Modern American Poetry

1

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 Mauberley
6. 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 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.

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 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.

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:

1. Direct treatment of the “thing” whether subjective or objective.

1. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.

1. 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.

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 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 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 19th 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:

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 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”.

1. 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.

1. 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.

1. 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 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: