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Critical Survey of Poetry: Topical Essays

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Critical Survey of Poetry: Topical Essays More Critical Survey of Poetry: Topical Essays English and American Poetry in the Twentieth Century by Thomas C. Foster Introduction Twentieth century poetry has been variously characterized as romantic, antiromantic, impersonal, highly personal, chaotic, orderly, classical, TABLE OF symbolist, wholly untraditional, reasoned and measured, or incomprehensible CONTENTS Introduction —depending on the critic whom one reads. This radical diversity suggests a The rise of modernism fundamental problem with poetry in the twentieth century: It has no clear path The end of Victorianism to follow. Finding previous poetry inadequate to deal with the situation in which Cultural breakdown they find themselves, modern poets must create anew, must, in Wallace Decadence Stevens’s phrase, “find out what will suffice.” The modern poem is an act of Early modern movements exploration. In the absence of givens, it must carve out its own niche, make its Imagism own raison d’être. Symbolism William Carlos Williams The Metaphysical influence Walt Whitman and Thomas Hardy After World War II Surrealism Renewed Romanticism Eastern, mythic, and archetypal influences Moral ambivalence New Criticism Disjuncture and discontinuity The poem sequence The Bridge Paterson The Maximus Poems Personal sequences English and Irish poem sequences Crow Mercian Hymns The Triumph of Love North Renga Confessional poetry Beat and Movement poetry Whither? Language poets Martian poets Wit and humor Voices of diversity Irish poetry Women’s poetry Postcolonial poets Bibliography Not surprisingly, then, twentieth century poetry is marked by astonishing variety. What logic could successfully yoke together Robert Frost and Allen Ginsberg, Philip Larkin and William Carlos Williams, Sylvia Plath and Ezra Pound? None, so long as the category of modern poetry is understood to be a fixed entity; such definitions always aim at closure and exclusion. Nevertheless, it is possible to see all of modern poetry as a piece, and that possibility is what this essay hopes to explore. The rise of modernism Modern poetry began with a sense of discontinuity, a sense that the world of the twentieth century was not merely different as one century always is from another but decisively different, qualitatively different from all the centuries past. This sense of discontinuity was shared by the other arts; it was “on or about December 1910,” Virginia Woolf wrote, that “human character changed.” This shared conviction of radical change gave rise to the far-flung, loosely defined movement in the arts known as modernism, characterized in poetry by the fragmented, elliptical, allusive styles of Pound and T. S. Eliot. To believe that the poetry of the Pound-Eliot school constitutes the whole of important modern poetry, however, or that modernism was a cohesive, unified movement, is to ignore many of its characteristic elements. As early as the first meetings of the Imagist group, gathered around Pound in England in 1912, the diversity of talent, ideas, and aesthetics among modernist poets was already clear. Modernism was not a unified movement even in its early stages. Moreover, there were significant poets who did not buy into modernism at all. Against Pound’s famous injunction to “compose in the manner of the musical phrase, not the metronome,” there is Frost’s equally well-known statement that writing free verse is like “playing tennis without a net.” Against the heavily idea-laden poetry of Eliot and the New Critic/Fugitive poets—John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, in particular—stand Williams’s “no ideas but in things” and Archibald MacLeish’s “a poem should not mean but be.” The pillars of what is commonly regarded as modernism, then, found themselves flanked right and left by dissenters, as well as faced by independent thinkers within their camp. Modernist poetry, as commonly construed, represents a fairly limited if important range of the whole of modern poetry. If discussion of that entire range (and the diversity of British and American poetry is staggering) is to go forward, “modern” must be reclaimed from “modernist.” As distinguished from the self-consciously modernist, “modern poetry” can be understood to be roughly synonymous with twentieth century poetry, excepting the occasional reactionary or nostalgic poet and a few carryovers from Victorianism. The end of Victorianism Modern literature is less united in what it stands for than in what it opposes. In a sense, almost all writing in the twentieth century attempts to throw over the nineteenth century, particularly those aspects of it generally classified as Victorian. Both the sociopolitical and the literary elements of Victorianism come under fire from the modern artist, and the combination of targets should not be surprising, since politics and economics combine with literature in the nineteenth century to form what appears to modern eyes to be a uniform culture. While this uniformity may be largely mythical, it nevertheless has become one of the givens in discussions of Victorianism. Behind most of the philosophical, social, and political inquiries of the nineteenth century, not merely in England and America but throughout the Western world, lies the idea of progress, of a goal toward which society is moving perceptibly. One of the clearest manifestations of this idea is Karl Marx’s telos, the goal or endpoint of civilization’s quest for utopia. Marxism depends on this idea as on no other; the supposition that one can chart the course of societies with certainty that each will follow the same line of development rests on the unstated assumption that all societies are moving in the same direction, and that therefore there must be some goal toward which all, willingly or not, tend. Marx is not alone, of course, in so thinking. The utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, with its emphasis on “the greatest good for the greatest number,” builds on similar foundations: That act is best that, since it offers maximum benefits to the most members of society, promotes the greatest social progress. Other progress-centered developments in thought range from American manifest destiny (and other nations’ quest for empire, as well) to Mary Baker Eddy’s “Every day in every way things get better and better.” Nor is this phenomenon limited to social thought; the single greatest scientific contribution of the century bears the mark of its time. Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory is every bit as dependent on the notion of telos as is Marx’s: The result of the fittest members of the species surviving to mate with one another is that newer and fitter forms of life constantly come into being. The newest and fittest form, naturally, is the human being. That Darwinian thought is a logical extension of nineteenth century notions of progress is borne out by the readiness with which evolution was accepted not by biologists, but by social thinkers. Social Darwinism combines evolutionary thought with the already accepted mode of utilitarianism. Cultural breakdown Against this concept of progress lies its opposite, and what may even be seen as its necessary, complement. A society that is constantly progressing is undergoing constant change, which in turn means that traditional institutions and ways of life must break down. In The Education of Henry Adams (1907), Henry Adams expresses this idea in terms of the twin images of virgin and dynamo. The virgin, representative of traditional culture, symbolizes stability and order, a manageable, if static, society. The dynamo, the modern society, spins constantly faster, changing incessantly, leaving its members with a sense of chaos and confusion. While modern society shows progress, it also falls into relativism, since the traditional institutions on which absolutes are based are breaking down. Whereas the idea of progress was a product of mid- nineteenth century thinkers, the time of the Great Exhibition in London, the notion of cultural breakdown achieved its widest circulation late in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, receiving its fullest development, perhaps, in the work of Eliot. Nineteenth century literature, particularly in England, mirrored the development of thought in the period. It should not be surprising, therefore, that the chief poet of High Victorianism, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, was tremendously popular as well as critically acclaimed, and that the same should be true for the novelist Charles Dickens. The artists of mid-century specialized in giving the people what they wanted. Walt Whitman, the nineteenth century poet to whom American moderns so often look, would seem to be an exception. One must remember, of course, that Whitman’s work was largely ignored during his lifetime, that he was not a popular poet by any means when his work first appeared, and that the recognized poets of the era, such as John Greenleaf Whittier and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, worked with the public’s desires more firmly in mind. Then, too, even Whitman wrote directly to his audience much more than the typical modern poet (if there be such a thing) does, and his great poem, Leaves of Grass (1855), is a public celebration of the people. Decadence The late nineteenth century produced the expected countermovement, in which the characteristic poem is much darker, more decadent, and suspicious of the openness and health of the High Victorians. Under the influence of the darker Romantics and the French Symbolists (who got their own dose of dark Romanticism from Edgar Allan Poe), the late Victorians from the Pre- Raphaelites on demonstrate a tendency toward the sinister and the unhealthy, toward madness and dissipation. Prostitutes, drug addicts, criminals—all those, in short, from the underside of society, from the social strata largely ignored by Tennyson—figure heavily in the work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, the early William Butler Yeats, and, of course, Oscar Wilde. Their fascination with dark subjects and dark treatments shows a suspicion of the methods and beliefs of the earlier Victorians analogous to Adams’s suspicion of progress.
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