The modernists

Technical innovations in both poetry and prose were just getting under way, perhaps as a reaction to the plain style of the realists and naturalists. The large wave of Modernism, which gradually emerged in Europe and the United States in the early years of the 20^th 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 1909, an American woman named Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), who had settled abroad in Paris, France, published an experimental work of prose called “Three Lives” that would influence an entire generation of younger writers. 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. Meaning, in Stein’s work, was often subordinate to technique, just as subject was less important than shape in abstract visual art. The idea of form as the equivalent of content, a cornerstone of post-War War II art and literature, crystallized in this period.

In 1912, in the major Midwestern metropolis of Chicago, Harriet Monroe founded a magazine called “Poetry”, through the pages of which she would discover and encourage a whole group of masterful new poets.

One important literary movement of the time was “Imagism,” whose poets focused on strong, concrete images. New Englander Amy Lowell poured out exotic, impressionistic poems; Marianne Moore, from the Midwestern city of St. Louis, Missouri, was influenced by Imagism but selected and arranged her images with more discipline. Ezra Pound (1885-1972) began as an Imagist but soon went beyond, into complex, sometimes obscure poetry, full of references to other art forms and to a vast range of literature. Living in Europe, Pound influenced many other poets, especially T.S. Eliot (1888-1965).

Eliot was also born in St. Louis but settled in England. He became a towing figure in the literary world there and one of the most respected poets of his day. To both Eliot and Pound, knowledge of tradition is necessary for the poet to create “new” poetry. Another principle of their philosophy was “impersonalism”, which means that it is important to look at the poetry, not at the poet. Eliot wrote spare, intellectual poetry, carried by a dense structure of symbols. His modernist, seemingly illogical or abstract iconoclastic poetry had revolutionary impact. He also wrote influential essays and dramas. As a critic, Eliot is best remembered for his formulation of the “objective correlative”, which he described in “The Scared 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. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land” (1922) spun out, in fragmented, haunting images, a pessimistic vision of post-World War I society. From then on, Eliot dominated the so-called “Modern” movement in poetry. His other major poems include ”Gerontion” (1920), “The Hollow Men” (1925), “Ash-Wednesday” (1930), and “Four Quartets” (1943), a complex, highly subjective, experimental meditation on transcendent subjects such as time, the nature of self, and spiritual awareness. Eliot received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948, for his innovations in modern poetry.

Another Modernist, e.e. cummings (Edward Estlin Cummings, 1894-1962), called attention to his poetry by throwing away rules of punctuation, spelling, and even the way words were placed on the page. His poems were song-like but satiric, humorous and anarchistic. He was the most joyful poet of the Lost Generation. His first work was a novel about war, “The Enormous Room” (1922). It attacks both war and government. In his poetry, we can see the clear influence of both G. Stein and the Cubist painters. Like the Cubists broke their paintings up into many different angles or “facets”, Cummings loved to break the traditional poem into unusual bits and pieces. He made every part of a poem express his own individuality. He rarely capitalized the words we usually capitalize (like his name). He sometimes uses capital letters in the middle or at the end of words. Cummings hated the large, powerful forces in modern life: politics, the Church, Big Business. To him, real love can only happen in complete freedom. Just as Whitman liberated American poetry in the nineteenth century, Cummings liberated the poetry of the twentieth century.

Wallace Stevens, in contrast, wrote thoughtful speculations on how man can know reality. Stevens’ verse was disciplined, with understated rhythms, precisely chosen words and a cluster of central images. The poetry of William Carlos Williams, with its light, supple rhythms, was rooted in Imagism, but Williams, a New Jersey physician, used detailed impressions of everyday American life.