Modernism in Poetry

new

« Prev
1
Next »

biglin
Jnr. Member

Posts: 65

Modernism in Poetry Dec 27, 2020 18:42:42 GMT -5

Quote

Post by biglin on Dec 27, 2020 18:42:42 GMT -5

Modernism in Poetry: Part One - the first fifty years

Is there such a thing as modern poetry? Or even modernist poetry? Did some mysterious sea-change come across poems written in English in, say, 1890, 1900, 1909, 1911, or 1917, or 1918, or any other equally plausible but arbitrary date?

Literary critics love to invent schools of poetry and to pigeon-hole entire eras under some aspect which they favour. Sometimes this can make sense; the gulf between Anglo-Saxon poetry, which continued to be written until the 1300s, and mediaeval poets is vast but easily explained. Without a glossary, Angl0-Saxon is virtually incomprehensible today, whereas Chaucer, Langland and other mediaeval writers are using an English we can more or less understand without needing a translation or too many notes.

Modernism is an even harder concept to pin down than romanticism. People first started talking about 'modern poetry' round about the 1880s, and what they meant by the term in those days was using a more vernacular type of language, avoiding archaism, and using a sentence structure closer to speech. Poets like Robert Buchanan, W E Henley, Rudyard Kipling and JOhn Davidson were the leading exponents of this style.

Then, in the 1890s, a new 'school' arose, known as symbolists or, by their enemies, 'decadents.' Its leading lights were Dowson, Symons, Wilde (and to a considerable extent) Yeats. They generally wrote short poems, exemplifying sound over sense, form over content, and frequently using striking imagery in ways that often anticipated the later devices of the surrealists. Their main inspiration were French poets, particularly Baudelaire, Mallarme, Verlaine, Rimbaud and Laforgue, and it was this school which was to have the decisive impact upon Eliot.

Two crucial transitional figures were Harold Monro, editor of 'Poetry Review,' and A R Orage, editor of 'The New Age.' Between them they launched the careers of almost every significant figure in British and American poetry between 1909 and 1922.

Essentially, there were four movements in verse between that period, each one in different ways impacted decisively upon poetry in English. BY now much of the changes involved close collaboration between British and American poets in a way that had been rare in the previous century. Each one of these movements saw itself as being the 'true' modernism.

The first of these movements to flower was Imagism. Contrary to later claims by Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell, this was invented by a British poet, Edward Storer. In 1909 he published a fine collection called 'Mirrors of Illusion' and also began having work published in 'The New Age,' Together with his friends T E Hulme and F S Flint, he set about the task of bringing a new freshness to poetry in English. Other poets soon became involved, most notably Florence Farr, Wyndham Lewis and Pound.

Pound and Lewis soon began to intellectualise the movement and to lay down 'rules' for Imagist poetry. A few 'Trojan horses' like D H Lawrence also became briefly involved but, like Pound and Lewis, were too individualistic to be confined within the framework of any movement.

Pound recruited other Americans, most notably Hilda Doolittle (HD), Amy Lowell, John Gould Fletcher, John Hall Wheelock, and (very briefly) Eliot. Of this group, only HD pursued a consistently imagist path and her poems really are stunning miniature masterpieces. Wheelock and Fletcher are also underrated poets, whereas Lowell lacked the talent to produce much of any significance.

By 1917, Imagism as a coherent school of poetry had collapsed, but its impact was out of all proportion to its brief heyday. Like a mayfly, its short life was brilliant and helped to change the future of poetry written in the English language for ever.

A parallel movement, which at first seemed complementary to Imagism, and is nowadays too frequently and too rigorously set aside from it, was the Georgian movement.This officially began in 1912, though it had been stirring for a few years previously. In 1911, an event happened which at the time (and, in hindsight, rightly) was looked on as marking a 'new spirit in verse.'

That year saw the publication of a long poem by John Masefield, called 'The Everlasting Mercy.' Nowadays it looks very tame stuff indeed, but in 1911 it roused a storm of controversy, particularly by its use of colloquial and slangy language.

Next year saw the publication of the first of many 'Georgian Poetry' anthologies. Pound, who always had a foot in both camps, was to have contributed to it, as was Frost, but at the last minute the editor decided not to include any Americans. Georgian poetry was primarily focused upon using language in afresh, simple and natural fashion. Unfortunately, with the exception of Lawrence and a few other poets, the quality of the contributors did not match their reforming zeal. Monro, who, like Pound, was a poet in both camps, championed Eliot, Pound and the Imagists as well as the Georgians. He was a crucial figure in terms of making poetic modernism acceptable.

Various minor movements, principally Vorticism and Futurim, came and went, having more impact in terms of publicity and shock value than in terms of producing any significant body of work. Then the next wave of modernism broke, this time in Europe.

Tristan Tzara, Hans Arp and various minor figures launched what was known as Dada or Dadaism. It was radically nihilistic in its philosophy and totally experimental in its approach to writing and art in general.

Dada was the punk rock of its day and Tzara was the Malcolm McLaren of the movement. Not particularly talented himself, he managed to launch a major movement in poetry and art that had decisive and lasting consequences. It was Dada that popularised stream of consciousness writing, concrete and sound poetry, collage (the ancestor of 'found' poetry), and chain poetry.

Although Dada's destructiveness was liberating, it was too purely negative to endure. Only Arp wrote any Dadaist poetry that could be considered great, and before long it metamorphosed into surrealism. This used many of the methods of Dada but with a less scattergun apprach. As a result, it not only created great art but also influenced mainstream poets as diverse as John Crowe Ransom, Yvor Winters, Allen Tate and William Carlos Williams. Though none of them did more than dabble with the movement, it still affected decisively both the style and direction of their writing. Williams in particular was profoundly affected by surrealism.

Then came the reaction, what might loosely be termed 'modernist classicism.' The principal leaders of this movement were Yeats and Eliot, both recanting their former work and embarking on a poetic dark night of the soul. During the twenties and thirties, both men wrote their finest poems. Cold, brittle, powerful and utterly desperate, they remain among the most impressive work in the modernist tradition. They soon found imitators, principally Empson, Bottrall, and the early Auden.

In the thirties, another reaction arose, in which Auden, Day Lewis, McNeice, Spender and Roberts were the leading British exponents. American poetry from the 1920s onwards began to diverge markedly from British practice so I'm going to have to write a special column on how that developed and on the great names that began to emerge from the welter of experiment. In terms of the British poets, a return to the Georgian preference for simplicity, freshness and naturalness was seen, as well as the return to fashion of rhyme and light verse.

I'll write more about the developments after the thirties in part two, as well as writing at least one more part on the specifically American aspects of modernism.

Last Edit: Dec 27, 2020 18:50:04 GMT -5 by biglin

biglin
Jnr. Member

Posts: 65

Modernism in Poetry Dec 27, 2020 18:50:14 GMT -5

Quote

Post by biglin on Dec 27, 2020 18:50:14 GMT -5

Modernism in Poetry - Part Two: From 1932 to the 1960s

The 1920s saw a number of poets who didn't really fit into any particular movement but still produced work of quite outstanding poetry. I've already written a column about that neglected genius Dorothy Wellesley, one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, who has fallen out of fashion because she wrote philosophical poetry.

Other names to put in the same bracket are the Australian poet W J Turner, who was at times astonishingly bad but at his best produced a dozen or so poems - again, primarily philosophical ones - that are of major importance.

The Scottish poet Hugh McDiarmid also wrote major work throughout the twenties, thirties and forties but (perhaps because he wrote in Scottish dialect) has not quite had the recognition he deserved. McDiarmid could write darkly philosophical or beautifully lyrical verse, and was another excellent poet who was too individual to fall into any kind of school and has therefore been underrated.

Frank Townsend wrote one major philosophical poem in 1927, 'Earth,' in free verse. Again, like most philosophical poetry, because of the changes in fashion he is a forgotten figure but it really is a major poem.

Not quite in the same league but a highly individual poet and one who, at his best, wrote half a dozen great poems, was the South African writer Roy Campbell.

On a smaller scale than any of the above, but someone who, at her best, wrote three or four lyrics that deserve to live for ever, Sylvia Lynd crafted timeless poems of love and nature.

1932 represents a convenient year to start the second phase of modernism. The first phase of experiment had lasted from 1880 to the early 1930s, and in that year a seminal work of literary criticism, 'New Bearings in English Poetry' was published. It was written by the eccentric Australian academic Frank Leavis and was to determine the 'orthodox' view of modernism for around the next forty years or so.

Leavis began by deciding that modernism only really applied to the poems written by Eliot and Pound. He also threw in the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins as a predecessor but dismissed Yeats and the Georgians and gave very short shrift to the Imagists as well. Hardy, Browning and Meredith, all of whom in different ways anticipated many aspects of modern poetry, were also given pretty contemptuous treatment. Only Bottrall and Empson were regarded as worthy of mention as rising stars. No American poets were discussed besides Pound, nor any other British poets.

Nowadays the book reads like a highly subjective and somewhat bizarre expression of invective and propaganda, but for about forty years it was regarded as holy writ within the ivory towers of academia, less so in America than Britain but certainly Leavis exercised a strong influence even in the US.

In spite of Leavis' injunctions, British poetry followed a completely different path from the one he wanted it to be, which was essentially reprising 'The Waste Land.' What actually happened was that political poetry became the dominant fashion in Britain, backed up by the continuing popularity of the Georgian poets.

Away from the prevailing fashions, Roy Fuller, Bernard Spencer, David Gascoyne, Francis Berry, Fredegond Shove, John Betjeman and Dylan Thomas pursued their own more more individual paths. Berry, who was decisively influenced by the Austrian poet Georg Trakl, is the only really successful British Expressionist writer. Though uneven, at his best he is a major poet. Fredegond Shove wrote a mixture of nature and spiritual poems of such high quality that her neglect is quite disgraceful. She misses only by a whisker being a major poet. Fuller began writing in the 1930s although his best work was done during the 1950s and early 1960s. He too comes close to greatness and is another writer who cannot be pigeon-holed into any of the prevailing schools.

Betjeman is almost entirely known for his humorous or topographical pieces, but actually he wrote around a dozen or so poems with qualities of greatness. The serious side of Betjeman is grossly underrated and deserves recognition. Spencer, by contrast, was never more than a minor poet but one who had an unusually acute eye and whose work will probably still be read with pleasure in two hundred years or so.

David Gascoyne was a major poet, one of the greatest of the twentieth century. He was the only significant poet from Britain to make his principal platform surrealism. Unlike other poets, who flirted with it, Gascoyne adopted it almost as a religion and remains the only British poet comparable with Eluard.

Dylan Thomas was another poet who was either brilliant or atrocious. Like Wordsworth, it is sometimes hard to believe that someone who can write superbly crafted poetry of astonishing profundity could also write some of the worst lines in the English language. He was also too individual to belong to any particular school, though at times he flirted with Eliot's modernist classicism, with surrealism, and with the political poetry favoured by Auden and his colleagues.

During the 1930s British poetry was dominated by Auden, Day Lewis, McNeice and Spender, who influenced even poets who disliked both their politics and their work. In two crucial anthologies, 'New Country' and 'New Signatures,' the poet Michael Roberts staked out a bold claim for Auden and his school as representing both a new renaissance in poetry and the only possible way forward for verse. To the school of Auden might be applied the sixties slogan, 'the personal is the political.' Even love poems were expected to carry some kind of social message.

Of course this was only the dominant trend, and Auden and Roberts were too individualistic to remain satisfied for long by the constraints of their own ideology. Day Lewis was always essentially a souped-up Georgian, and none of the school wrote anything during the thirties that bore comparison with the major poems produced by McDiarmid, Gascoyne and Dylan Thomas. Before long, Roberts moved into writing philosophical poety and wrote half a dozen poems that are among the finest examples produced during the twentieth century.

As the horrors of fascism and communism began to repel many of the poets who had formerly advocated them, a return to a more introspective and even romantic style of poetry began. Thomas, Gascoyne and George Barker were the leading lights in this movement, which gathered pace with the coming of war.

A new poetic movement arose in Britain, known as 'The New Apocalypse.' As well as Thomas and Barker, Vernon Watkins, Henry Treece and Nicholas Moore were the leaders of this school. There were also of course the war poets, of whom Sidney Keyes, Drummond Allison, Alun Lewis and Keith Douglas were the finest exponents. Douglas really is a truly great poet, almost as good a war poet as Owen, and is no accident that reading his work decisively influenced the poetic direction of the young Ted Hughes.

Until 1953, the Apocalypse, with its loose surrealism, its preference for the imagery of symbolism and dream, and its frequently technically clumsy work, dominated British poetry. Then a new school arose, calling itself simply 'the Movement.' Its leading lights were Philip Larkin, Thom Gunn, Kingsley Amis and John Wain, and it adopted a radically different approach to both poetry in general and modernism in particular.

Essentially, the Movement represented a return to Georgian poetry. Surreal imagery, looseness of form and unrhymed verse, difficult and allusive diction were 'out,' as were poems dealing with philosophical or political subjects. In spite of the quality of some of the work produced by Movement poets, especially Larkin, Gunn and Amis, it represented a total rejection of most of the ground won by earlier modernists. Poetic technique improved, but the content and drive of poetry during the fifties was negligible and niggardly.

Of course poets rebelled against the Movement, as they had against all earlier movements. The most impressive dissenters were Jon Silkin and, of course, Ted Hughes. Gascoyne and Fuller continued to produce major poetry outside the fashionable tendencies.

In the sixties, experimentalism and variety began to return to British poetry once more. Concrete poetry, sound poetry, the Black Mountain poets, the Beats, even the influence of pop music, all broke down the barriers and created a new and richer poetic tapestry. Since that time, though there have been prevailing trends and frequent attempts to impose a school upon British poetry, no one movement has succeeded in establishing its dominance over the scene in general.

In my next column I will look at how modernism affected America between the 1920s and 1950s, which was so radically different from its impact on Britain that it deserves a column to itself.

biglin
Jnr. Member

Posts: 65

Modernism in Poetry Dec 27, 2020 18:51:55 GMT -5

Quote

Post by biglin on Dec 27, 2020 18:51:55 GMT -5

Modernism in Poetry - Part Three: American Poetry during the 1920s

In 1922, in spite of the huge impact that the American exiles Pound and Eliot had made on British poetry, back home verse was still a much more traditional matter. With the exception of Whitman, no American poet had succeeded in carving out a truly national self-consciousness in poetry, and the majority of them had remained, to a greater or lesser degree, imitators of the island across the pond.

A representative American anthology from 1922 explicitly compares itself with the British anthologies of Georgian poetry. There is no Eliot or Pound, but plenty of more traditional poets like Frost, and an apology for the failure of Edward Arlington Robinson to contribute a poem for the anthology that year. Some modernist poets are included, principally Amy Lowell and HD, but the bulk of the work is entirely comparable with that represented in the Georgian anthologies of the same period. Vachel Lindsay and even Carl Sandburg, who are included, are both far closer to Georgianism than to even Imagism, still less the modernism of Eliot and Pound. Edna St Vincent Millay was hailed in the book as a rising star but was hardly a modernist; John Gould Fletcher and Conrad Aiken were included but none of their work in the anthology is any different from those of British Georgian poets.

With amazing rapidity, this situation was to change fundamentally in America. Of the 'old guard,' only one was able to learn from the modernist revolution and thereby achieve greatness as a poet. Aiken tried and failed to imitate Eliot; Fletcher and Wheelock produced competent but inferior imitations of Imagist poetry; Elinor Wylie and Edna St Vincent Millay tried to reshape their language but otherwise failed utterly to engage with poetic modernism. Masters, Sandburg, Lindsey and the others remained what they had always been, competent minor poets.

Only one of the established poets in the traditional manner faced the challenge of poetic modernism head on. Temperemantally one of the least likely innovators of her time, under the impact of modernism, Sara Teasdale moved from being a good minor poet into a great poet. Her technique strengthened, her use of language grew more experimental, and her range of subjects widened and deepened. During the twenties and early thirties, she wrote some of the greatest poetry ever to come out of the USA.

Teasdale was not the only American poet to be liberated by modernism. The same was true of Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams. Both men struck out entirely new paths, not simply in American poetry, but in terms of poetry written in the English language. Stevens is less obviously a revolutionary than Williams, but his use of language, while more formal than his contemporary, is not dissimilar. Both men have an acute visual eye that saves them from the facile imagery of earlier poets. Though Stevens can never quite get off the leash, and is always seduced by European culture, Williams is the most quintessentially and self-consciously American poet since Whitman, whom, in many respects, he resembles.

If you compare, for instance, Williams' poem 'Spring and All' with, say, Stevens' 'No possum, no sop, no taters@ both the similarities and differences between them become apparent. Stevens wrote some technically beautiful verse but his work sadly lacks much in the way of content or depth. Williams, by contrast, is one of the profoundest philosophical poets of the twentieth century. Good as Stevens is at his best, he is a great minor poet, whereas Williams, IMHO, is a major poet. 'Paterson' alone secures his place among the true greats.

Other poets from the same period began to experiment with distinctive and primarily American voices - Marianne Moore, e e cummings and the magnificent Hart Crane. Crane is as technically gifted as Stevens but with far greter content and depth about his work. A transitional figure, much of his work could equally have come from a British poet, but then he found his true voice with utter majesty and power. He is the greatest American poet since Whitman.

Cummings was a true original, experimenting with orthography, grammar and diction. He created a tiny universe in which the world of Alice in Wonderland was the true reality. At his best he has a satitirical subversiveness that gives depth to what are essentially rather shallow poems, and it would not be too unfair to compare his work as a whole with that of Ogden Nash or Don Marquis, but at his best he achieves slightly more, Sadly, he was too often content simply to play with words and experiment formally rather than to externalise the modernist discontents.

Moore is essentially a descriptive writer, though at times she has the ability to inject philosophy into her radically new nature pieces. She is original but lacks depth and a comparison with Williams shows at once the difference between a superficial and a profound eye gazing upon the landscape.

In the thirties, of course, all this experimentalism led to an explosion of new talent, about which I shall write in my next column.