EXTRACTS from FRANK LENTRICCHIAS MODERNIST QUARTET.

Preface and Acknowledgments:

[American Modernists: Key Features]

The American literary culture that my poets [Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Erza
Pound and T.S. Eliot, Lentricchias Quartet] grew to know [] was dominated by
values that hostile commentators characterize as genteel. [] These genteel poets
and critics formed our poetic nineties, not to be conflated with the Paterian nineties of
British aestheticism. Our asthetes valued purity above all, the rigorous evacuation
from poetry of sensuousness and the sensual, and of any tendencies to social
representation. Our aesthetes were ascetics of circumambient gas. They flew from the
world taht capital was making (but so would the modernists), from what one of them
called the modern industry of prose fiction (the metaphor reveals almost
everything), a denigrating reference to the (then) avant-garde presence of realist and
naturalist fiction and all repulsive social references of this new writting: the classes,
middle and lower, in uneasy relation and movement, Americas new (and swarthy)
inmgrants, bussiness, money, power, sex, divorce, and other distinctly nonideal
preocupations of a postaristocratic literart world. (pp. ix-xi)


[They digested vacancy (Santayana)]

Of course, they were attacked [] for being out of touch: hopelessly nostalgic,
prudish, feminine, all enervated lyric inwardness. In Santayanas unfair phrase for
Emerson: they digested vacancy. [] They would have agreed, at any rate, that they
were out of touch: they intended to be out of touch; it was the nature and function of
poetry to be out of touch. [] Genteel poetry was a poetry of happily dissociated
sensibility. (pp. xi-xii).


Chapter One: Philosophers an Harvard, Circa 1900.


[Modernist relationship among Philosophy, Intellectuals and Society]

Santayana, James and Royce each addressed the future of philosophy and poetry as if,
at the same time, they were addressing the future of society, as if the shape of things
to come in some crucial part depended on the way writers and intellectuals conducted
themselves. (p. 1)



[Relationship between Modernist American Philosophers and Modern American
Poetry]

The apperenticeship of what we know as modern American poetry coincides both
with the big blak of American poetic history and the big bang of modernist American
Philosophy. [] It is no hard to trace links between sentences in Santayana and James
and specific poems and phrases in Stevens, Frost, and Eliot. But those are the
footnotes to the text of modern American poetic history. The philosophical Works
written in Cambridge in the last decade of the nineteenth century and first decade of
the twentieth, despite the attitue of traditional literary history, are not background.
[] The key works of Santayana, Royce are themselves collaborative modernist texts,
the original metapoetic idiom of the youth Eliot, Frost, and Stevens both expressions
and criticisms of the ideologies of modernism before the fact. (pp. 3-4)


[Santayana: The Sense of Beauty]

The Sense of Beauty [is] a treatise on aesthetics which can stand as a miniature of the
nineteenth-century preoccupation (via Kant and Schiller) with beauty in isolation
from knowledge, use, and morality. Autonomous beauty; not an elusive and ascetic
spirituality, but a special kind of play that certifies our final achievement of
humanity: our civilization, our happiness, and (key word for aesthetic idealists) our
freedom from al necessities imposed upon us from outside. (pp. 4-5)

Santayanas sense of beauty lies its evasin of two powerful trivializations of literary
experience at the end of the nineteenth century, two kinds of aestheticist extremity
which signaled two kinds of alienation from the burgeois life: on our side of the
Atlantic, thanks to the gentil cultural critics, [] the vaporization [] of the aesthetic
into the ascetic; on the other side [], the conversin of the aesthetic into private
sensuous delight. []