American Literature

The American Modernism(I)

(1914 - 1945)

Lecture Ten

Part One: Introduction:

I. The background of producing modernism1) Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) radically altered

the nineteenth century romantic view that nature, especially human nature, was benign.

2) Herbert Spencer and the "Gospel of Wealth" or Social Darwinism: reconciled individualism with capitalism by suggesting that the interests of each citizen as well as the interests of the state are served by free economic expansion.

3) The work of Marx, and Freud, as well as other great intellectual explorers and rebels had mounted an assault against orthodox religious faith that lasted into the twentieth century.

4) World War I in particular deepened doubt and reauthorized disillusionment.

5) Another source of disillusionment was the rapid transformation of American society that accelerated with World War I.

II. Modernism? http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10415a.htm

1) Modernism is a cultural movement that generally includes the progressive art and architecture, design, literature, music, dance, painting and other visual arts which emerged in the beginning of the 20th century , particularly in the years following World War I. It was a movement of artists and designers who rebelled against late 19th century academic and historicist tradition, and embraced the new economic, social and political aspects of the emerging modern world.

2) The avant-garde movements that followed-including Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, Constructivism, De Stijl, and Abstract Expressionism-are generally defined as Modernist.

3) Modernism in literature is not easily summarized, but the key elements are experimentation, anti-realism, individualism and a stress on the cerebral rather than emotive aspects.

4) The work of Modernist writers is characterized by showing the disenchantment, dislocation, and alienation of men in the world, and by the emphasis on experimentation and formalism and objectivism which are, in most cases, a reaction to the cataclysm known as the Modern Age.

5) Among American writers, the best-known Modernists are T.S.Eliot, Ezra Pound, F.Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and so on.

III. The Schools of American Modernism:

1) Modern poetry: experiments in form (Imagism)

2) Prose Writing: modern realism (the Lost Generation)

3) Novels of Social Awareness

4) The Harlem Renaissance

5) The Fugitives and New Criticism

6) The 20th Century American Drama

Part Two: Modern poetry: experiments in form (Imagism)

I. Imagism:1) It is a Movement in U.S. and English poetry

characterized by the use of concrete language and figures of speech, modern subject matter, metrical freedom, and avoidance of romantic or mystical themes, aiming at clarity of expression through the use of precise visual images.

2) It grew out of the Symbolist Movement in 1912 and was initially led by Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and others.

3) The Imagist manifesto came out in 1912 showed three Imagist poetic principles: direct treatment of the “thing” （ no fuss, frill, or ornament ） , exclusion of superfluous words （ precision and economy of expression ） , the rhythm of the musical phrase rather than the sequence of a metronome （ free verse form and music ） .

4) Pound defined an image as that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time, and later he extended this definition when he stated that an image was “a vortex or cluster of fused ideas, endowed with energy.”

5) There existed great influence of Chinese poetry on the Imagist movement. Imagists found value in Chinese poetry was because Chinese poetry is, by virtue of the ideographic and pictographic nature of the Chinese language, essentially imagistic poetry.

II. The Major Representatives of the Modern Poetry:

Ezra Pound (1885- 1972)

T.S.Eliot (1888 - 1965)

Wallace Stevens (1879 - 1955)

William Carlos Williams (1883 - 1963)

Robert Frost (1874 - 1963)

E.E.Cummings (1894 - 1963)

一 . Ezra Pound (1885 - 1972)

1. His Life:1) Born in Idaho in 1885 and raised in Pennsylvania, Ezra Pound

spent most of his life in Europe and became one of the 20th century's most influential -- and controversial -- poets in the English language.

2) Pound was undoubtedly a genius. Before he graduated from university, he had mastered 9 languages as well as English grammar and literature. After college in Pennsylvania and a brief stint as a teacher, in 1908 Pound travelled to Venice and then to London, where he refined his aesthetic sensibilities and edited the anthology Des Imagistes (1914).

3) Pound championed the likes of T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams and James Joyce and, influenced by Chinese and Japanese poetry, advocated free meter and a more economical use of words and images in poetic expression, leading the Imagist Movement of poetry.

4) He moved to Paris in 1920 and got acquainted with Gertrude Stein and her circle of friends (which included Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso), then settled in Italy in 1924.

5) Enamored with Benito Mussolini, Pound made anti-American radio broadcasts during World War II. He was arrested as a traitor in 1945 and initially confined in Pisa. He was then sent to the U.S., where he was deemed mentally unfit to stand trial for treason.

6) Pound was confined for 12 years in a hospital (actually prison) for the criminally insane in Washington. During this time he translated works of ancient Greek and ancient Chinese literature. While in prison, he was awarded a prestigious poetry prize in 1949 for his last Cantos.

7) In 1958 he returned to Italy, where he continued to write and make translations until he died in 1972.

2. His works:1) Pound wrote 70 books and over 1500 articles in his life.

2) His major work of poetry is The Cantos, a long poem which he wrote in sections between 1915 and 1945.

3. His masterpiece: The Cantos1) In this poem, he traces the rise and fall of eastern and

western empires, the destruction caused by greed and materialism.

2) He deplores the corruption of America after the heroic time of Jefferson,

3) The last part, produced from his own suffering, is the most moving.

4. His poetic features: Ezra Pound is often considered as the poet who is most

responsible for defining and promoting a modernist aesthetic in poetry. His critical theories have great influence on many important American and British poets.

Throughout the 1920s, he was much involved in most of the major artistic movements. He was the leader of the Imagist school in poetry. He believed that good poetry was based on images rather than ideas.

As an imagist himself, he advocated and followed the imagist credo, writing succinct verse of dry clarity and hard outline in which an exact visual image made a total poetic statement.

His technique came from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry. On one hand the stressed clarity, precision, and economy of language. On the other hand, Pound mused the traditional rhyme and meter in order to, as Pound put it, “compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of metronome”.

A Chinese imagistic poetry: Autumn

Evening crows perch on old trees wreathed with withered vine,

Water of a stream flows by a family cottage near a tiny bridge.

A lean horse walks on an ancient road in western breeze,

The sun is setting in the west,

The heart-broken one is at the end of the Earth.

《天净沙 · 秋思》马致远

枯藤、老树、昏鸦，小桥、流水、人家， 古道、西风、瘦马，夕阳西下，断肠人在天涯。

There are nine nouns or nominal phrases placed in the first three lines in isolation from each other.

To appreciate the poem you should link the scenes produced through these words up in your imagination by way like montage in movie art. So, a vivid picture like a story will be displayed in your mind: In sight of the beautiful scenery with withered vine, old tree, crow returning home at dusk, small bridge, river and households, a man, accompanied by west wind and a thin horse on the ancient road, is suffering from homesickness

5. In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

人群中幽然浮现的一张张脸庞， 黝黑的湿树枝上的一片片花瓣。

About the poem:

① The “Metro” is the underground railway of Paris.

② The word “apparition”, with its double meaning, binds the two aspects of the observation together:

Apparition meaning “appearance”, in the sense of something which appears, or shows up; something which can be clearly observed.

Apparition meaning something which seems real but perhaps is not real; something ghostly which cannot be clearly observed.

③ The poem is an observation of the poet of the human faces seen in a Paris subway station. It looks to be a modern adoption of the Japanese haiku.

④ He tries to render exactly his observation of human faces seen in an underground railway station. He sees the faces, turned variously toward light and darkness, like flower petals which are half absorbed by, half resisting, the wet, dark texture of a bough.

⑤ Repeating it, you can have a colorful picture, also you can feel the beauty of music through it’s repetition of different vowels and consonants, such as /p/ and /au/. Especially the repetition of /e/ in the second line emphasize it’s sense of music.

⑥ In this brief poem, Pound uses the fewest possible words to convey an accurate image, according to the principles of the “Imagists”. Pound wrote an account of its composition, which claims that the poem’s form was determined by the experience that inspired it, evolving organically rather than being chosen arbitrarily.

⑦ Whether truth or myth, the piece has become a famous document in the history of Imagism.

Homework: Search for Fitzgerald’s personal

information and report to the class. Read his masterpiece The Great Gatsby

and give a simple summary.