american modernist poetry
Post on 16-Nov-2014
966 Views
Preview:
TRANSCRIPT
AMERICAN MODERNIST POETRY
2
Characteristic Features of Modernist Poetry
• The shift of emphasis on the self-referentiality of poetic language
• The notion of a crisis of language • Search for the overall coherence of language • Language as the preeminent cultural system • Increasing doubt about the possibility of a
single, unified speaking subject
3
The Great Variety of American Modernist Poetry
• The dadaist and surrealist poems of Gertrude Stein
• The Imagist poems of Ezra Pound, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) and Amy Lowell
• T. S .Eliot’s The Waste Land
4Ezra Pound in 1913
H.D. in mid-1910s
5
The Great Variety of American Modernist Poetry
• V. Lindsay’s doomed fantasy of a fully public, participatory, democratic poetry
• The restrained and universalizing regional poems of W. Carlos Williams
• The prolific Black poetry of Langston Hughes and the other blues writers of the Harlem Renaissance
6
The Great Variety of American Modernist Poetry
• The populist poems celebrating American life (Little Red Song Book,1909, IWW, Joe Hill)
• The socially and politically engaged poetry to develop especially throughout the late 1920s and 1930s
7
Modernist Poetic Landmarks
• Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work Magazine
• Gertrude Stein’s essays
• Mina Loy’s “Aphorisms on Futurism”
8
Harriet Monroe’s Poetry
9
Gertrude Stein 1874-1946“The Mother of Us All”
10
Gertrude Stein • Studied with William James at
Radcliffe College
• Studied brain anatomy at Johns Hopkins Medical School
• Major preoccupations:
- characterization
- reader’s preoccupation with the text
11
Expatriation• In 1903 moved to France• Met Alice B. Toklas• Returned to the United States only once, in 1934 but
claimed America as her country • Her career in Europe was that of an art critic• Paul Cezanne was discovered by her brother• She was called “the Mama of Dada”• Pablo Picasso drew her portrait
12
Writings
• Three Lives, written in 1904, published in 1909
• The Making of Americans, written in 1911-12, published in 1925
• Tender Buttons (1914)
• Tender Buttons Two: Gertrude Stein and her Brother and G. M. P.
• The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933)
13
Writings
• The Geographical History of America (1935)
• Picasso (1938)
• The Mother of Us All (1946)
• Bee Time Vine and Other Pieces (1953)
• Stanzas in Meditation and Other Poems (1956)
14
Features of Stein’s Works
• An attempt to achieve a kind of verbal “after-image”
• To penetrate the reader’s conscious-ness and evoke some genuine response
• Subversion of familiar literary techniques• Use of deliberately unliterary language
15
Features of Stein’s Works
• Writing should be about real characters, real objects
• Real scenes from American life
• Forces the reader to complete the description
• Characters’ motivations are purely emotional and unchangeable
16
Features of Stein’s Works
• Draws emotional states but not their physical presence
• Creates not visual characteristics of the objects
• Avoids labels (Tender Buttons) • Wit and experimentation • Use of “disguising” tactics
17
Features of Stein’s Works
• Defies any genre-oriented classifications• Defies any attempts to assign a humanizing
persona to the poetic voice• Devoted to an exploration of how language
works• Anticipated most of the linguistic
experimental strain of modernism • Anticipated as well much of
postmodernism
18
Ezra Pound 1885-1972• Family background
• Education: University of Pennsylvania, met William Carlos Williams, transferred to Hamilton College
• Expatriation: 1908 settled in London, a productive friendship with William Butler Yeats
19
Early Poetry 1908-1914
• Personae (1909), to be revised and re-issued in 1926 as Personae: The Collected Poems.
• Patria Mia (1912), essays on American literature and society
• Indiscretions (1920), autobiographical writing
20
Early Poetry 1908-1914 • Reflects his struggle to achieve clarity
and precision• In search of a direct conversational
diction• The notion of personae, or masks: • To sustain a dialogue between past and
present by speaking through various historical personalities
21
Poetic Philosophy• The obsession with the literary past, his
desire to revive ancient ghosts: “The Spirit of Romance” (1910)
• Anticipates T .S. Eliot’s argument in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919)
• The modern poet can recapture the vitality of ancient myths
22
Poetic Dictum • The language in his first poems - obscure
and antiquated • Ford M. Ford: all poetry should have the
economy and precision of prose• The concept of translation as a dynamic
act-“I gather the Limbs of Osiris” (1911-12)• A translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem
Seafarer
23
The Poet-Critic
• Criticism and poetry – inseparable
• Five types of fusion:
- Criticism by discussion
- Criticism by translation:
- Cathay (1915)
- Umbra (1920)
24
The Poet-Critic
• Criticism by exercise in the style of a given period
• Criticism via music and the importance of “melopoeia’
• The highest form is criticism in new composition
25
Imagism and Vorticism
• Started around 1912; the first Imagist anthology, Des Imagiste (1914)
• Based on the ideas of Hulme• Pound’s imagism soon turned the doctrine,
which was heavily indebted to the Symbolist-Impressionist way of thinking into an anti-Symbolist and anti-Impressionist platform
26
The Image
• A “direct treatment of the “thing” whether subjective or objective”
• No words that do not contribute to the presentation
• “To compose in sequence of the music phrase, not in sequence of a metronome”
27
The Image
• The Image is a fusion of spontaneity, intensity and critical discipline
• An ‘equation’ for an emotion
• Not the verbal metaphor of a ‘thing’
28
Vorticism
• The ‘permanent’ or ‘absolute’ image-complex juxtaposition must be active rather than static
• Vorticist images “swirl, whirl, flutter, strike, fall, move, clash and leap, with a new emphasis on conflict and distortion”
• A re-definition of the Image as Vortex
29
Image/Vortex• “The image is not an idea. It is a radiant node or
cluster; it is what I can, and must perforce, call a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which ideas are constantly rushing.”
• The image can be described as content conceived of as form
• Provides a medium for exploration, rather than a territory to be explored
• It is, in his own words, a new focus
30
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
• Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, 1920, a farewell to London
• To emphasize the plight of the Odyssean artist in the modern world
• The prevailing atmosphere is one of postwar disillusionment
31
The Cantos
• Moved to Italy - a lifetime project, the writing of The Cantos
• A Draft of XVI Cantos, 1924/25, published in Paris
• A Draft of XXX Cantos, 1930
• XXXI – XLI (XI New Cantos), New York, 1934
32
The Cantos
• The Fifth Decad of Cantos (Leopoldine Cantos), London, 1937
• LII – LXI (The China Cantos), 1940• LXII – LXXI (The Adams Cantos), 1940• LXXII – LXXIII, 1944- 1945, in Italian,
posthumously collected• The Pisan Cantos (74-84), 1948 • Rock-Drill (85-95), 1955 • Thrones (96-109), 1959 • Drafts and Fragments (110-117), 1969
33
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS1883-1963
William Carlos Williams, Self Portrait , 1914
34
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS1883-1963
• The most self-consciously American
• Five major categories of works:
• Short, extremely laconic lyric poetry
• Paterson, 1946: five-book long
• Spring and All 1923: mixing of prose and poetry
35
Williams’ Work
• In the American Grain:
- Sketches and portraits
- the special quality of the american imagination
• Autobiographical writings: Autobiography, 1951, I Want to Write a Poem: The Autobiography of a Poet, 1958
36
Williams’ Poetry
• Referential force• An objectivist poet• New technique of verse:
- triadic units of collocations – ‘variable feet’ - a distinctive American poetry-indebted to French symbolism, surrealim, impressionism, cubism and futurism
top related