American Literature: Poetry

A

Regionalism

In the last decades of the 19th century, American literature had entered a period of regionalism, exploring the stories, dialects, and idiosyncrasies of the many regions of the United States. Dialect poetry—written in exaggerated accents and colorful idioms—became a sensation for a time though it produced little of lasting value. However, one major poet who rose to fame on the basis of his dialect poems was Paul Laurence Dunbar, a black writer from Ohio. Dunbar’s dialect poems, which romanticized the life of slaves in the pre-Civil War South, were extremely popular. His volumes Oak and Ivy (1893) and Majors and Minors (1895) brought attention to African American literature, although the dialect poems later embarrassed many black poets. Dunbar also wrote many nondialect poems, and through his work initiated an important debate in African American literature about what voices and materials black writers should employ.

Other regions and groups developed their own distinctive voices. Kansas-born Edgar Lee Masters achieved success with Spoon River Anthology (1915). His poetic epitaphs (commemorations) capture the hidden passions, deceits, and hopes of Midwesterners buried in the fictional Spoon River cemetery. Edwin Arlington Robinson explored the lives of New Englanders in his fictional Tilbury Town through dramatic monologues—poems written entirely in the voice of each of his characters. Many of the monologues employ the rhythm of everyday speech and reflect a Puritan sense of humankind’s moral corruption.

Robert Frost further developed Robinson’s New England voice in poems that can be read both as regional and as some of the most accomplished modern poetry of the early 20th century. Restrained, humorous, and understated, Frost’s poetry gives voice to modern psychological constructions of identity without ever losing its focus on the local and the specific.

Frost often wrote in the standard meter of blank verse (lines with five stresses) but ran sentences over several lines so that the poetic meter plays subtly under the rhythms of natural speech. The first lines of “Birches” (1916) illustrate this distinctive new approach to rhythm: “When I see birches bend to left and right / Across the lines of straighter darker trees, / I like to think some boy’s been swinging them. / But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay / As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them / Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning/ After a rain…” And while Frost’s images and voice seem familiar and old, his observations of New England life have an edge of skepticism and irony that make his work, upon rereading, never as easy and carefree as it first appeared. Frost delivered American poetry into the 20th century.

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B

Modernism

The early 20th century was a time of huge industrial expansion in America, and many writers found the conditions for creating art unfavorable in a culture that was so focused on business and making money. Part of the struggle among modernist writers concerned the possibility or even desirability of continuing to develop a specifically American poetic tradition. Many writers exiled themselves in cultures that seemed more conducive to art, while others decided to stay and resist through their poetry the growing materialistic culture.

One way to categorize the major modernist poets is to separate those who left the United States and wrote most of their poetry as expatriates in Europe from those who stayed in America. Among the expatriates were Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle (who wrote under the pen name H. D.), T. S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein. Those who stayed in the United States included William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, Langston Hughes, and Robinson Jeffers. Most of the latter group visited Europe at some point and flirted with the idea of staying there to write.

B

1

The Whitman Tradition

During the first half of the 20th century a number of poets carried on what we might call a Whitman tradition. They wrote in free verse—a rhythm that responds to the specific subject instead of adhering to a predetermined, set meter. And they strived for a poetry that would have a wide appeal and would help define and develop a democracy. Carl Sandburg devoted his poetic career to celebrating the power of a tough, free, democratic working class. In this way he shifted Whitman’s focus on individual identity to a new concern with social identity, an idea that culminated in his Depression-era book, The People, Yes (1936).

Vachel Lindsay set out to tramp across America, trading poems for food. His goal was to build a kind of mass participatory poetry through what he called “the higher vaudeville,” performances in which he led large groups of people in chanting his poetry. Langston Hughes, who became one of the century’s most important black writers, wrote socially conscious poems that sought to capture the black experience. Hughes used the rhythmic structure of blues music and the improvisational rhythms of jazz in his innovative development of Whitman’s ideas, and he insisted on a more inclusive democracy than even Whitman had proposed. Michael Gold, born and raised in New York City slums, wrote impassioned chants to American workers, often invoking Whitman. Were Whitman alive—so Gold imagined—he would have joined the Communist struggle to liberate the working class.

William Carlos Williams, a physician from industrial New Jersey, looked to Whitman as the source of his own American rhythms, which he claimed to pick up from listening to Americans talk on the streets. Williams developed forms that broke Whitman’s long lines into brief lines that focused attention on the concrete reality in front of the poet: “No ideas but in things,” he said. Williams’s massive poem Paterson (1946-58), released in five volumes, is an epic about Paterson, New Jersey. Williams sought to make poetry out of material considered unpoetic by conventional standards: his focus was always on the local and immediate.

B

2

Imagism and After

Early in Williams’s career he belonged to a group led by Ezra Pound called the imagists. Pound, Williams, and Doolittle all met at the University of Pennsylvania and became part of Pound’s self-declared movement to remake poetry, or, as he said, to “make it new.” The imagist credo called for new rhythms, clear and stripped-down images, free choice of subject matter, concentrated or compressed poetic expression, and use of common speech.

The poets who subscribed to this credo applied it differently: Williams found his new rhythms in everyday speech, while Pound sought his new rhythms in adaptations in English of Chinese, Greek, Provençal (southern France), and other poetic traditions. Pound’s Personae (1909) demonstrated his remarkable ability to write intense, beautiful experimental verse, echoing poems from other languages. Pound introduced the poetry of Hilda Doolittle as the model of imagism, and her chiseled and often erotic Sea Garden poems (1916) became for many the movement’s signature book. H. D., Pound, and Williams left imagism behind, but it continued to influence some poets for a number of years under the leadership of Amy Lowell, a descendant of James Russell Lowell.

Pound took his modernist revolution in a surprising new direction, building his brief imagist poems into a jagged collage that eventually became a massive long poem, The Cantos. While the individual poems that went to make up the Cantos were published in various forms from 1917 until the 1960s, the first complete edition of the poem was published in 1970 as The Cantos of Ezra Pound. This lifelong work invites comparisons with Whitman’s lifelong project, Leaves of Grass. Pound distanced himself from Whitman, however, disliking what he saw as the 19th-century poet’s overinfatuation with America.

Pound believed the poet should be a citizen of the world and a contemporary of all the ages, able to learn from excellence wherever and whenever it appeared. He and Williams debated this issue for years, Williams insisting that original poetry could emerge only from the local and the present and Pound insisting that fresh beauty could come only by encounters with the distant and the past, the lost and forgotten. Whereas Williams’s Paterson insists on staying in one place, Pound’s Cantos move through time, languages, and cultures—leading Pound eventually to a flirtation with fascism, which he embraced while in Italy during World War II (1939-1945). Yet both of their epic-length poems share a collage style, built of sudden, unexpected juxtapositions of disparate materials.

Doolittle also turned to long poems with her trilogy, The Walls Do Not Fall (1944), Tribute to Angels (1945), and The Flowering of the Rod (1946). In these works she turned to Egyptian mythology, ancient history, and a reconfiguration of Christian tradition as a response to the violence of World War II.

An important result of Pound’s push to build long poems out of imagist fragments was his editing of The Waste Land (1922) by T. S. Eliot. For many readers this poem ranks as the great statement of despair in the aftermath of World War I (1914-1918). Before its publication Pound condensed and reshaped this highly allusive, darkly suggestive work, which is built on fertility myths and the legend of the Holy Grail. The Waste Land has been read in many different ways, its meaning as unstable and fluid as its diverse imagery. Eliot, born in St. Louis, Missouri, eventually became a British citizen and joined the Church of England. Much of his later verse, including Ash-Wednesday (1930) and Four Quartets (1943), relates to his spiritual concerns and suggests a religious pathway out of despair and toward a renewed sense of purpose.

Some American poets tried writing responses to The Waste Land. Williams was incensed by Eliot’s poem, because its erudition suggested that readers of poetry had to be scholars. Williams, meanwhile, championed a poetry more accessible to the general reader, a poetry written in the language of the common person. He saw his own Paterson as a kind of local and optimistic answer to Eliot’s cosmopolitan poem of pessimism.

Hart Crane, too, viewed his epic-length The Bridge (1930) as an answer to Eliot. Crane sought a way to bridge the American past to a productive American future and reveal the wasteland of the present as a necessary stepping-stone to that future. The Bridge is a difficult poem, written in highly charged, symbolic language and suffused in dense imagery, much of it derived from American myth, legend, and history. Crane eventually came to believe it was a failure.

Instead of answering Eliot, Robinson Jeffers wrote some of the bleakest poetry in all of American literature from his isolated home in California. His bitter vision, a kind of post-Waste Land, is of a cold natural world that would be better off cleansed of humanity. With no hint of redemption, Jeffers’s poetry anticipates the dark tones of the kind of science fiction that imagines the world after ecological or nuclear holocaust.

Other modernist poets focused even more intently on experimentation with language and form. Some of their work was quite playful and some of it showed the influence of dada and surrealism—European movements that undermined and mocked the value and traditions of art. E. E. Cummings wrote highly experimental poetry that parodied the platitudes of what he called the unworld, a sterile modern world that seemed to him to strip human beings of their humanity. Using puns, unorthodox typography—words, all lower-case, divided and sometimes spread out letter by letter across a page—and other fracturing of traditional poetic forms, he created a playful yet serious, highly individual poetic voice.

One of the most radical innovators of modern poetry was Gertrude Stein, although most of her poetry was not published until after her death. Her work probed the ways that language ultimately refers only to itself, not to things of the world, and she experimented with multiple, shifting speaking voices.

Marianne Moore also wrote experimental poems, but her experiments led not to the shattering of form so much as the invention of strict new forms. She imposed on herself a discipline of precise syllable counts and elaborate structures, all in the service of precise, witty, and distanced observation of animals and other objects rendered in surprising metaphors. Her poetry scrutinizes the world and scrutinizes itself, always revealing a strong ethical regard for the things described. An incessant reviser of her poetry, Moore produced a small but intricately complex body of work.

Wallace Stevens created a cerebral, philosophical poetry that nonetheless shimmers with lush and often playful sounds. Abstract and often difficult, Stevens’s poetry seems almost the opposite of that of his friend William Carlos Williams. Whereas Williams believed ideas could emerge only from things, and that the poet must therefore attach words to solid reality, Stevens believed things emerged from ideas, and that without thought, there are no things or at least no things that language can embrace. Stevens began publishing his poetry late in life, and his work forms a mature reflection on the mind’s relation to the world and one way that the imagination can encounter the world. This encounter happens through the creation of what Stevens calls the supreme fiction—the belief that poetry or any art creates a meaningful order and pattern in life, an order we accept even while recognizing that it is artificially imposed by humankind.

One influential group of modernist poets from the South was dedicated initially to poetry that had a regional basis. But the main commitment of these poets—John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren—was to a well-wrought, ironic, and often indirect or obscure poetry. Their work led to what came to be called the New Criticism, a way of reading poems and other literature that tended to value work that was difficult, ambiguous, and that transcended its personal, historical, and cultural surroundings. The goal was a poem that could survive on its own as a perfected work of art. Their work built upon that of other modernists, such as Eliot, and encouraged a new formalism—that is, a return to careful craftsmanship and tradition as the primary virtues of poetry.

C

After Modernism

As noted earlier a period of inaction in American poetry followed the death of the great 19th-century poets and lasted until the modernist poets arose a decade or so into the 20th century. A similar lull came after the great poems by the modernists in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. American poetry paused as many poets imitated what had been innovative a few decades before and produced the new formal poems that New Critics called for. By the 1950s most of the major modernists were still alive but they seldom produced innovative work and no longer had any interest in continuing to lead a poetic revolution.

A middle generation of 20th-century American poets emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, most of them born in the second decade of the century. Many achieved fame, including Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, Theodore Roethke, Karl Shapiro, and Delmore Schwartz. Several came to be known as confessional poets because of their use of modernist techniques to explore their own psychology and their lives. These techniques included irony, collage, verbal finish (careful attention to word choice for the effects of sound or rhythm as well as for meaning), and wide-ranging allusion.

Berryman undertook such explorations in his Dream Songs (1964-1968), Lowell in Life Studies (1959), and Roethke in Words for the Wind (1958). Confessional poetry broke away from modernism’s dedication to impersonality and reopened poetry to intense self-exploration and frank revelation of personal experiences. Although the early confessional poets rarely used their poetry to explore political issues, their investigations of how personal identity is constructed laid the ground for a more openly political poetry that emerged in America in the late 1950s and was still written at the century’s close.

The confessional poets also became the first generation to teach the writing of poetry in America. As instructors at some of the earliest poetry workshops, they developed poetry as a subject at a number of American colleges and universities. Some of Lowell’s poetry students used his confessional techniques for even more intense and unsettling self-examinations—especially Anne Sexton in All My Pretty Ones (1962) and Sylvia Plath in Ariel (1966). Steeped in Freudian analysis and imagery, these poems tracked psychological breakdowns; and a number of confessional poets, including Sexton and Plath, took their own lives. Their poetry explored tortured family relationships and examined the female psyche, the female body, and the dynamics of mother-daughter interactions. Sexton’s and Plath’s poetry influenced the development of feminist poetry—poetry by women that questioned the traditional roles society assigned to females. Confessional poetry in general served as a counterforce to the prevailing mood of the country in the 1950s and 1960s, when the family was presented in the mass media as the source of stability and happiness.

Also important to the development of feminist poetry and a key poet in the tradition of political investigation is Muriel Rukeyser, whose poetry looks at labor problems and larger class issues. A contemporary of the confessional poets, Rukeyser’s work stands apart in its commitment to social justice. Another important female poet who is equally hard to categorize is Elizabeth Bishop. Influenced by Marianne Moore, Bishop was an intense observer of exotic and common things, always rendered in a most uncommon language, and many of her observations suggest a psychological dimension not unrelated to the confessional poets.

Rukeyser and Bishop served as disparate but equally important sources for the poetry of Adrienne Rich, who ranks as one of the most important poets of the second half of the 20th century. Like Plath and Sexton, Rich offers a probing examination of motherhood and of what it means to be a woman in America in a remarkable series of books starting with her first collection, A Change of World, in 1951. However, she moved beyond Plath and Sexton in discovering ways to apply her anger not to self-destruction but to pointed critiques and reenvisionings of society. Beginning with a formal and very finished modernist style, Rich’s poetry over the years took on a much more experimental form as she explored increasingly radical political positions and interrogated America’s assumptions about gender and the ways gender structures our social experience.

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