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Modernist American Poetry: Pound, Williams, Frost, Stevens

(Ezra Pound: “In a Station of the Metro”, William Carlos Williams: “The Young Housewife”,
Robert Frost: “Design”, “Apple Picking,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, )

With the inventions of everything from the automobile to the airplane, the vacuum cleaner to
the incandescent lightbulb, the motion picture to the radio, and the bra to the zipper, people’s
lives were changing with unprecedented speed. Many English-language artists, including
poets, thought a new approach was needed to capture and comment on this new era, requiring
innovation in their own work: the result was called Modernism, the largest, most significant
movement of the early 20th century.

Difficult, various, complex: these are often the very terms critics use to describe Modernist
poetry in general. T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is often seen as the acme of Modernist writing
—so much so that William Carlos Williams later compared its publication in 1922 to “an
atom bomb” dropped on the landscape of English-language poetry. The long, obscure poem
exhibits many of the techniques associated with the movement: use of collage and disjunction,
free verse, an unsentimental impersonality, and a dense web of references to both high and
low culture. However, neither those gestures nor the poem’s apocalyptic atmosphere fully
represents Modernist poetry, which is often, in its “variety and complexity,” difficult to read
and to define.

One of Modernism’s most famous slogans is a case study in its contradictions. For later
critics, “make it new” became a shorthand for the movement’s goals, especially its obsession
with artistic novelty. But the phrase, attributed to Ezra Pound, wasn’t well-known to the
Modernists themselves and, ironically, wasn’t itself new.

Wallace Stevens, another giant of the era, saw contemporary upheavals in a less pessimistic
light. His lavish philosophical poems explore how poetry might constitute a “supreme fiction”
that could take the place of organized religion.

Others sought a more decisive break with tradition. “Nothing is good save the new,” William
Carlos Williams writes in the prologue to Kora in Hell. For him, the new meant jarring
enjambment, vernacular language, and an improvisational style—innovations fueled in part
by innovations in the visual arts such as cubism and the readymade.

Ezra Pound: “In a Station of the Metro”

"In a Station of the Metro" is a poem by American writer Ezra Pound, originally published in
1913. Pound's two-line poem is a famous example of "imagism," a poetic form spear-headed
by Pound that focuses above all on relating clear images through precise, accessible language

imagery: the speaker sees a bunch of people in a subway station and this prompts the speaker
to envision petals on a tree branch. This shift is remarkably sudden: in just two lines—a
fleeting instant—the speaker sees both petals and a crowd of faces, and manages to vividly
convey both images to the reader.
 Including the title, the poem uses just 20 words—meaning there is nothing to focus on
besides the pair of images and how they relate to each other. The poem’s structure thus
allows for a clear association between the what the speaker sees (“faces in the crowd”)
and what the speaker imagines in response (“petals on a wet, black bough”).

The poem also notably doesn't use any verbs. Instead, it is isolated to the rawest, most
basic descriptions of images, which contribute to the spontaneity of the speaker’s visual
association

The city itself could be thought of as a tree, with each metro station representing different
"boughs" of that tree and people representing the tree's leaves.

Pound may thus be suggesting that despite their obvious differences, urban life and the
natural world follow the same universal laws. Or, to go a step further, perhaps urban life,
being relatively modern, cannot help but mimic the older, established form of nature.

William Carlos Williams: “The Young Housewife”

"The Young Housewife" by William Carlos Williams was apparently published in 1916 as
an individual poem, perhaps in an obscure poetry magazine, it was published in 1917 in a
52-poem collection entitled Al Que Quiere!

The Young Housewife by William Carlos William is a short poem that portraits the
sexism towards women. The poem gives the reader a lot of details how married women in
society are viewed. It also shows the reader what women are expected to do once
married. The Young Housewife poem has hidden views about women that are particularly
sexist. Through the eyes of William Carlos William it portraits what society thinks of
women. Their thoughts and/or his thoughts are not necessarily something a woman would
want society to regard them as. The beginning of the poem starts with the young
housewife walking around the house. The poem gives an specific time "At ten AM the
young housewife moves about in negligee behind the wooden walls" (pg. 619). The fact
that the author gave an specific time, it shows how controlled the housewife 's life is. It
gives the impression to the reader that married women must do everything at an exact
time.

"A woman 's light dressing gown, often made from a sheer fabric",(pg.619). By giving her
that description she is being objectified. She is seen not wearing too much clothing,
usually women that show too much skin are given a bad connotation. They are not
respectable in society, and are often talked wrongly about. The title of the poem itself has
a hidden message. "The Young Housewife", means that the woman could have been
married as young as the age of eighteen. Since she stays at home being the "housewife",
she is depends on her husband to take care of her needs. The poem gives no hope of her
being independent so she will forever depend on someone to support her. From this
interpretation the poem is saying that women are to marry young, and stay at home. Not
given the opportunity to pursue a career, and obtain a decent job to support herself
 William Carlos Williams minimizes the housewife by referring to her as "young." This
adjective projects her as juvenile or child-like; therefore, in the poet's mind, she is helpless
and incapable of making her own decisions. The poet further marginalizes the woman by
comparing her to a "fallen leaf." His choice of the word "fallen" is interesting in that it is a
genteel way of describing prostitutes, who are sometimes labeled fallen women. Therefore,
the woman is his own "fallen leaf;" a fantasy prostitute. Even more specifically, the speaker
states that the "shy, young housewife" is standing outside "uncorseted, tucking in her hair"
while she is "calling the ice-man [and] fish-man." By describing her in this manner, he is
further comparing the woman to a slovenly prostitute whose body is loose without her corset
and whose morals are wild along with her unkempt hair. There she is, standing coyly outside
on "the curb," announcing her presence to the johns, who are the cold and slimy "ice- and
fish-men.”

Robert Frost: “Design” (just read: “Apple Picking,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy
Evening”,)

Robert Frost's "Design," first published in a 1922 anthology of American poetry, reflects on the
argument that the complexity of the world proves that a supernatural creator (i.e., God) must
have designed things.

Robert Frost's "Design" describes a white spider on a white flower holding a dead white moth
(its next meal). Musing on who or what brought these three "characters" together in this
gruesome scene, the speaker wonders whether life is brutally random or if there’s a higher
power with an intelligent “design” for the universe pulling the strings. The poem ultimately
implies that the existence of such a power (i.e., God) isn’t necessarily any more comforting
than the idea that people are all alone; on the contrary, such a "designer" must have a twisted
taste for darkness and evil.

On the one hand, the sight of these three white figures might mean that the world is the product
of intelligent design—that all of nature’s complex parts have been finely tuned by an outside
force into one miraculous system. The speaker wonders if something or someone “steered” the
moth to the flower at the exact moment the spider was on top of it and ready to pounce. Other
elements of the scene also might suggest that it's more than mere coincidence: “heal-all”
flowers are usually blue, for example, but this one is white, just like the spider and moth atop it.

That the spider, moth, and flower are all white in color might also symbolically link these
creatures with purity and divinity. Perhaps, then, the white scene is meant to be a sign of God's
hand in guiding the world.

But the scene is also brutal: a creature is being eaten, after all! To the speaker, there's thus
something unnerving and grotesque about all this whiteness because it's so clearly tied to
suffering and destruction; it evokes not heavenly purity and divine love, but deathly pallor.
These "characters," the speaker continues, are more like the "ingredients" in a creepy witches'
potion than proof of God's love for creation.
In the end, however, the poem questions whether God exists at all: the speaker wonders if there
really is any sort of design to a "thing so small" as this creepy little interaction between a
spider, moth, and flower. In other words, the speaker wonders if life itself is too "small" and
unimportant to warrant the hand of a designer in the first place.