2.

Pre- and post-WWII poetry: High and Radical Modernisms, Nativists and Expatriates,
examples of formal (e.g. Imagism) and regional classifications (e.g. New England), post-
WWII trends, schools, groups. Demonstrate characteristic features in poems assigned in
the reading list.
Pre-WWII poetry
 High and Radical Modernism


o High Modernism (Robert Frost)

 Order is possible – attainable through art
 Symbolic dualism of the phenomenal and substantial, e.g.: nature
 Frost poem: “After Apple-Picking” – apple picking is not merely
the act of picking apple but it also represents human experience
 Objective and subjective: natural and manmade, visible and invisible,
surface and depth can be interdependent
 They don’t necessarily represent 2 ends of the same scale, not 2
extremes that are never able two made
 Basic principle: art has a kind of mission to convey the abstract order that
is inherent in the world
 Natural – essential to be a representative, a symbolic manifestation of
human values
 Primary mover of their poetry is the metaphor (where based on
similarities, natural and abstract phenomena are brought together)
 The objective is employed to express the subjective (e.g.: “The Road Not
Taken” by Frost)
  The subjective is not necessarily an autonomous entity but it’s kind
of transmitting the objective
 Suspense, ambiguity that sometimes may confuse the reader
o For this reason, they take a good use of T.S. Eliot’s idea of
the symbolic embodiment of the emotional state – the
objective correlative (idea is in an essay titled “Hamlet and
his Problems”)
 High Modernism and its views and principles are rejected by
Postmodernism (mostly on account of believe in order)
o Radical Modernism (William Carlos Williams)
 extremely experimental
 The basic idea of art: individual freedom & poet’s individual freedom to
make as radical breaks from existing poetic, linguistic, artistic conventions
as possible
 Doesn’t believe in abstract order -> question: if art can or should attempt at
creating this order (the answer is a definite NO)
 Art = unconditional human freedom
 Should enable the poet to experiment and go against all the
existing linguistic, social and literary categories and cross as much
of the borders as possible and break down boundaries (Ezra Pound
quote of “Make it new”)
 Unlike in high modernism, the natural phenomena in itself is inherent
 No interpretative meaning
o Gertrude Stein’s Rose: a rose in itself may carry those
qualities that some readers of high modernism would attach
to it as a symbolic meaning
 Primary tool: metonymy
 Works horizontally as opposed to the vertical nature of high
modernism,
o A lot of juxtaposition and representation and interpretation
may not stand for presentation
 Value is immanent (benne rejlő)
 It’s independent of human judgement,
 The word stands for itself, we shouldn’t look for a meaning behind,
it is tactile, objective, take it for what it is
 Continued & expanded in the poetry of post 1945 period (Postmodernism)
 Nativists and Expatriates (easiest distinction)

o Nativists (Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg)
 Believe
 in the regenerative artistic power of American soil
  that American poetry is rooted strictly in American tradition
(falling back on the tradition of 19th century and even earlier Am.
poetry)
 in continuity, and the organic relations between reality and art
 Reality – a model/symbol for human experience and how art is supposed to
express this
 V extensive use of American themes and idioms
 Geographically covers the large cultural regions (they all produce their
own poetry)
 East Coast
 Midwest, within the Midwest more specifically Chicago (Carl
Sandburg)
 The South (the Fugitive movement)
 Harlem (African American poetry)
o Expatriates (külföldi(?)) (elitist pessimism of The Lost Generation)
 Much more closely related to European countries (France, Italy, England)
– Ezra Pound
 Falling back on traditions of European and other cultures (e.g.: Oriental
cultures) can contribute to regeneration of American Poetry
 There is a wider gap between reality and art – can be bridged by poems
 Formal (e.g.: Imagism) and regional (e.g.: New England) classifications
o Formal classifications
 Traditionalists
 Experimentalists
 Imagists
 Objectivists
o Regional
o Nativist/Regional/Traditional
 Frost: The Road Not Taken
 everyday life in Frost’s poetry is conveyed through the natural
phenomenon
 for example: in “The Road Not Taken” – the visual experience of the
natural phenomena is a catalyst for thinking about greater things/questions
of life (the myth of the autonomous individual in “The Road Not Taken”
taking the less travelled by road, but the speaker only really sees the
difference between the two paths in retrospect)
 Frost: Death of the Hired Man
 Later in his career he would learn different genres: lyrics, dramatic
monologues, a genre within poetry called duologues (a dialogue
between two characters in a dramatic scene), some political poems
and long narrative poems (“Death of the Hired Man”)
 “The Death of the Hired Man” is one of the less shocking poems, it
displays the vernacular speech of a character with their intonation
 and the monosyllabic words that they utter - husband and wife
talking about the faith of Silas, the Hired Man, and it is through
them, that the various existentialist takes on life are introduced
 His voice in these poems: plain rural sage (sage: wise man), also kind of a
moral sentimentalist who speaks up publicly on private values, and the
poet of the contemporary tragic vision that recognizes the kind of terrifying
power of the modern universe and how it is emptiness and exposure that
surrounds the modern man – many of his poems have melancholic and
bewildered take on human existence
 Farming – many of them related to activities performed in a rural
environment
 farming for him equates writing or the two fulfil the same functions, both
are activities that result in the creation of a meaningful life, and the
physical activity of both is a catalyst for the imagination

Post WWII trends, schools, groups
 Post WWII
o Social, political, historical changes
o categorization is impossible – rather: individual groups, kind of attracted by
certain aesthetic principals that can be discussed: sometimes writers don’t belong
to any, sometimes they belong to several at the same time
o in the second half of the 20th century, the emphasis is on the texture of the poems
– texture: form AND content, what and how is expressed
o 1st phase: lasts until about the 1970s, then there is a more contemporary one
 Groups
 1st group:
 those who follow the modernist tendency (not only continuing the
tradition but taking it a step further)
 believe in the possibility of order created by both art and within
that poetry
 they stress interpretation, they find it essential as part of poetry
 they believe in metaphoric and symbolic structures
 they try to be impersonal in presentation, they try to hide behind a
mask, a persona
 many of them are ironic, and employ several instances of the
paradox
 2nd group:
 those who try to break away from the modernist aesthetics by being
more direct and spontaneous
 their poetry is primary in oral form (example: Allen Ginsberg’s
“Howl”)
 they rely much more on open forms
  they operate with collage and concrete poetry (like the “Concrete
Cat” on the slide)
 they are very critical of Western Culture
 New York School of poetry
o represented by the poem: “Why I am Not a Painter” by Frank O’Hara
 illustration:

 extremely experimental and very anti-establishment

 the poets worked very closely with a group of visual artists
 the first few lines of “Why I am Not a Painter” gives a reference to
Michael Goldberg’s painting or the act of painting which becomes one of
the obsessions of the New York school of poetry – poetry and poems
should not be taken as final, finished products, but they should be
considered a process, how poetry comes into being
 many of the poetry composed reads very informal, the language is kind of
conversational in the sense that, for example “Why I am Not a Painter”
makes the reader feel as if the question was posed by themselves (like:
“Frank, why are you not a painter?”)
 the creation of the actual painting is also reflected upon in the poem, so
this is where the 2 artistic media, painting and poetry are blurred together
 as a result, comes a surrealistic juxtaposition
 the tangible nature of language is taken very seriously and even though the
style is very informal, it still goes against what Beat poetry would
represent
 Confessional poetry (Sylvia Plath: “The Applicant”)
o examples: Robert Lowell: “Skunk Hour”, Sylvia Plath “The Applicant”
o confessional poetry is a reaction to the tendency that said poetry has to be very
impersonal, and the poetic work has to be independent unit of meaning
(independent of biography, historical context, etc.)
o accepts the autonomous individual and the personal intone – used to express the
deepest secrets of the psyche
o confessional poetry goes back to Catholicism or Puritanism (one or the other) – in
the sense that there’s a confession act where the inner secrets can be or should be
expressed to obtain some kind of rejuvenation of life -> they do not refrain from
talking about expressing taboos in their poetry and by that redefining what is
normal
o subjects like addictions, sexuality, giving birth, struggling with womanhood,
abuse, etc. – these personal problems do not appear in poems as an
autobiographical element but the manifestations of their pain and suffering is
expressed, often from a non-participant point of view
 o there is a kind of distance achieved through a mask between the poet and the
speaker
o (example: Sylvia Plath experiences various hardships in her marriage and she
gives an account of her own experiences, or Anne Sexton in “The Addict” gives
an account of taking pills for being suicidal and how they numb it, it’s not
necessarily the first-hand experience that motivates them)
o many write cycles: they are connected by the central Ego, whose personal
experiences stand for and express larger social, historical problems
o “The Applicant” – could be kind of a “creepy” experience – as if someone was
shopping for the ideal wife as dictated by contemporary norms of how pretty she
is, how she’s serving tea, etc.
o Plath was associated with social movements like feminism, and it all started with
the very personal Ego talking through the poem
o Robert Lowell “Skunk Hour” – at first sight could be confusing, although it gives
as a specific place (Nautilus Island)
o it was written as a response to a poem that was dedicated to Lowell (the original
poem was titled “The Armadillo” by Elizabeth Bishop)
o skunk means the animal skunk
o When you read the poem, you go on a kind of nocturnal journey with the speaker
together with the skunks and cats and other nocturnal animals in this very fancy,
private island “neighborhood” (more like a very private space/area). The speaker
is walking out around sundown hunting/scouting for love cars where he would like
to act in a voyeuristic manner to see what’s going on in the love cars.
o In this sense “Skunk Hour” is kind of a confession of the speaker on behalf of
Lowell for being out and peeping into other people’s privacy
o By expressing it through the poem, it’s kind of a therapeutic process and he
expects a sort of redemption for doing wrong, or what is perceived as wrong by
society
Characteristic features in poems from the reading list
Robert Frost, “Death of the Hired Man” (1914); “The Road Not Taken” (1916)
 Pastoral stuff
 Regional: farming
 Long
 Duologue (2person dramatic monologue)
 RNT
o More traditional form
 Stanzas
 Rhyme/rhythm
o Choice
o Retrospective (TIME)
 You can only look back at the road you chose
  Now he knows he chose the less frequented road
 Realistic description
William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow” (1923)
 Experimental
 relies on erratic or unusual lineation
 dissolves the traditional boundaries between one thing, or idea, and another
Theodore Roethke, “My Papa’s Waltz” (1942)
 child abuse
 It rhymes!! ABAB
 Has stanzas
 High modernist (?)
o Waltzing as the metaphor for the beating
Allen Ginsberg, "Howl" (1956)
 Title: cry out, sound – a cry of protest, revolution
o Deep, elemental expression of despair/rage/defeat – animalistic kind of sound, not
articulate (inarticulate)
o You can read it as an invitation (verb), but more than invitation imperative
 Part I.
o First line (that’s actually three) (“It’s a good experience, even if you feel
suffocated”)
 desperate, emotion, rushing through
o “starving hysterical naked”
 The marginalized, minorities, poets, artists
 Positioned outside
o Doom but beautiful
 Sky lit up by
o Beat to the poem
 “who” – mantra
 Creates a kind of monotony
 Catalogue
o From Whitman
 Part II. (Moloch)
o Kind of demon
o Being fed by the mind and the body of the innocent
o Capitalism, military, police, machinery, wards, atomic bomb, but also The Mind
 Part of our minds
o America, the system
o Personification
o The air that we breathe
  Part III.
o Active identification
o Slows down
o Affectionate, loving
o Grappling w mental illness in a form of suffering
 Other parts: it’s rebellion
o Madness: a kind of a revolution (political)
o Ending: it was a dream
Frank O’Hara, “Why I am Not a Painter” (1957)
 The process of both painting and writing poetry
 Combines the visual effects
 Blurs them together (painting & poetry)
o Beginning of the processes: there are sardines and oranges as starting points
 Later on they both disappear, then reappear (just not literally)
 Reflexes on the creative process of writing a poem
Gwendolyn Brooks, “We Real Cool” (1959)
 Enjambment (soráthajlás)
 Alliteration
 No regular meter
 Experimental (?)
Robert Lowell, “Skunk Hour” (1959)
 Confessional poetry
o Confession: secretly watching lovers in their cars at night
 Intertextuality
o Love, O Careless Love
o “I myself am hell”
 An echo of Satan speaking in John Milton's Paradise Lost: “Which way I
fly is Hell; myself am Hell”
Sylvia Plath, “The Applicant” (1963)
 Confessional poetry
 Buying a wife
 Gender stereotypes
 Loss of identity (bc of social expectations)
Joy Harjo, “Remember” (1981)
 American Indian
 One stanza
 Free verse
 o No rhyme scheme/metrical pattern
 Repetition of “remember” – marks the beginning of each new sentence
 Enjambment (soráthajlás)
 Personification
o Moon (she)
 Metaphor
o “Remember the earth whose skin you are”
 Earth colors – skin colors
 Alliteration: “star's stories” (2nd line)
Layli Long Soldier, “38” (2017)
 Free verse
o Not consistent (but there were rhymes)
 Lil history lesson
 Def postmodern
o Metafiction
 Refers to itself as a constructed fiction
o TIME (jump between the two stories)
 Reflects on the creative process
o Explanation of italicized lines/words (typography)
 Imitation of the Indian American oral storytelling method