Make it new: Experiments in poetry

New Poetry

• The last decades of the nineteenth century were invaded by prose fiction. American poets lost the innovative energy exhibited by Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Many American poets turned to overseas artistic manifestations.
• Several poets remained grounded on the Whitnamesque tradition of vernacular language and native themes.
• Chicago harbored the creative dynamism of midwestern authors like Sherwood Anderson and the representative voices of the Chicago Renaissance, Carl Sandburg, and Edgar Lee Masters.
• Both relied on rhetorical strategies inherited from the oral tradition, a simple non-academic style, and everyday life.
• However, the true poetic revolution came from poets in contact with foreign influences, who incorporated European, Asian, and African rhythms into their work and exploited the conceptual and perceptual possibilities of a hybrid poetics.
• French symbolism poets had a major influence on American poetry and prose. (Mallarme, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Verlaine)
• Baudelaire saw the poet as a visionary, able to transcend the real world and suggest through the evocative power of language. They explored this suggestive capacity through metaphor, metonymy, the musicality of words, and synesthesia. They used elaborate language to convey the fluidity and rhythm of the music. The meaning of words encompassed both meaning and sound. They sought impressions instead of descriptions.
• The symbolists had descendants that shared a surrealist approach to art: Vorticists, Dadaists, and Imaginists.
• Imaginists contributed especially to the Modernist non-referential poetic method and made efforts to overcome the dangers of excessive documentation. They were the leading school among American Modernist poets who searched the immediacy and impression left by images. The image is considered an emotional and intellectual "complex" that searches for the individual self's indissolubility.

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• This resulted in succinct and clear outlined poems, relying on the clarity of expression conveyed by a precise image and intense juxtapositions that could liberate the poem from time and space limits.
• In addition to these main trends, other foreign influences entered Modern American poetry: T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound had been exposed to the rhythmic patterns or Romance languages (French-Italian). Frost was influenced by Latin (Ecogles and georgic poetry). African American poets like Langston Hughes used the inherited rhythms of jazz.
• Many showed interest in Orientalism and were influence by the haiku tradition and the Chinese ideograms.
• Some were determined to write poetry for a mass audience and focused on reflecting the American scenes and concerns. Among them were Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams (native poets of American Modernism)
• Eliot, Pound, Stein, and others traveled to Europe to explorer the avant-garde movements. Their hybridization required specific learning from the reader, which estranged them from the American public.
• Harriet Monroe, a Chicago poet, founded Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, which welcomed experimental verse and published the early work of many key names of Modernism poetry.
• This and other little magazines also introduced European authors and forms, making transatlantic contact possible.
• Despite the diversity of themes, forms, and moods, American poetry revealed some common trends. They demanded newness ("Make it new" - Ezra Pound). Poets stressed the need to create poems different from any other and tried to open poetry to every thematic and formal innovation.
• It would be an expressive medium of the collage of cultures in America, a resistance to the cultural melting pot, and a genuinely American creation. (Lentricchia)

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• Wallace Stevens stated that Modernist poetry tried to fix an idea of reality through an apparent deviation from reality. They discarded ideas and themes per see and pursued the representation of the origins of emotions.
• "Not ideas about the thing but the thing itself.
• Thematic concerns lost their prevalence. There was a renewed interest in metaphysical poetry of the seventeenth century, which could reflect the focus on language and form over the subject matter.
• Pound formulated the poetic program of Imaginism around 1912:
• - use of the language of common speech, seeking for the exact word.
• - Preference for the free verse to communicate the poet's individuality.
• - Freedom in the choice of subject matter
• - The use of images to preset particularities un an accurate way
• - Avoidance of in definition and search for clarity.
• Belief in concentration, although a significant number of poets turned to the long poem in later stages.
• In short, Imaginists tried to find the exact image capable of suggesting emotion. Poems were short in length and rapid in rhythm and conveyed the same fragmentary feeling of Anderson's fiction. They also exploited the suggestive power of language.
• Their poems were built around a primary metaphor and a juxtaposition of images. Tropes were conceived as poetic speech itself.
• The Imaginists were a short-lived group, but they influenced many writers, including some prose writers such as Hemingway and Faulkner. In fact, an imaginist line has survived to the present contributing to the development of contemporary poetry.

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• Though Modernist poets were intensely individualistic, some technical features represent the whole poetic production of the movement.
• The surrealist substratum aspired to weaken the boundaries between subject and object, both in grammatical and conceptual terms, to eliminate poetry referentiality. This implied a fusion of speaker and topic, vision and viewer. Therefore, the object under scrutiny absorbed the totality of the speakers' attention, and the object reflects the speakers' mind. The object then gains poetic existence. TS Eliot proposed the objective correlative as "the only way of expressing emotion in the form of art".
• In this pursuit of appropriate images, visual arts played a significant role. Photography, painting, and films provided new approaches to life. The expressionistic display of experience proved to be effective in presenting the fragmentary quality of life.
• Gertrude Stein sought to create analogs between modern art and the written word. Using repetition, dislocation, and different angles of vision to reproduce the visual compositions of abstract art, especially Cubism. She simulated a broken spatial wholeness and its fragmentation. Her use of simple words resembles Picasso's use of primary colors.
• As in art, the subject or theme lost interest, so that technique became inseparable from the subject. Poetry would become visual and audible.
• They abandoned the search for permanent insight and significance and explored epiphanic moments, instants of illumination, analogous to the evocative vibration of sound in a single poem.
• Although rhyme and prosody were almost completely disregarded, some rhyming patterns could be found. Imaginists used the free verse and compensated the absence of rhythm with certain patterns that could create a sense of musicality through repetition of words and natural oral discourse cadences.
• The new poetry saw a broadening of poetic interest. From the grotesque aspects of life to the marginalized types, they claimed the right and need to act freely. They also developed a Whitmanesque interest in city life, highlighting ordinary life details and made minority voices audible.

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• Modernist writers believed in the power of the artist to impose some order or patterns on the chaos. They sought momentary clarification. Ezra Pound expressed in "From Chebar" his conviction that art, in general, constitutes an exemplary instrument of order. And announces that "gods" (a transcendent flux of spirit or significant energy) dwell in everyday experience. The universality of art resided in the power of language and form. Modernists showed a skeptical attitude towards assumed abstractions that rested on a false global understanding of existence.
• Robert Frost explained a poem's workings as something that "begins in delight and ends in wisdom (and) clarification. A momentary stay against confusion". He defended that poetic meaning is transitory and private, not eternal and collective. Poetry cannot aim to provide universals. So, the extensive imagery by the Modernists did not confer fixed or permanent meanings.
• According to Eliot, poetry should not convey the poets' emotions. The poets' art did not lie in finding or revealing the speaker's emotions but transforming them into poetry. Hence, his/her role is to act as a catalyst to enable the fusion of object and language. The poet's presence in the poem is not necessary. "Poetry is not a turning loose from emotion, but an escape from emotion."
• Art compensated for the loss of beliefs and a cultural system. Modernist poets regarded reality as a source of emotion. They resumed the Romantics' belief in the observer's creative power and the dependence of apparent reality on the perception of the agent. They did not see the universe as a harmonious whole. Their designs are projected by imagination. Poets did not hold Whitman's visionary role and could not be considered the receptor and transmitter of truths and beauty. The prophetic and transcendentalist aura of Romantic poetry was therefore regarded obsolete.

Approaching Modernist poetry

• All the Modernist authors presented responded to the necessity of interrogation and newness.
• T.S. Eliot - "The Hollow Men"
• He was closer to the European cultural tradition. He became a British subject and joined the Church of England. He partook of the British and American canon alike.
• His apocalyptic vision of a society, postwar culture, and history influenced a whole generation of poets and prose writers. He was also an insightful and influential literary critic.
• His mythical method was his formulation of Joyce's organizing strategy of Ulysses. He relied on myth as an effective strategy to establish a parallelism between the present and the past aiming at bringing light and meaning to the contemporary panorama.
• His poetry has often been described as elitist. The mythical method implied the poet's and reader's shared knowledge of a cultural context, allusion, and quotation from previous literary works required a similar training. He pursued the involvement of the audience in the meaning of the text. Nevertheless, he claimed that "genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood."
• He coined the term objective correlative to name the poet's suitable choice of images to account for emotion. The poet locates the origin of such emotion and evokes it for the reader through the object and word correspondence.
• Ezra Pound - "In a Station of the Metro"
• He spent twelve years in London and worked as a secretary for the Irish poet W.B. Yeats. He edited Eliot's The Waste Land.
• He provided the first theorizing of the Imaginist movement in poetry, edited the anthology Des Imagists
• "In a Station of the Metro" is one of the most famous of all the imaginist poems. His poetry and criticism aimed at producing a social and aesthetic change.
• He advocated energetic poetry, committed to precision and economy in the style of Flaubert (prose)
• He was deeply interested in Asian art and literature, translated Chinese poetry into English and had a fascination for ideograms. The poem evidences the poet's delight in Asian forms.

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• William Carlos Williams - "This is Just to Say"
• One of the "native" poets of the era as opposed to the "cosmopolitan" Eliot or Pound.
• Paid attention to local issues and made efforts to write accessible poetry. He wrote about everyday events in a distinctively American speech (Shared with Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost). He listened closely to ordinary conversations in search of typically national rhythms and expressions, even from slang.
• Form and structure - his poems resemble snapshots that try to capture an instant of time. Made use of his poems' visual organization to achieve the emotional impressions that he detected in everyday situations.
• His phrase "no ideas but in things" survived as an Imaginist axiom. Following the philosophical pragmatists, such as William James, he defended that the meaning of the reality of something did not depend on the perceiver. He concentrates on objects themselves to dispense with the role and centrality of the observer.
• He dismissed the scholarly references that Eliot and Pound included in their poems.
• Wallace Stevens - "Dissilusionment of then O'Clock."
• Like WCW, he kept a life-long profession parallel to his creative endeavors. Despite his apparently boring job, he was an active participant in the New York cultural scene.
• He published in the "little magazines" ( popular publication that supported and encouraged emerging poets.
• The poem appeared in his first collection Harmonioum (1923). Here he displayed his attraction to imagery and language under the influence of the Imagist work. Color and light abound and participate in the celebratory tone of his lines, disclosing the instant pleasures.
• He inclined to exotic words, appealing to both the visual and aural senses, which made him less popular than Frost, for instance.
• He was also deeply interested in perception; he believed that meaning involved the subjective process of observation. That perception was subjective and that any possible way is as valid as any other. The beauty and the meaning depended on the observer and his/her capacity to pause and distill.
• He is often regarded as an obscure poet, seeker, and explorer of abstractions such as "order," "imagination," and "reality". In fact, many of his books are entitled after this persistent preoccupation for order ("Harmonious," "Ideas or Order," "Parts of the World")

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• Robert frost - "After Apple Picking."
• He's often defined as a "Nature Poet" due to his years as a farmer - showed through his poetry. Other labels, "symbolism," "synecdochist," and "anti-Platonist," He only had a short European experience (1912-1915) where he met Pound, who would help him publish his first volume "A Boy's Will" in London. The outbreak of WWI saw his reputation increase.
• Naturalist and Transcendentalist attitude in his precise but lyrical representation of natural scenes. He did not present a romanticized version of nature or agrarian life, and the melancholic air of his poems did not derive from a sense of loss or longing. His poetry evoked rural New England scenarios often constructed with some obscure or troubling depth. The agrarian myth of the American countryside was reconsidered, participating in the revisionist spirit of the age.
• <He addressed natural setting and avoided direct references to the agitated new era. His poetry, however, transmitted an idea of change through a variety of images.
• Form - Deeply traditionalist. `Reservation of rhythmic and rhyming patterns. Sought the newness in idiom and subject matter. Criticized the tendency to make new by subtracting or eliminating.
• He is often situated in Coleridge and Wordsworth's tradition, but he never believed in the communion of self and nature. In his poems, nature lacked the redeeming quality perceived in many nineteenth-century poets. Frost perceived nature as alienated from the human mind, which resulted in a slight bleakness of tone.
• Nature's remoteness and indifference are used to celebrate human awareness of frailty, death, and emotional response. He tried to communicate something with his poetry unlike those of his contemporaries who have "tried without content". There is a progression from "delight" to "wisdom" in his poems, or from a moment of insight to another of clarification. The structure of his poems articulates a discovery brought about by the perception of a natural fact.

Revisiting Modernist Poetry

• T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men"
• It was conceived as an epilogue of The Waste Land. It was published in 1925, and its first epigraph recalls the spiritual and ideological emptiness depicted by Conrad in Heart of Darkness. The second epitaph relates to the "Old Guy" (Guy Fawkes). Both figures introduce the poem's hollow men by indicating both what they are and what they're not. The Hollow people are morally dead and are not energetic as Kurtz or Fawkes.
• The poem displays the characteristic features of the author:
• repetition and anaphora
• representation of a fragmented reality through a variety of voices
• blank or free verse
• intense use of imagery and allusion
• Eliot pays some attention to end rhyme in the first four parts: the final word of most stanzas rhyme with some previous en word. It is written ina simpler and sparer accentual mode than The Waste Land. He made efforts to resemble conversation and composed his poem in rather short, sometimes harsh lines, with two or three major stresses among any number of unstressed syllables. The occasion four stressed lines reinforce the ceremonial tone.
• Parallel and repetitive structures provide rhythm to the poem and emphasize diction and ideas. Caesuras, punctuation, and enjambment also guide the rhythmic reading of the line.
• According to the author, the title blended William Morris's "The Hollow Land" and Kipling's "The Broken Men." Some critics observed a debt to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Others detect parallelism between these hollow creatures and the straw figures of fertility rites. Finally, others traced the title to the Roman ritual of casting straw puppets into the Tiber to divert demonic attention from real human beings.
• The poem is a sarcastic elegy that involves a quest and a failure.

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• Structure - The poem is episodic and fragmentary, despite the collectivity suggested by the plural form of the term "men". The people in the poem seem to be predisposed towards spiritual disunion. The physical wasteland runs parallel to the moral and emotional barrenness of these human beings.. Only the shadow (black, negation) impregnates their lives.
• The structural and thematic quest involves a balance between the physical and the abstract. The impossibility of reconciliation is conveyed in contrast between the imagery of motion and the imagery of inaction, articulated in a "motion between two sphered of existence (and) the inability to find an acceptable truth creates images of frustrated inertia."(Urquhart)
• "leaning together" advances the generalized immobility sensed throughout the lines. The leaning directs towards the center, which resembles the final "whimper". The image of circular motion "round the prickly pear" suggests energy without result. All the sections communicate the growing tension between motion and immobility and advancement towards frustration and despair.
• Action/stasis - hollow/stuffed - tenderness/stone - Here/there (a physical world and its abstract counterpart)
• Here refers to the wasteland inhabited by the hollow men; there is the "death's dream kingdom," a territory of unrealized possibilities. Both kingdoms will meet in the last section, pointing to a dreadful circularity of existence.
• The poem's fragmentary arrangement corresponds to the fragmentary presentation of the characters: Hands, voices, lips, eyes... A synecdochical conception of human beings (counter to the de indissoluble selves pursued by Modernistas). A completely disembodied portrayal "shape without form, shade without color / paralyzed force, gesture without emotion". Another sign of rupture us the broken prayer ("life is very long") and the discontinuous ("For thine is / Life is / For Thine is the")
• A desolate, fatigued tone impregnates the lives of the hollow people. Diction and repetitive structures confer a ceremonial air, but the poem also suggests exhaustion of the language ("We group / and avoid speech").
• Concepts are dismissed as mere signifiers, which intensifies the liturgical rhythm but unveils and skepticism about words and their meaning, for shadows fall in between and destroy the connection, leading to creative aridity.
• The myth of the Fisher King resonates in the use of natural imagery. The FK was a central image in the Grail legends. The poem is concerned with the sterility of land, and a collectivity of hollow men bears the guilt for the land's misfortune. They are presented as mutilated as Tiresias in a twilight kingdom that is only a shadow of what it used to be.
• The title's reference to the male members of the community points to impotence. Vegetation is used as imagery of this degradation, not of plenitude. "dried grass," "cactus land," "prickly pear" violently contrast with the desired multifoliate rose (Dante Alighieri's symbol of Heaven & traditional symbol of female sexual organs)

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• Ezra Pound - "In a Station of the Metro"
• The poem epitomizes the author's interest in the image as speech. It is illustrative of the use of compression, sharp visual imagery, and juxtaposition. It is an urban poem that responds to the technological and capitalist scenario.
• The poem displays the influences of Orientalism. In particular of haikus, poems of seventeen syllables that present a clear and concise picture. Its intention is to excite a particular emotion and provide spiritual insight. The haiku reveals the poet's communion with nature in which senses play a significant role.
• The fusion of subject and object is evident. The speaking "I" almost disappears to bring to life a scene, so the poetic voice speaks indirectly. The speaker is a viewer of the scene, which gains artistic existence because the voice observes it and makes it participate in his or her consciousness.
• In an instant of time, the viewer comes into contact with a situation. But the situation and the moment are experienced and objectified by the subject, leading to a union of the inside and outside. The scene is perceived by a subject that ultimately disappears from the poem.
• Images are juxtaposed, neither linked by grammatical connectors nor by the trope of comparison. Standing one beside the other, any sense of priority among them is foreclosed.
• Concentration is a key feature of the poem. An image represents a texture ("wet") and visual impact ("petals", "black bough") of the scene. The two lines comprise the impression caused by a fragment of life.
• Modernist disregard for ornamentation in terms of diction and tone are evident. Also favoring the harsh simplicity and exactitude of ordinary language and manifesting the instantaneity of the sensation. The impression lasts an instant, and so does its validity. The poet avoids abstraction and rhetoric so that the concreteness of the object is achieved.
• The choice of words (diction) suggests the bleak impersonality of city life. The overcrowded Paris commuters are revealed in the image "faces". "Apparition" adds a gloomy touch and suggests suddenness.
• The poem conforms to the prosodic freedom advocated by most Modernist poets. The lack of regular rhythm and rhyme welcomes the use of parallelism to achieve some rhythmic effect -> repetition of the agent-less and action-less grammatical structure (including the title). This repetition underlines the fragmentary effect and echoes modernist fragmented perception.

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• William Carlos Williams - "This is just to say."
• Often considered an Objectivist poet - an offshoot of Imagism that emphasized the poems themselves as objects. He was a poet of the local, rendering precise moments. His poems "attend to the thing in itself".
• The poem shows an apparent simplicity because of its lack of scholarly references or cultural allusions. But the poem guides the reader's attention to its complex underside, suggesting the extraordinary in the ordinary.
• Unconventional punctuation invests the poem with a peculiar rhythmic pattern. The poem projects a personal organization of lines and words through the absence of the expected punctuation marks. The metric pattern relies more on lengths than on the number of stressed and unstressed syllables. The formal distribution of lines enhances the idea of a metric pattern in the absence of one. Enjambment accelerates the rhythm and makes it similar to regular speech.
• The poem shows an absence of a theme or main idea. The adverb "just" deprives the poem of a superior or ulterior significance and grants the air of a note on the fridge. The readers' attention is directed towards the words themselves and not too hidden meanings.
• The author strove for a poetic language that echoed American speech and lacked Eliot or Pound's erudite allusions. He employs common speech, ordinary words put into poetic form. The explicit "you" reflects his interest in commonly spoken utterances, enhanced by the fluency of its syntax. The term "icebox" evidences American English and ordinary experience shows throughout its lines, which suggests a domestic scene through diction: "breakfast", "icebox", etc.
• In his effort to mane the object speaks for itself, rather than describing it, he used very vivid imagery. Some critics detect erotic overtones due to the sensuality conveyed by plums.
• The tone is ironic: the voice apologizes but shows delight in his "crime". The I is soon disregarded and the poet concentrates on the image. Williams thus objectifies the experience and depersonalizes it by making the object stand out in its specificity - Not any plums, those plums.
• In summary, his minimalist method comprises a preference for American vernacular, a photographic style, a geographic and creative distance from the other cosmopolitan authors, and the use of a non-academic language.

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• Wallace Stevens - "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock"
• This poem problematizes Stevens' pursuit of meaning in life. Critics have interpreted his poetry as a celebration of the transient but meaningful satisfaction provided by ordinary experience. The readers' attention is guided by the aesthetic energy that the poet discovers in reality, an aesthetic and temporary order out of the chaos of life: ordinary versus extraordinary experience. A mild reproach of the conventionalities and conformities of middle-class life.
• The poem lacks a regular metric pattern and a visible structure or stanza. However, a certain rhythmic effect is achieved, and some casual rhyme contributes to the poem's overall musicality.
• Focusing on the syntax, careful punctuation, and adverbial clauses, the reader can perceive a more narrative style than other poems in the unit. The last four verses are, in fact, a complete statement.
• The poem is fragmentary in terms of the perception of experience. The imagery of the colored ghostly gowns creates a perceivable sensation. The poet attempts to recreate disillusionment itself, so the poem shifts from subject to object.
• The poem gives voice to a topic frequently explored by Modernists: failure of expectations. Here related to the night and its unfulfilled promises. The title reduces a wide span of time to a much shorter segment, quicker and more apprehensible. Disillusionment is conveyed by color, which closes distinctiveness or totally dissolves in the darkness. The reader's attention is guided to diction and sensorial imagery more than structure or prosody. The connotations of colors are personal, not generalized.
• People are impregnated with the anodyne quality of the night and do not possess unusual or special dreams. Exotism counterbalances dullness with evocative colors and odd-sounding words ("baboons," "periwinkles"), much to the author's liking of aural suggestiveness.
• He shows a rather playful attitude towards disillusionment as if he had cast aside the origin of the emotion and had instead detected the aesthetical possibilities.
• Wallace celebrated the beauty of the ephemeral in life. The Symbolist legacy is present in the attention paid to color and sound imagery, which confers an exotic air to his poetry. He was also a poet of abstractions who sought an order in apparent chaos and explored the interplay between reality and imagination.

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• Robert Frost - "After Apple-picking"
• The poem was published in his second collection of poems, North of Boston, in 1914. The author attempt to write in the American idiom, employing the vernacular and stressing common scenes. He sought the beauty of poetic musicality, and so, some of his poems maintained the restraint of the poetic form provided by rhyme, rhythm, stanzaic structure, and so forth. He was not an Imagist poet since he gave preference to sound oversight. Prosody became central in his verse, particularly intonation for its musical and dramatic possibilities.
• The poem is written in blank verse (iambic verse, mostly in pentameters, regardless of the varying length of its lines)—preference for the traditional poetic forms and delight in rhythm and rhyme.
• The poem has a narrative flavor for its descriptive, commenting, and reporting diction. This poem stresses action through its peculiar use of words. The title points to change and action. Many of his poems are entitled after physical occupations, which evidenced his personal circumstances as a poet who needed to sustain himself and his family—interesting conjunction of time ("After") and work ("apple-picking").
• The poem deals with a simple event that nevertheless discloses complex implications. The poem "dissolves into a kind of dream world," the literal and the dream world overlapping as in a superimposed photograph. The juxtaposition of apparently opposite concepts has its counterpart at a sound level of the poem, whose rhyme and rhythm remind the reader of drowsiness and distorted states of perception. The word "sleep" is a pivotal term that seems to articulate the reflection proposed by the poet. Its repetition supplies with an additional rhythmic device.
• Frost creates a persona for the poem. The speaker is an aged person who has gained knowledge from nature, to which the meditative, evocative tone contributes. The voice exudes nostalgia through references to a lifetime, bygone activities, and its accomplishments and failures. The speaker is a narrator accounting for moments that he resolves through report and description. Diction referring to an action, connecting words, and references to time and place organize the speakers' experience into narrative structures. He's not only communicating but telling.
• Frost has been often defined as a "Nature poet". he railed heavily on sound and prosodic effects to capture what he termed "recognition". he used traditional poetic devices such as rhyme, meter, and stanza in combination with flexible syntax and blended the legacy of classic pastoral forms with the New England natural setting.