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Modern American Poetry

Plan
1.
2.
3.
4.
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8.

Modernism is an art resulting from contradictions.

Case study: Ezra Pounds use of Chinese materials.
The Chinese Written Character confirms Imagisme.
T.S. Eliot, Preludes
Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
T.S. Eliot, Fire Sermon
Langston Hughes, Merry-Go-Round, Weary Blues.
Lewis Allen, Strange Fruit
1.

Modernism is an art resulting from contradictions.

American Authors or International Literary Citizens?

I believe that in pinning these authors down to a certain nationality
when they were striving for international literary citizenhood does
not do justice to their works.
Sonja Streuber on the Internet.
Or is it a dialectic between these two definitions, which accounts in part
for what we recognize as Modernist texts?

In fact when striving for definitions of Modernism, a tendency to think in

terms of binary oppositions.
The end of Victorian certainty points then towards modernist
uncertainty [...] and an essay that deals specifically with this
transition is Daniel J. Singals Towards a Definition of American
Modernism, in American Quarterly 39 (1987). He defines
American modernism largely through juxtaposition with
Victorianism: relativism vs. immutable natural laws; integrated
human experience vs. moral dichotomies like civilized/savage;
experimentalism vs. didacticism. Singal sees resistance to static
patterns, or anti-formalism, as a trend that identifies and

distinguishes this period, and he points out that such Modernism

began well before the Armory Show.
John Frederic Utz on the Internet.
One could argue that Modernism characteristically is an art that is created
from an intense experiencing of conflict, is an art resulting from
contradiction. And perhaps I should list a few of the possible
contradictions:
Reverence for Renaissance values vs. innovative deployment of
modes of abstraction, discontinuity and shock.
Enhanced sense of the appeal of the classical world and of an
idealised primitivism vs. a distilled sense of discontinuity with the
past, and the instability of social institutions
The nostalgia for the secure past vs. the impact of the urban
environment
The response to major political events vs. the importance of the
individual artistic sensibility
Validation and frequent practice of translation, versions, parody vs.
emphasis on the new and specifically modern.
spontaneity vs. reliability in The Good Anna but also
hidden /buried historical allusions to early or early modern history
Vs a flattened contemporary surface using continuous present
intuition vs. objectivity
Eric Homberger has described the conflict as:

The dialectic between the local, immediate pressures on a writer,

and the imperatives of technique.
Bradbury & McFarlane (1991), p. 159
and Graham Hough, writes:

The dialectic between tradition and innovation seems to be one of

the mainsprings of their work.
Ibid., P. 315
(much of that list is a distillation of some of the ideas put forward in the
Bradbury & MacFarlane collection.)

And of course one area of binary divide that has given rise to a great deal
of tension and also creative energy is that of gender difference. Coming
out of the 19th century with the rise of the New Woman, into the 20th
century, with the final ratification of the amendment to the Constitution,
which finally allowed women to vote circa 1920, conventional ideas
about gender roles were subjected to intense criticism and debate. In fact
once the battle for Universal Suffrage was won, it became clear that there
was a more subtle battle between the sexes, and indeed conflict within
individual psyches, in which the field was that whole area of gender role
definitions.

Summary: these contradictions include a sense of national identity or

global identity; reverence for nature & fascination with artifice;
meeting of Western culture and Oriental cultural traditions.

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4.

Case study: Ezra Pounds use of Chinese materials.

I will begin by reminding ourselves of Pounds first encounter with

China. It was through the ms. Notebooks entrusted to Pound as literary
executor by Ernest Fenollosas widow. Hugh Kenner sums it up
succinctly:
For He that would bring home the wealth of the Indies (Emerson,
quoting a proverb) must carry out the wealth of the Indies, and Ernest
Franciso Fenollosa (1853-1908), born in Salem and educated at
Harvard, took with him to Japan in 1878 as Professor of Philosophy
(Hegel, Herbert Spencer) the treasures of Transcendentalism, and
brought back with him from Japan on his last journey in 1901 that same
Transcendentalism, seen anew in the Chinese Written Character and set
forth in what Pound, who acquired the ms. Twelve years later, was to
characterize as the big essay on verbs, mostly on verbs.
(Kenner 1971, p. 158)

Pound worked on the Fenollosa mss. Including The Chinese Written

Character as a Medium for Poetry, first published 1918.
All that poetic form requires is a regular and flexible sequence, as
plastic as thought itself []
Perhaps we do not always sufficiently consider that thought
is successive, not through some accident or weakness of our
subjective operations but because the operations of nature are
successive. The transferences of force from agent to object, which
constitute natural phenomena, occupy time. Therefore, a
reproduction of them in imagination requires the same temporal
order.
CWC, p. 7
Note that Fenollosa / Pound feels confident in referring the reader to the
operations of nature, as some kind of underlying authority for poetic

method. The Chinese Written Character is then recommended, as in some

ways preferable to our phonetic system of language since:
Chinese notation is something more than arbitrary symbols. It is
based upon a vivid shorthand picture of the operations of nature.
CWC, p. 8
The essay goes on to talk in more detail about the form of the sentence
and considers various grammarians definitions. But it objects to them. To
the definition that a sentence expresses a complete thought Pound has
this to say:
All processes in nature are interrelated; and thus there could be no
complete sentence (according to this definition) save one which it
would take all time to pronounce.
CWC, p. 11
Summary: What Pound finds in the Fenollosa material is partly a
confirmation of New England Transcendentalism; which is to say
he reads it through his own cultural formation, and through that of
a Harvard educated professor of philosophy. So what he does with
it is more American than it is Chinese. However, Chinese scholars
confirm his intuitive readings of Chinese philosophical and cultural
traditions as being surprisingly accurate.

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5.

The Chinese Written Character confirms Imagisme.

Imagisme 1913
In the spring or early summer of 1912, H.D., Richard Aldington
and myself decided that we agreed upon the three principles
following:
4.
Direct treatment of the thing whether subjective or
objective.
4.
To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the
presentation.
6.
As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the
musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.
Upon many points of taste and of predilection we differed, but
agreeing upon these three positions we thought we had as much
right to a group name, as least as much right, as a number of
French schools proclaimed by Mr Flint in the August number of
Harold Monros magazine for 1911.
L.E., p. 3
In the same essay, Pound also says:

An Image is that which presents an intellectual and emotional

complex in an instant of time. I use the term complex rather in
the technical sense employed by the newer psychologists, such as
Hart, though we might not agree absolutely in our application.
It is the presentation of such a complex instantaneously which
gives that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from
time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we
experience in the presence of the greatest works of art.
It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce
voluminous works.
L.E., p.4
Dont use such an expression as dim lands of peace. It dulls the
image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the
writers not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate
symbol.

Go in fear of abstractions. Do not tell in mediocre verse what has

already been done in good prose. Dont think any intelligent person
is going to be deceived when you try to shirk all the difficulties of
the unspeakably difficult art of good prose by chopping your
composition into line lengths.
L.E., p. 5
Id like to consider a very simple Imagiste poems, that arguably
demonstrates the principles of the Imagiste manifesto.

Namely, Ezra Pounds In a Station of the Metro (1912):

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.
If you want to look at a thorough account of the genesis of this poem, you
will find it in Gaudier Brezska: A Memoir (1916). There Pound describes
how, if he were subject to this kind of visionary experience frequently he
might try to become a painter, and that this particular type of experience
might be best rendered as a series of abstract dots. He also says that
after the experience in question he went home and wrote a poem of
several pages in length, was dissatisfied with it, left it, came back to it
months later, and cut it, reducing it to half its original length, was still
dissatisfied, left it for another six months, and finally edited down to
these two lines. This becomes a paradigm for Imagisme, and for its
relation to the wordiness of late nineteenth century poetry, or to the

poetry of the Georgians at the turn of the century. Basically, put the red
pen through anything that is verbose, that is discursive, that is abstract.
Leave the stage setting to the readers imagination, get to the heart of the
drama.
What one also need to remember is that Pound emphasises music and
word-play in poetry as of importance:
Music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry
atrophies when it gets too far from music.
There are three kinds of melopoeia, that is, verse made to
sing; to chant or intone; and to speak.
The older one gets the more one believes in the first.
ABCR, p. 61
See also ABCR, p. 63:
(phanopoeia, melopoeia, logopoeia)
So what are we left with? Well, despite the immediate connotations of
that word image, with the visual imagination, and despite Pounds
emphasis on the visual, in his account of the genesis of the poem, this
simple little two-liner, packs a lot of cultural references. Firstly there is
the title: In a Station in the Metro, tells the reader that this is an
American in Paris, an ex-patriot writer, joining the increasing number of
expatriates who went to live, work and write in Paris, in the first decades
of the 20th century. As well as cosmopolitanism, it also connotes a
metropolitan experience. This is the 20th century, the age not just of the
railroad, but of the underground railway. So there are implications of how

technology is altering civilization. Having established the place and time

in the title, (Paris, metro, 20th century), Pound does not need to repeat this
information in the body of the text. The first line:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
emphasises human, urban experience. This picks up continuities with 19 th
century culture, where the theme of The Man in the Crowd emerges in
the work of the French poet, Charles Baudelaire and in the tales of the
American, Edgar Allan Poe. Poes short story with that title suggests the
following questions: What is the effect of urban experience on humanity?
Does it dull and anonymise, reducing individuality to a clich? Or, as
Pound suggests here, can it lead to moments of heightened perception and
intensity? The word apparition, suggests this. He has had a visionary
experience, something has appeared to him. Also, of course, one primary
connotation of the word apparition is ghost. So part of the vision, is
that this underground station is not all that different from Dantes inferno,
or a classical Greek Hades. This is an image complex, in an instance of
time: modern day Paris, Renaissance Italy, Ancient Greece. Or to use a
term employed both by Pound and H.D., this is a type of palimpsest.1

The image of the first line, is separated by a semi-colon from the

imagistic statement of the second line:
1

from the Greek, meaning having been rubbed smooth.

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Petals on a wet, black bough.

There is no like, as, or yoking together of the two lines. Modern
psychology and Poundian poetics assume this will happen in the readers
consciousness anyway. So what is the provenance of this line. Well,
unlike the first line, we are in the world of nature. And the image is quite
specific. It is an image of Spring, and of blossom against a bare branch.
In particular it could be an image of almond blossom, where the flower
comes before the leaf, and which Pound associated with Provenal and
with medieval Provenal culture, which often celebrated spring lyrically.
It is also, more abstractly, an image of hope; of life springing anew, and
exquisitely against the apparent blackness of death. Or, having recently
attended the celebration of the Chinese new year, and watched a
calligrapher, using just one brush and calligraphers black ink, carefully
drawing a branching tree, with criss-crossing boughs, and then carefully
selecting just one pale-cream paint to dot on the blossoms, I could argue
just as feasibly, that this is an invocation of the classic Chinese art of
calligraphic painting, reproducing in the line of poetry the equivalent to a
traditional visual motif. Either way, what we have here is a type of
modernist springtime lyric, located in the underground/underworld and
celebrating renewal. Put that together with the emphasis with the
visionary, with the having seen, the epopteia to use the Greek word, and

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the hidden meaning of this poem becomes clear. One possible meaning of
this two line poem is that it is a poem about the Mystery Religion,
celebrated at Eleusis each year, in which the initiand was allowed a vision
of the Goddess, Persephone or Kore, promising hope, promising renewal,
promising continuing life in the face of death, a celebration of the eternal
mysteries. By his palimpsestic method here, Pound recreates the
mysteries in a modern context.
Summary: The Fenollosa manuscripts tended to confirm poetic
principles which Pound had already developed through the
Imagiste movement. In both imagisme and the invocation of the
Chinese Written Character, we should remember that Pound is not
only interested in poetry as a medium to convey images. In each
case he is at pains to emphasise the importance of music in poetry,
and in both he is also interested in what he calls the dance of the
intellect amongst words.

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7.

T.S. Eliot, Preludes

Urban landscape. Title and first line suggests lyrical and even pastoral
context, but immediately veers into urban, with sense of detritus and
waste. Scents and images of steak, smoke, newspaper, beer, all part of
urban modernity. Technically uses a language beyond metaphor, a
language of allusion or logopoeia. Invocation of smell is both
specific and pervasive; everywhere and nowhere. The allusion to
smoking & hangovers, is a technique of suggestion, but
depersonalized. Its not the individual city dweller, but the smoky
days and the morning that are the subjects or agents here. This
deprives the individual of his own sense of agency and power and
identity in the urban environment.
8.

Ezra Pound, from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley

Forbes careless use of headings blurs complexity of the poem. Not a

simple war poem, but part of a sequence of poems, which attempts a
Jamesian novel in a tight verse form, derived from the French poet
Gautier. The larger argument is about what kinds of poetry was being
written in London during the war years, what kind of poetry (and what
kind of poetic persona) does it take in modern times to write a poem
including history. (ABCR 46) Poetic composition by sculpting sound.
9.

T.S. Eliot, from Fire Sermon

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Pound not only developed the principles of Imagisme, he also publicised

them in a theatrical manner, and he believed in them strongly enough to
bring them to bear not only on his own writing but on that of his fellow
poets too. Pound operated a poetics of composition by cutting, and I
sometimes wonder if an unconscious motive was to do with power, and
limiting the potency of his peers. The conscious motivation was about
retaining what was active in the draft of a poem, cutting the dross, the
filler, and them finding the form from the active lines that were left.
(End To Torment, pp. 18 & 40)
The point of reading these passages is to indicate that a modernist
aesthetic is not universal, since its impact can be different depending on
your gender. H.D. recollection of Pound suggests in her choice of verbs
that his editorial action was at the least high-handed and patronizing, and
that it could be seen as aggressive and phallocentric: he slashed with a
pencil. He also in patriarchal fashion takes upon himself the role of renaming her for publication. Writing in 1979, Adrienne Rich puts it
succinctly:
I had been taught that poetry should be universal, which meant of
course, nonfemale.

In the time remaining, I want to consider briefly another way in which the
notion of universal values needs to questioned.
(The Sacred Wood, pp. 54 & 58.)

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In the Sacred Wood, T. S. Eliot writes in an influential essay, Tradition

and the Individual Talent that:
The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the
man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the
mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material. (54)

And again:
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is
not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But of
course, only those who have personality and emotions know what iti means
to want to escape from these things. (58)

I want to suggest that the modernist aesthetic Ive looking at so far is not
only a masculinist version of modernism, but is also a racist one. That is
to say it assumes that the universal is both nonfemale and white. The
values of separation, perfection and escape from personality (i.e.
objectivity and detachment such as we hear in the voice of Tiresias) are a
luxury that only those who belong to a reasonably secure and powerful
portion of society can indulge in.
9. Langston Hughes, Merry-Go-Round, Weary Blues.
If one is a Blackamerican and homosexual to boot, in Harlem in the
1920s, social and cultural realities are quite different. The unreal city
presents a different unreality for Langston Hughes than it does for T. S.
Eliot. Very briefly, I might mention that the entrance of the US into World

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War 1 in 1917 had a sharp impact on African-Americans. In spite of the

domestic policy of racial segregation, they were summoned to serve by
the thousands in a war which was presented to the American people as a
war to save democracy, a war whose outcome President Woodrow
Wilson declared would bring self determination to oppressed peoples
(in Europe). Yet when soldiers returned from the war they found no
change in policies and practices of racial segregation in their own
country. Langston Hughes doesnt need to distance himself from emotion;
he needs to find an adequate vehicle for pressing political emotion. He
also needs to find a voice which will both speak about working-class,
Blackamerican experience, and speak for it in a way that doesnt alienate
his subject. Thus Hughes uses the African-American cultural form that
grew up in the American South during slavery, possibly as a result of
African slaves not being allowed to use the African instrument par
excellence, the drum. (But thats another story.) He uses the blues both as
theme and as form in his poetry.
10.Lewis Allen, Strange Fruit
To end, coming back round to where I began but with a difference. Pound
talks of poetry being close to music, but I dont suppose he had popular
music in mind. One characteristic of twentieth-century, American culture
is that the boundaries between high and low cultures are blurred, for all
sorts of reasons. These might include an ideology of egalitarianism, and a

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desire to erase elitism in cultural production, as well as the expansion of

possibilities that this blurring opens up. So I shall end with Strange
Fruit, which was written in response to the ongoing lynchings in the
American South, not by an African-American but by an American Jew,
who changed his name to Lewis Allen (see notes at back of Forbes
anthology). The blues doesnt just belong to Blackamericans, it is a lyric
form which can be drawn upon quite appropriately by others. And yet
Lewis Allen uses the techniques of imagisme to communicate the awful
unnaturalness of the lynchings, which took place regularly at least until
the time of World War 2, and beyond into the time of the civil rights
movement in the post-war years.
Summary: by looking at, and most importantly listening to, a small
selection of poems, Ive tried to demonstrate that critical discourses about
modernism tend to favour a European, or European-American, or
Eurocentric version of modernism, which emphasises a set of formalist
and aesthetic values, including composition by cutting and objectivity
and impersonality. However, I have also tried to suggest that this
account of modernism should be complicated by attending to issues of
gender both as sexual and textual politics. Furthermore, any account of
Modernism in poetry should also be complicated by the recognition that
there was more than one Modernism. The art of the Harlem Renaissance,

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exemplified here by the poetry of Langston Hughes, presents another, but

equally valid version of modernist poetics and practice.