in New York City, he spent a year in
Europe, studying pediatrics at the University of Leipzig, visiting Pound in
London, and traveling on the continent. Twice in the 1920s he spent time in
Europe.
In 1912, two years after he began medical practice, Williams married Florence
Herman. Influenced by early reading and imitation of Whitman and Keats,
Williams was to find his way after publication of Poems 1909 through
Imagism and interest in modernist art to a new attitude toward poetic form and
treatment of immediate reality. Responding to Pound’s advice, Williams
alternately distanced himself by means of a stripped-down language that
captured ordinary scenes form an urban landscape and, in markedly different
poems, created a persona who revealed passionate engagement with the
sensual world.
With Paterson, Book Ⅰ(1946) Williams undertook the long poem for which
he had been preparing since the preliminary study, “Paterson” (1927).
Williams persists during the last fifteen years and strokes and a nervous
collapse, to write a number of psychologically complex and hauntingly
beautiful poems. He is considered the most diverse and challenging poet of his
generation. Williams's health began to decline after a heart attack in 1948 and
a series of strokes, but he continued writing up until his death in New Jersey in
1963.
A Brief Analysis of the Author’s Important Work
To A Poor Old Woman
munching a plum on
You can see it by
the street a paper bag
the way she gives herself
of them in her hand
to the one half
sucked out in her hand
They taste good to her
They taste good
Comforted
to her. They taste
a solace of ripe plums
good to her
seeming to fill the air
They taste good to her
A Simple Analysis:
The Poor Old Woman, by William Carlos Williams, represents
symbolism. The poem is about an old woman on the street eating a
plum. Although there is not much said about this old woman and the plum,
the symbolism takes action immediately in this poem. As it starts off, it only
says that she is eating a plum. But as the poem proceeds, Williams takes the
concept of the woman eating a plum into a question. Why is this lady so
wholesome, eating such a wonderful plum? What does this woman represent
by eating a plum? Well, this woman represents how not everyone has the
chance to always get what they want, and how some people are lucky to get a
delicious plum and be able to eat it so happily. Williams repeats this line in
the poem many times, “They taste good to her They taste good to her. They
taste good to her.” This is an example of symbolism because it symbolizes
that not everyone can always get what they want, and the little things do
count.