Modern American Poetry

Plan

1. Modernism is an art resulting from contradictions.2. Case study: Ezra Pound’s use of Chinese materials.3. The Chinese Written Character confirms Imagisme.4. T.S. Eliot, “Preludes”5. Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley6. T.S. Eliot, “Fire Sermon”7. Langston Hughes, “Merry-Go-Round,” “Weary Blues.”8. 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. Singal’s ‘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

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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 institutionsThe nostalgia for the secure past vs. the impact of the urban environmentThe response to major political events vs. the importance of the individual artistic sensibilityValidation and frequent practice of translation, versions, parody vs. emphasis on the new and specifically modern.spontaneity vs. reliability in “The Good Anna” but alsohidden /buried historical allusions to early or early modern history Vs a flattened contemporary surface using continuous presentintuition 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:

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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 Pound’s use of Chinese materials.

I will begin by reminding ourselves of Pound’s first encounter with

“China”. It was through the ms. Notebooks entrusted to Pound as literary

executor by Ernest Fenollosa’s 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

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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 Monro’s 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

Don’t use such an expression as “dim lands of peace.” It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer’s not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol.

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Go in fear of abstractions. Do not tell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose. Don’t 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

I’d like to consider a very simple Imagiste poems, that arguably

demonstrates the principles of the Imagiste manifesto.

Namely, Ezra Pound’s ‘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

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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 reader’s 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 Pound’s

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

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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. Poe’s 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 cliché? 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 Dante’s 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 reader’s

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 Provençal and

with medieval Provençal 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 calligrapher’s 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. It’s 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”

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

them in a theatrical manner, and he believed in them strongly enough to

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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 re-

naming 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.)

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

and the Individual Talent” that:

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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 I’ve 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 War 1 in 1917 had a sharp impact on African-Americans. In spite

of the domestic policy of racial segregation, they were summoned to

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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 doesn’t 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

doesn’t 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 that’s 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 don’t 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

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

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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 doesn’t 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, I’ve 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,

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

equally valid version of modernist poetics and practice.

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