Sintezaist Lit Engleze 3 - 2

UNIVERSITATEA SPIRU HARET Page 1 of 29 LIVIU ANDREESCU
March 2008
MODERN ANGLO-AMERICAN POETRY

“Sinteze” An III, LLR
Lector dr. Liviu Andreescu

andreescul@gmail.com
The modernist movement, which crystallized some time around the turn of the century, was the
first major trend in 20th century art. Its influence has been so lasting that it is impossible to discuss in
detail any late-century author without at some point referring to his or her indebtedness to some
modernist influence or precursor. Indeed, the century that has just elapsed was the century of
modernism – so much so that it has been argued, persuasively enough, that even anti-modernist
movements (post-modernism included) were ultimately an expression of the same impulses or
principles of modernism (Călinescu 1995, 222-5).
This discussion of modernism in poetry will consist of three parts. First, an attempt to offer a
general definition of modernism as a movement in 20th century art (and beyond). Secondly, an outline
of the modernist conception of the work of art, of the role of the artist, and of their relationship to the
audience. This will also serve as an occasion to introduce some of the technical strategies of modernist
artists. The third subsection of the Introduction will move to a more specific discussion of modernism
in Anglo-American poetry. A discussion of several famous modernist poems will be offered as an
illustration.
The exact meaning of the term “modernism” has been the subject of a healthy though
occasionally overdrawn debate, especially in the second part of the post-war period. It is useful, at the
outset, to distinguish between several understandings of the term (Singal 1987, 7-8). First, modernism
was defined by contrast with a related concept, that of “modernization”.1 In this sense, modernism
represents “a culture – a constellation of related ideas, beliefs, values, and modes of perception – that
came into existence during the mid to late nineteenth century, and that has had a powerful influence on
1
Calinescu (1995) prefers to speak of two opposed and interdependent modernisms: one rationalist, technological,
progressivist, the other critical and self-critical, engaged in a deconstruction of the norms of the first.
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art and thought on both sides of the Atlantic since roughly 1900.” (7) By contrast, modernization refers
to a process of social and economic development, associated with the rise of the modern bureaucratic
state, with the advent and the coming of age of the industrial revolution (as well as with accompanying
phenomena such as urbanization). Modernization started as far back as the seventeenth century. As to
the relationship between the two, as Singal explains,
[it] is exceedingly complex, with modernism arising in part as a counter-response to the triumph
of modernization, especially its norms of rationality and efficiency, in nineteenth-century
Europe and America. Despite that initial hostility, however, the modernist stance toward
modernization has typically been marked by ambivalence, with modernists simultaneously
admiring the vitality and inventiveness of technological progress while decrying the
dehumanization it appears to bring in its wake. (7-8)
A second view of modernism “equates it exclusively with the philosophy and style of life of the
artistic avant-garde at the turn of the twentieth century.” In this sense, the term “modernism” refers to
radical experimentation in the arts; a drastic rejection of existing norms and mores; a flourishing, open
exploration of sexuality (especially after Sigmund Freud and his peers revolutionized the understanding
of the subject); and a preoccupation for épater le bourgeois. “The entire movement, according to this
definition, was comprised essentially of a small number of highly talented poets and painters based in
the bohemian quarters of certain large cities, such as Paris, New York, Vienna, and Berlin, culminating
around the time of the First World War in the work of such ‘canonical’ masters as Picasso, Pound and
Joyce.” (7) Under this description, modernism was an adversarial, rebellious culture which sought a
radical re-fashioning of the era’s intellectual and aesthetic sensibilities. It originated in the elitist group
referred to above, but later spilled into an intellectual mainstream, or at least became influential enough
to make its authority felt beyond the borders of bohemia.
Central to this definition are two “faces” of modernism – the avant-garde, and decadence. The
first is a radical and utopian understanding of modernism as an embattled movement engaged in an
essentially civil war (Călinescu 1995, 92). The avant-garde is militant, deliberately and self-consciously
nonconformist, courageously visionary, dynamically exaggerated, fearlessly suicidal. It proclaims its
faith in the victory of time over traditions claiming timelessness and transcendence. Its program is
usually nihilistic, its theoretical futurism more often than not an alibi for its subversiveness (88-9). The
avant-garde represents the insurgent face of modernism.
In a modernist context, decadentism is the flip side of the avant-garde. Like the latter, it is
essentially negative. At its core there lies a radical condemnation of technological progress, which is
blamed for a general sense of alienation and disaffection. Culture, mores, social justice, religion,
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systems of belief are seen as experiencing an unstoppable decay. Decadentism involves simultaneously
a recognition and an acceptance of inevitable this decomposition, an acute sentiment of crisis. To
progress – and to the world of progress – the decadentists oppose aestheticism, frequently coupled with
a revolutionary rhetoric and various forms of utopianism, as well as a lifestyle designed to shock the
middle-class. Its aesthetics is anti-naturalist (hence anti- or post-romantic) and relies on a cult of the
artificial (149), often emphasizing the refinements of sensuality and voluptuousness.
A third concept of modernism proceeds in the opposite direction, regarding the trend as no
longer the product of an exclusivist avant-garde, but rather as a sort of a spirit of the age, a
Weltanschauung which slowly but surely captured the century:
Far from being anarchic, modernist thought in this view represents an attempt to restore a sense
of order to human experience under the often chaotic conditions of twentieth-century existence,
and it most assuredly does contain a unifying principle if one knows where to look. Not just the
plaything of the avant-garde, it has assumed a commanding position in literature, music,
painting, architecture, philosophy, and virtually every other realm of artistic or intellectual
endeavor. Moreover, modernism in this formulation has cast its influence well beyond the
intellectual elite to encompass much of contemporary middle-class Western society. Its values,
though somewhat diluted, are held by a majority of present-day [Westerners]… In short, the
definition being proposed here suggests that modernism deserves to be treated as a full-fledged
historical culture much like Victorianism or the Enlightenment, and that it supplies nothing less
than the basic contours of our current mode of thought. (Singal 1987, 8)
This third view of modernism chimes in with recent attempts at definition which emphasize not
only the rebellious, anti-mainstream nature of modernism, but its synthetic qualities. Authors belonging
to this school of thought insist that modernism was not primarily deconstructive, though it may have
appeared so at first. In a well-known paper, James McFarlane (1976, 80-4) suggested that there were in
fact three important, distinct phases in the development of the movement, from an initially
deconstructive one to the final, integrative (or, as McFarlane calls it, “super-integrative”) stage. The
first was the bohemian, later one frequently mistaken for the entire movement. It is the phase of early
T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, of Gertrude Stein and early James Joyce, of Picasso in painting and
Stravinsky in music. The emphasis was on fragmentation and the disintegration of the carefully-
constructed systems already in place. The second stage was marked by an attempt to fuse the disparate,
fragmented parts together and re-create something which resembled a system. Such budding, tentative
attempts at systematization were eventually followed by a full-scale pass at integration, so much so that
modernism became a movement about “things fall[ing] not so much apart [as] … fall[ing] together”.
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This final stage and its synthetic impulses are observable, for example, in the late work of such
modernist poets as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, or William Carlos Williams, who looked to the past (or to
past systems of thought) or the local and the regional as alternatives to the dissolution they perceived as
characteristic of the modern age:
Pound had hit on an extraordinary formula: to fuse the modernist rush toward the future with a
patrician worship of the carefully selected past. Eliot found a similar combination: the idealized
combination of an ideal Christian-authoritarian tradition with the abstract, whispered melodies
of the mystically obscure. Even William Carlos Williams, with his Populist ideology,
concentrated in Paterson on images of an idealized, craft-centered artisan past. (Gittlin 1981,
75)
Joyce’s novel Ulysses, with its attempt to bring together sequence and distance into an unified whole,
was interpreted in the same integrative sense. (Singal 1987, 14)
There is another important characteristic of modernism which points in a direction contrary to
the sense of fragmentation and segmentation with which modernism is frequently – and in large part
justifiably – associated: the remarkable cross-pollination among the various fields of the arts. Poets,
painters, photographers, film-makers and musicians, philosophers and theoreticians, all studied one
another, learned from one another, borrowed from techniques in different domains, with a sense that
the barriers between the arts and crafts were weaker than ever before. The Imagists in poetry were
famously influenced by photography; Ezra Pound often described his creation in musical terms.
Langston Hughes, the major black American modernist poet, drew heavily on jazz (Patterson 2000).
Futurism was a crucial influence for all types of avant-garde. Blast, the journal of the Vorticist
movement, which the indefatigable Pound – the man who discovered Eliot and Joyce and mentored
innumerable other talents – also helped father, relied on the latest trends in book design and
typographic art for “its militant style, anti-liberalist politics and anti-humanist philosophy of art, its
metaphysics of energy and violence, its primitivism and cult of technology, its aestheticization of
politics and, finally, its totalitarian bias…” (Hansen 1980, 362) It has often been noted that William
Carlos Williams’s famous red wheelbarrow in the poem of the same name was a versified equivalent of
Marcel Duchamp’s Readymade objects.2
Indeed, when Virginia Woolf famously signaled the radical, modernist change in “human
character” which supposedly occurred “on or about December 1910”, what the British writer had in
2
Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow” will be discussed below. The so-called Readymades by Marcel Duchamp, an artist
closely involved in the Dada movement and surrealism, were “found objects” (such as stools, bicycle wheels, urinals etc.)
which he assembled and then exhibited as art.
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mind specifically was an epoch-making event in painting – the exhibition “Manet and the Post-
Impressionists”, the first major showing of continental art in Britain. In November 1910, the public
showing of the paintings of Cezanne, Van Gogh or Gauguin
questioned an aesthetic judgment acquired through centuries of privileged education: the works
confronted gallery-goers with new, ‘distorted’, conceptions of empirical reality, particularly of
the human face and body; they drew attention to their own material surface rather than offering
a window to the world; they undermined the system of presentation governing Western painting
since the Renaissance – a conception of space oriented on linear perspective, which had granted
the spectator virtually the same position as the creator. (Hansen 1980, 360)
More generally, the exhibition threatened traditional modes of perception, grounded in a realist-
naturalist conception of the world and centered on previously uncontested psychological, sociological,
anthropological assumptions – “the very concepts, in fact, at issue in the discussions on literary realism
in the New Age”. In this capacity, the exhibition served as a mere signal of or catalyst for “already
existing undercurrents”. Nevertheless, Virginia Woolf’s oft quoted “gives us a sense of the qualitative
leap that was felt” (360).
The Impressionists’ challenge spilled into all other fields of art. In fact, a painting exhibition
was considered the trigger of the modernist revolution not only in Britain, but also in the United States.
The 1913 New York Armory Show, which housed an exhibition of Cubist and Postimpressionist
painting, essentially introducing the same artists that had been shown in London three years before,
was similarly regarded as defining “the effective start of a rich era in American poetry” (Cunliffe 1967,
254). At least in part, the resourcefulness of modernists in every area of the arts, and certainly in
poetry, owed to their readiness to borrow massively from all other areas.
Modernism was pluralist and effervescent in other ways too. It was, most significantly, an
international movement without an epicenter. It flourished in the great bohemian metropolises of Paris
and London (“the double city of London and Paris”), Vienna, Berlin, and New York, but also in
Chicago, Rome, Moscow, and in Latin America. Ezra Pound may have deserted America because he
considered it, “historically” speaking, “hardly a nation” on account of its lacking “a city to which all
roads lead” (Zwerdling 1998, 223), but not even Anglo-Saxon poetic modernism owed its roots to
London alone. Ideas and concepts moved freely among these great Euro-American cities and fully
developed in spaces different from their places of origin. (Pound also claimed that great literature’s
local roots are accidental.) Surrealism in poetry, for example, though commonly associated with the
French scene, was being simultaneously delved into – sometimes under other guises – in the US, Spain,
and the large South American cities. The trends were often transported from one city to another by
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foreigners working in idioms that were not those of their native culture. The most important English-
speaking modernist journals were insistently cosmopolitan. The major cities of continental Europe
were invaded by Anglo-Americans or Eastern Europeans. Pre-war and wartime avant-garde “was most
prominent, not in the great urban centers…, but on the periphery, especially in those still backward but
rapidly industrializing nations, Italy and Russia.” (Perloff 2004, 143)
Furthermore, the impact of these trends and sects upon local cultures were different. And
despite strong bonds and influences, as often as not schools of modernist poetry and fiction lacked a
coherent, common philosophy; it was often necessary to be an outsider – a foreigner – to grasp the
commonalities. Modernism, as Malcolm Bradbury (1987, 32) noted “was an affair of many
movements, of a common avant-gardizing tendency, with international origins and a massive and
constant change of personnel, and considerable capacity for transit. It was also an affair centered in
certain cosmopolitanizing cities capable of concentrating the flow of art-news and sustaining a large
bohemian population of polyglot character. And one of the marks of modernism was that it seemed to
have no home.” (32)
Having succinctly defined modernism as a movement (or a set of many interconnected
movements), it is time to turn to a related question. We have established that, to an important extent,
modernism constituted a radical break and was, in part at least, a reactive movement. But reactive
against what? As briefly noted above, modernism arose in response to the mindset of the Victorian age,
a period which coincided with the expansion of the bourgeoisie and the development of the industrial
revolution. The ethos of Victorianism comprised the bourgeois values of thrift and diligence (the so-
called “protestant ethic”), informed by a belief in a mechanical universe governed by a benign God. In
the field of knowledge, this ethos was accompanied by a corollary faith in science as holding the keys
to this universe. In morals, it engendered a distinction between the higher human attributes, typically
cultivated by education and religion, and a base human nature that man shared with the animal world
and which it was the task of education and the arts to manage strictly; instinctual passions, and
especially sexual drives, had to be carefully contained. In the arts, Victorians cultivated refinement,
generally defined in terms of adherence to formal rules of composition, well-established mimetic
norms, conventional and controlled subjectivity, and self-restrained releases of emotion. Their quest in
art had as a goal the discovery of transcendent, eternal beauty.
Modernism took shape – and was perceived – as an anti-Victorian revolt on all fronts. In
metaphysics and epistemology, it questioned the belief in a mechanical universe and especially the
optimistic notion that science would eventually be able to explain it in comprehensive fashion. Under
the impact of the major changes in developed urban societies, as well as of the revolutions in the hard
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sciences and the emerging social sciences, the modern spirit regarded the universe as characterized by
unremitting flux, constantly changing and therefore escaping the totalizing grasp of human knowledge.
The world was built upon transitory foundations. Uncertainty, fundamental and inescapable, became
one of the core beliefs of the modern age. And uncertainty was worth celebrating, because the opposite
would have meant stagnation.
In ethics, the relativist attack on the bourgeois values of the Victorian era was even more
radical. To thrift and diligence, modernists opposed a cult of individual self-expression and
authenticity. Without fully turning the old opposition between the cultivated and the animal-like upside
down, they often exalted physical drives and impulses, the irrational and the subconscious. In this, the
influence of the budding discipline of anthropology, which rediscovered the primitive human as the
equal or the superior of the civilized man, was paramount. Furthermore, to the extent to which
modernism was a revolt against Victorian prudishness, some of the underlying violence was expressed
through an affirmation of “the animal”, whether in the rediscovery of the vital body, or in a
preoccupation with the animal world as in the writings of D.H. Lawrence (or of postwar British poet
Ted Hughes). Last but by no means least, modernism launched itself in a full-scale exploration of
sexuality, a subject thoroughly changed by the Freudian revolution then just underway. As it has been
pointed out, the cult of authenticity and the belief in the fundamental fragmentariness and incompletion
of experience created something of a paradox, as to the modernist authenticity would never be fully
achievable. But modernists wholeheartedly accepted this sense of incompleteness, for it opened the
prospect of a never-ending quest for self-fulfillment: authenticity would never be consummated except
in continual search. A search that was however not past- or future-oriented, but simply an embrace of
an always ephemeral though irresistible, promising present (Călinescu 1995, 15)
Finally, in the realm of the arts modernists did away with the formal, the conventional and the
rational, with the moralistic missions and with didactic habits of mind. In fact, it was here that
modernism appeared most evidently like a new spirit, as well as a movement (or many more or less
closely related sectarian groups). Since to Victorians the point of art was to educate and cultivate the
higher attributes of man, and since modernists called into question precisely the primacy of the latter, it
was natural for the arts to be the modernists’ battleground of choice against the ancien régime:
Precisely because [the arts] represent a realm where that quest can be pursued with relative
safety through surrogate experience, the arts have become a medium for radical
experimentation in new ways of amplifying perception, organizing the psyche, and extending
culture. … Art is aided in this task by its ready access to the devices of symbolism, metaphor,
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and myth, all of which … serve to connect ‘things that were previously separate in experience’
and that cannot be joined through logic. (Singal 1987, 15)
Armed with this conception of artistic endeavor, modernists started to systematically
deconstruct the Victorian world system. Poetry provides a good illustration of their preferred weapons.
As John Newcomb has recently argued, the revitalization of American poetry in the first two decades
of the twentieth century was in large part due to American poets’ decision to ignore the genteel,
Victorian ban against topicality in poetry, and in particular against the use of modern material. The
journal Poetry, founded in 1912 in Chicago, transformed this decision into the basis of its editorial
policy. It turned out to be a decision crucial to its institutional success and instrumental to the renewal
of American poetry. As Newcomb (2004, 280) explains,
This rejuvenation would not have happened if so many American poets had not immersed
themselves in the stubbornly material and irreversibly modern world outside their windows. …
Hundreds of poems from 1910 through the early 1920s explored the material spaces of the
machine-age metropolis – from glittering department stores to netherworldly factories and
impersonal cafeterias. Others appropriated (and were appropriated by) the iconic objects –
billboard, skyscraper, subway, hotel – that were emerging as the common cultural currency of
urban American modernity. Still others responded to modern forms of mass amusement:
baseball games, movies, vaudeville shows. Collectively, these works … offer us an alternative
modern American poetry, deeply engaged with the material conditions and social dynamics of
urbanized and technologized modernity.
In this sense, modernism was a poetry of the ordinary, accommodating the dull, the common, the
utilitarian, the repulsive, the conventional. Poets such as the Chicagoan Carl Sandburg made verse out
of the most unpoetic of settings and used prosaic slang, in a manner echoing a terser and more laconic
Walt Whitman, to deal with serious themes, which they relocated from Victorian inner spaces to
modern urban environments.
Take any streetful of people buying clothes and groceries, cheering a hero or throwing confetti and
blowing tin horns … tell me if the lovers are losers … tell me if any get any more than the lovers … in the
dust … in the cool tombs. (“Cool Tombs”)
The quintessential modernist poets were, however, even more radical in their experimentalism,
more cosmopolitan in their (anti-bourgeois) outlook, and more self-consciously sophisticated. Like
painters and photographers as well as their fiction-writing contemporaries, they emphasized
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fragmentation, abrupt juxtaposition of dissimilar images, and quick shifts between trains of thought
moving in different directions. They let the mind loose to move freely between the conscious and the
unconscious, frustrating the sense of communicational harmony at the core of the harmonious Victorian
worldview.
As a result of the interest in the modern and the dynamic, and of the emphatic rejection of
clarity and of predictable pattern in expression, poetry became increasingly a means to express intense
or strange states of minds. With the channels of communication intentionally broken or perverted, the
work of art appeared more and more like a personal affair, an expression of private fantasies, into
which only a few lucky or knowledgeable individuals were invited to partake. “Imagery came to be
increasingly obscure and disconnected, syntax willfully broken, words disjointed, metaphors
unintegrated, and poems made up of free associations not fixed in any logical frame.” (Block 1959,
176-7) The main purpose of the theme and of any recounted events in poetry was now that of stressing
the separation of poet and society, whether manifested as rebellion and épater le bourgeois, or as the
poet’s self-assumed cloistered existence outside the social mainstream.
Defamiliarization, the autonomy of art, and the audience

In order to obtain a better understanding of the vocabulary of modernism in poetry it is useful at
this point to bring into the discussion a concept from literary criticism, one which is especially relevant
to modernist art: defamiliarization. According to Russian formalist critic Victor Shklovsky, whose
poetics was, in part at least, designed to come to terms with literary modernism (Eynsteinsson 2003,
296-300),
The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are
known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, to increase
the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in
itself and must be prolonged. In art, it is our experience of the process of construction that
counts, not the finished product. (Shklovsky 1988, 20)
In other words, literature, as defined by this modernist critic, is at bottom a process of undermining
recognizable rational discourse in a way designed to extend the aesthetic experience. To take one of
Shklovsky’s famous categories, if the “story”, defined as the causal-temporal unfolding of events, is the
familiar way in which a chain of events is recounted, the “plot” is a defamiliarization of the story,
exemplified by the way the chain of events is told in a piece fictional prose. Unsurprisingly, the
Russian thinker considered Tristram Shandy to be “the most typical novel in world literature” because
its contorted plot systematically violates the rules of the story (Shklovsky 1965, 57). It provided an
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excellent illustration of the typically modernist identification of time and self. With this theory in mind
Picasso would perhaps be considered, among the painters, the paradigmatic portraitist.
Defamiliarization, then, is a form of aesthetic (“artistic”) motivation (Tomashevsky 1965, 80-
7). Shklovsky quotes William Spencer to the effect that rhyme and rhythm in poetry are ways of
habitualizing perception: once one gets accustomed to them, and they become predictable. As a result,
the act of making forms difficult or unpredictable is an act of revolt against automatism, against the
“superficial” satisfactions supplied, as in a Pavlovian experiment, by routinized perception. When, for
instance, poetic expectation (automatization) is satisfied by the classical, “seductive” poetry, a prosaic
insertion can “defamiliarize” the object and thereby enrich the poetic experience.
What makes defamiliarization specifically relevant to the modernist work of art? After all, at
least since the time Romantic thinkers re-described the artist as a creator-genius opening up new realms
of experience to his audience, the work of art was conceptualized as something which transcended the
world of ordinary perception. When Wallace Stevens, one of America’s foremost modernists despite
his symbolist filiation, invited the poet in his in “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction” to become “an
ignorant man” so as “to see the sun again with an ignorant eye”, he could have spoken on behalf of
both a primitivist Romanticism and an equally primitivist modernism.3 Indeed, as it has been noted,
“from Shelley to Pound, poets have shared an image of the poet as a special being empowered to know,
in behalf of humanity, what would otherwise not be known.” (Gittlin 1981, 64) This exceptionalist
view was shared by both Romantic and modernist poets (Rosen 2003, 484). The difference between
modernists and those who preceded them, at least with respect to their conception of the artist, must
therefore lie elsewhere. One suggestion is that it resides in the fact that while pre-modernist writers
stood apart from the community “in order to speak to it more clearly”, the quintessential modernists
isolated themselves because they refused to speak to the larger community (Gittlin 1981, 64-5).
This self-assumed isolation resulted, first, in a special conception of the work of art. For the
modernists, the work of art was a self-contained entity, hence one functioning autonomously, according
to its own self-made laws. The latter somehow steps outside the consciousness of the artist from which
it emanated (or, better perhaps, this individual consciousness steps outside its own product). The work
of art therefore inhabits a space free from narrow subjectivity. To the modernist author, the point of
literature was to generate new meanings not by creatively enlarging upon the significances and
conventions of ordinary language, but by reaching beyond these conventions and meanings. Poetry was
conceptualized not as “a language of signs to be exchanged in the marketplace of communicative
3
In some sense, of course, romanticism was a form of modernism (Calinescu 1995, 41-60).
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action, but one in which things are restored to their purity precisely by absenting them from
predication.” (Bruns 2001, 185) Mallarmé’s famous statement that poetry relies on a language of
absence rather than presence has often been quoted in this context. Unlike the language of presence,
which relies on linguistic convention for its functioning, the language of absence refuses precisely that.
Each individual work of art is therefore self-supporting and self-sufficient. William Carlos Williams
put it thus: “A poem is a complete little universe. It exists separately.” As a self-enclosed object, a
closed system existing in and for itself, the art work achieves a particular spotlessness. It is possessed
of a sort of sanctity.
The paradox at the heart of this conception is unavoidable: the road to impersonality and
objectification passes through a form of intensely personal experience, one that is different from the
sentimental, narcissistic solipsism of the Romantics and the Victorians, to be sure, but remains, initially
at least, a form of solipsism nonetheless. “The thing,” Eliot once wrote to his friend Conrad Aiken, “is
to be able to look at one’s life as if it were somebody else’s.” (Zwerdling 1998, 294) Whether this
paradox points to some exciting and fresh modernist insight,4 or is merely a proof of the ultimate
incoherence of modernist rationalizations concerning their craft, what remains evident is that it
provided modernism with an effective creative tension. It also supplied a theory on the basis of which
modernists could claim complete aesthetic autonomy for their works. As a result, more than other
trends in literature, modernism overtly denied its continuity with literary tradition. “We are sharply cut
off from our predecessors,” wrote Virginia Woolf in the mid-1920s. Unlike previous literary
movements, which often struggled with and against preceding views of literature and did their best to
reformulate them or stand them on their heads, and in so doing implicitly recognized the latter’s
legitimacy, modernism attempted to create a parallel literary (or artistic) universe. To its modernist
practitioners, defamiliarization was therefore, as the Russian formalists recognized early on, a
fundamental means to the end of situating themselves and their work not so much in opposition to, as
outside the ordinary world surrounding them.
Under such circumstances, however, the following questions seem natural: where does that
leave the audience? What happens to the readers of (modernist) poetry? Who are they? Some
modernists took it upon themselves not merely to challenge the expectations of their presumedly
bourgeois audience, trained to the settled, stale forms and rhythms of previous ages. They strove not
simply or necessarily to stimulate their audience into self-questioning and reflection, but to make their
works inaccessible to them. The poets’ metropolitan whereabouts certainly helped amplify their sense
4
The Romantics struggled, of course, with the same paradox, which Wordsworth, for instance, tamed in his conception of
poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquility”.
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of segregation and the accompanying inaccessibility to outsiders. “The atomistic nature of urban life –
its isolation, privacy and myriad subcultures – encourages small-group identity as a mode of survival.”
(Zwerdling 1998, 225) Modernist poetry was written with a selected and selective audience in mind,
both as a result of the social make-up of the avant-garde, and as a matter of deliberate artistic vision,
though the two are undoubtedly related. As Todd Gittlin (1981, 70) argued,
The emergence of inaccessibility [in poetry] can be understood as a certain sort of protest, but a
self-enclosed protest, against the … wrenching coexistence of the writer’s economic
dependency [on the bourgeois audience] and his or her contempt for the audience.5
For his part, Pound objected to the Whitmanian motto selected for the journal Poetry, whose
European correspondent he was: “To have great poets there must be great audiences too.” (Zwerdling
1998, 230) This position, common among the modernists, came in response to an age in which poetry
had become “utterly dispensable,” (Gittlin 1981, 71) the acquired taste of a coterie, after having been
the main literary genre in the 1860s and 1870s (at least in the US). The poetry of Pound and Eliot, then,
was a not merely a protest against a banalizing audience, but a wholesale rejection of it. Their verse
was fragmentary, non-linear, a confession of incoherence, etc. in order not to be understood. Eliot, who
first published The Waste Land with a wealth of explanatory annotations, later regretted this attempt to
meet the reader halfway. Pound assumed that serious writing implied an audience of hundreds, a few
thousands at most. The titles of his early poems contained baffling allusions to little-known literary
works or lines in foreign languages.
Stylistically, modernist poets cultivated the so-called vortex-image at the expense of the
symbol, and hence relied on associative leaps which kept readers at bay. For images are private, and
therefore take-it-or-leave-it propositions, whereas symbols must pass the test of inter-subjectivity.
Imagism, a short-lived but extremely influential movement in poetry in the first decades of the 20th
century, considered the “feel of experience” more genuine than rhetoric. The rhythms of the Imagists
were deliberately intended as a break with bourgeois regularities. As Pound confessed in Canto 81, “To
break the pentameter, that was the first heave.” Their calculated self-referential works, intended to
bring about personal relief (Eliot regarded poetry as an analgesic), constituted therefore an explicit
dismissal of their audience.
Quite expectedly, then, modernism was attacked for its “formlessness and for distorted and
anarchic representations of society, disintegration of outer reality, and disorderly manipulation of
language.” (Eynsteinsson 2003, 299) Modernists responded with even more radical formal
5
In fact, many of the most important high modernists (including Pound, Eliot and Joyce) depended on rich patron of the
arts, which subsidized their work, periodicals, and events.
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experiments, enhancing the fragmentariness of their works, moving abruptly or cinematically across
scenes, frustrating the organic sense of wholeness or chronology. It was part of the credo of Pound and
to some extent of Eliot that the poet must be difficult6 – a notion that, as it has been observed, a Walt
Whitman would have abhorred. Precisely because of this, it is one of the great (though not so
uncommon) ironies of literary history that, slowly but surely, modernism infected the mainstream and,
in fact, monopolized it while at the same time suffering a process of transfiguration. It was at first de-
radicalized and institutionalized. Then, in one of its final guises, modernism became a form of modern
kitsch (Călinescu 1995), a modernism for the masses familiar in the cult of shopping-mall authenticity
or self-expression at any cost. Modern kitsch turned the modernists’ minimalism, a skillful and
laborious though condensed quest for an instant, explosive moment of intellectual or emotional clarity,
into a hedonist search for instantaneous gratification.
Anglo-Saxon poetic modernism

If traditional modernism in poetry blended private seclusion with a programmatic rejection of
the audience, it is hardly a wonder that American modernist poetry belonged in large measure to
expatriates. (In part, the same was true of modernist fiction, of course.) As Gittlin (1981, 66) explains,
“Robust American society in the progressive era afforded no reliable social basis for an artistic elite; its
aristocracy was too small and shallowly rooted, its bourgeois audience too philistine, to sustain an
avant-garde. One interim solution was flight to Europe, or rather to aristocratic images of a departed
Europe…” Another was to seek metropolitan Europe as a springboard into the world of literary
success, a strategy pursued by Pound and, at his behest (“anything else is a waste of time and energy”),
by T.S. Eliot after a fated meeting with his already accomplished conational in September 1914.
The foundation stone of Anglo-Saxon poetic modernism had been laid a few years before. The
departure of American poets Ezra Pound and his protégé Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) for London and their
subsequent association with British philosopher, poet, Bergson- and Sorel-translator T.E. Hulme are
credited with having laid the foundations of Imagism, a new and vital movement in early twentieth-
century poetry. Influenced in equal manner by the French Symbolists and Oriental verse, as well as by
the recent popularity of photographic art, imagists rediscovered minimalism and strove to use images
not as decorative elements, but as vehicles of condensed emotions stripped down to their purest, most
intense substance. As Pound, the movement’s poet-theorist, famously defined it, an image is an
6
Eliot famously said that “the poet must be difficult” in order to wrest himself from a failed post-Renaissance poetic
tradition, which had forsaken serious philosophical concerns in poetry and turned the products of the craft into the hobby of
casual readers.
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“intellectual and emotional complex in an instance of time”, used by the poet for the purpose of
achieving “clarity of expression”. To that end, the poet must work with maximum precision and supply
clear visual images. As a result, some of Pound’s works in the imagist period (he soon left Imagism to
the epigones and moved to other varieties of modernist verse), most notoriously “In a Station of the
Metro”, bears a striking resemblance to Japanese haikus. Though not before long abandoned as a
movement, Imagism, with its emphasis on economy, precision, free verse, and – last but not least – its
passion, left a powerful legacy on 20th century poets.
Together with fellow American expatriate T.S. Eliot, Pound belonged to a class of “poet-critics”
(and political reactionaries). Their conception of poetry is best understood as a reaction to late-
nineteenth century English and American verse in particular, and to Romanticism in general. By the
end of the Victorian era, British Romanticism was generally seen as a movement which had
degenerated into sentimentalism and/or didacticism, “while the ambition of poets like Wordsworth,
Coleridge and Shelley to create through their poetry the intellectual climate in which a society in moral
and political decline might achieve regeneration had long since been lost in a welter of emotionalism.”
(Williams 1987, 6) Late Victorian poetry in particular was perceived as a form of escapism, as having
forsaken the public consciousness in favor of private, self-indulgent concerns.
To the poetry of the Romantics, generally perceived as anti-intellectualist, the modernists
opposed their “dry, hard, classical verse” (Williams 1987, 17). Very prominent among the latter was
T.E. Hulme, to whom the previous words belong and whose ideas Eliot characterized as having “fallen
like a stone to the bottom of the sea of print” (Hansen 1980, 355). As a professional philosopher, the
latter provided the best theoretical ammunition in the early twentieth-century struggle to re-define the
poetic craft away from the Romantic conception. In describing imagination as a spontaneous power of
the mind in charge with the latter’s creative (self-)expression, Coleridge had stood the empiricist theory
of imagination as mechanical association on its head. As Murray Krieger (1953, 302) pointed out, the
anti-Romantic Hulme contested this vision of the poet as a being with unlimited powers and, therefore,
unlimited aspirations, creating ex nihilo. Instead, he “explicitly” called for a poetry of “fancy” (or, in
Eliotian terminology, of “consciousness”) rather than “the poetry of unbounded imagination which he
feels contaminated English verse in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He call[ed] for a
poetry that is formally precise and whose pretensions are limited to simple and vivid description.”
(Krieger 1953, 302-3) Nevertheless, Hulme’s poet, while assigned a descriptive task, was supposed to
look at the world and see it not as it “appears” in its familiar, ordinary guise, but as it really “is”. And
this world, the world as it really is, was apparently accessible only to those possessed of the higher
(Romantic?) faculty of “intuition”, rather than to mortals merely endowed with a lowlier “perception”.
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Whether or not Hulme in fact smuggled the Romantic imagination back into his theory of
poetry through the back door, he did supply kindred poets such as Pound, Eliot or William Carlos
Williams with a more stringent, more demanding conception of poetry, closer to the classical ideal of
creative discipline. According to Pound, who internalized this conception, poetic language must treat
images not as ornaments, but as explorations of the manner in which objective things turn into
subjective images. “Any mind that is worth calling a mind”, he famously wrote, “must have needs
beyond the existing categories of language, just as a painter must have pigments or shades more
numerous than the existing names of colors.” And, just as Hulme had theorized, Pound believed such a
mind should strive for concrete and fresh imagery in the contemplation of finite things, rather than for
the “vague” emotions in which the Romantics had indulged. The mind of the poet must eschew the
patterns of language and search for fresh language and, by extension, fresh ideas.
David Rosen (2003, 489-90) identifies in the modernist faculty of “fancy” or “consciousness”
the source of the typically lengthy modernist poem:
Where the imagination imposes on form a hierarchy of objects and occurrences (the kernel
moment of vision, reflection on that moment, the wider context, etc.), consciousness merely
happens and continues to happen until it stops. … with a peristatltic heave, each phrase seems
to begin some place very different from where the last left off, and in no obvious or inevitable
sequence. They could go on indefinitely. Consciousness, indeed, practically dictates an open
form and thus the reemergent nonnarrative long poem.
Nevertheless, despite the fact that most major modernists wrote this type of poetry at one point or
another in their career, some very representative works are quite the opposite in form and structure. In
Rosen’s terms, consciousness happens and then it dwells on a single image, without proceeding further.
In this kind of a poem, a single frame of mind is presented. One of Pound’s most famous poems, “In a
Station of the Metro”, provides an excellent illustration of the latter variety, as well as of the kind of
poetry Pound had in mind when he discussed the concept of “image”. It comprises a mere two lines:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.
The haiku-like, verbless poem consists in fact of two images, simply juxtaposed, separated only by a
semicolon. The first image describes, in a tentative, wavering snapshot an image picked up in a
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crowded Parisian metro. (Pound wrote the poem in 1912 while in the French capital.)7 Its blurriness is
an effect of the ambiguity of the word “apparition”, whose primary sense in English is that of a
supernatural phenomenon or a ghostly presence (a reading reinforced by the fact that it refers to
isolated faces in a group). The second meaning of the term – and the primary one in French – is that of
“appearance” or instant coming into view.8 Both the ambiguity and the ghostly presence lend a certain
haziness to the scene, without weakening the sense of surprise at the “apparition” of the faces.
The second image clarifies the first and, to keep the photographic language going, sharpens it,
brings it into better focus. It is also of a radically different origin – no longer something culled from the
metropolitan transportation system, but an image of nature, clear and unambiguous. The contrast
between the petals (implicitly white or of another light hue, although the color is not mentioned and,
indeed, neither is the color of the faces) and the black bough adds vividness and crispness to the image.
So does the fact that the bough is wet, for water darkens the bark. Water also provides a reflective glow
to the scene, which heightens its vibrancy. In the poem, which is constructed as a single metaphor, two
very different images (different in terms of scenery as well as, for lack of a better word, technique) fuse
together, with the second one enhancing and shedding light, both literally and figuratively, on the first.
The end result is a short moment of extreme intensity.
Pound perfectly captured the blueprint of the poem when he noted, not long after having written
it, that “the ‘one-image poem’ is a form of super-position, that is to say, it is one idea set on top of
another”. Indeed, the poem is one image set on top of the other. “In a poem of this sort”, the poet
continued, “one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms
itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective” (Bevilaqua, 1971). It would be difficult to think of a
poem that better illustrates the famous Imagist definition of an image as an “intellectual and emotional
complex in an instance of time”, while at the same time doing perfect justice to the modernist credo
that poetry should keep emotional ballast to a minimum. It also captures Hulme’s definition of a poem
as a “mosaic of words” – a work of patience and technical skill, of reserve as well as boldness.
And yet the structural and symbolic simplicity of the poem is deceptive. First, it is not difficult
to notice that the poem is longer by a half than Pound claimed it was – that is to say, it has not two
lines, but three. For the poem’s title, explanatory and descriptive, does a lot of the piece’s work.
(Imagine the same poem title-less, or with a neutral title such as “Faces in the Crowd”. Crucial
information would be missing and the intensity weakened.) Secondly, it is also the title that opens up a
7
He tweaked it, especially the punctuation, several times.
8
There is in fact a third sense, now obsolete, but perhaps relevant in light of the fact that the poem is one metaphor:
“semblance”.
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variety of symbolic interpretations of the poem. For example, it suggests a contrast between the
netherworld of the metro (an association emphasized by the multi-functional word “apparition”) and
the world of vitality above ground; or between the machine age and natural beauty, and so on.
Haiku-sounding poems were hardly Pound’s last word in poetry. His later poetic work amassed
a vast array of eclectic influences, from European verse in various eras and cultural areas to Middle and
Far Eastern literature. Erudite and iconoclastic, it challenged readers and critics alike, who were faced
with the daunting task of interpretation. In the early 1920s Pound started writing The Cantos, a book-
length, unfinished, patchwork poem which included Chinese pictograms, quotations in a variety of
European languages, and directly incorporated a variety of documents and historical sources. Many
historical and cultural references remain obscure even to the initiated reader. Their influence extended
not only to the Pound’s contemporaries, but also to later generations of poets, among them the
(American) Beats.
Although Pound eventually abandoned America for good and, indeed, became one of its
harshest European critics before and during World War II, his influence at home was visible in such
authors as William Carlos Williams (also known as WCW) and Wallace Stevens. Williams, a college
friend of Pound, shared the latter’s sense of immediacy and accuracy – a poem must be “pruned to
perfect economy”, as the author himself put it –, but applied it to typically American material. Hence
the marked contrast between Pound’s cosmopolitan metro in the poem discussed above and WCW’s
homespun wheelbarrow in what is probably his best known short piece, “The Red Wheelbarrow”. Like
Pound and Eliot, Williams eschewed sentimentality, seeking instead intellectual exactness. “A poem”,
he observed, “is a small (or large) machine made out of words. When I say there’s nothing sentimental
about a poem, I mean that there can be no part that is redundant.”
Once again, a short and not necessarily very typical poem turned out to excellently illustrate the
artist’s credo.
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain

water
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beside the white

chickens
The similarities with Pound’s poem are striking. Here too we are presented with two juxtaposed images
– though without the metaphorical relationship –, first of a red wheelbarrow, then of white chickens
simply “beside” said piece of machinery. The image is vivid and bright, and once again the poem relies
on a sharp contrast of colors for added vibrancy. Water is also involved, this time around in a thin layer
covering the wheelbarrow – a reflecting surface which lightens up the scene. Since the image must
have been captured soon after the rain had stopped – contrast the fresh water “glazing” the
wheelbarrow with the stale water often found on the bottom of such containers days after the latest
rainfall –, the air and the light are probably hard and brilliant. Indeed, as it has been noted, light, though
never mentioned as such, is most likely what the poem is in fact about.
Like “In a Station of the Metro”, Williams’ short poem captures an intense, brisk emotion.
While the former, with its big city backdrop, is perhaps more quintessentially modernist in terms of
subject matter, both are fundamentally modernist in terms of technique, with their terseness, their
recourse to “primitive pigments” (one of Pound’s favorite notions), their shunning of sentimentality
and embellishment. Williams fashioned his poem out of non-poetic, even anti-poetic material.
Furthermore, “The Red Wheelbarrow” seems to abandon all stylistic sophistication as well. All stanzas
are built around a simple structure: three words in the first line followed a single, bi-syllabic word in
the second. No metaphor and no extra-cultural references are present in Williams’ poem. The normally
more abrupt, and hence perhaps more modernist, enjambement is preferred as a device, though in this
particular instance the latter does not impede or detract from the coherence and the fluency of the
image.
In fact, so strong is this image that it immediately lures the reader’s attention, which is soon
monopolized by it at the expense of the very perplexing statement introducing the poem: “so much
depends upon…” The concreteness of the visual detail – the piece has been often described as a
painterly poem – weakens the abstract announcement to the point of making it almost redundant.
Almost, however, because the puzzle of the statement is never fully resolved. How much, to be more
precise? And exactly what depends upon the red wheelbarrow? Is the statement perhaps ironic, some
piece of farmer’s humor? (Such a decision would require a dramatic change in the way the poem is
read.) Is it a metaphysical musing on continuity and presence? Or, maybe, a philosophical rumination
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on the importance of such a basic, primitive instrument, as old as the wheel itself, to human
civilization? Perhaps just the more modest observation that a farmer’s life depends on his tools?
Like Pound’s short poem, “The Red Wheelbarrow” lends itself to a variety of legitimate
readings, some of them decidedly abstract, despite the fact that both pieces aim at concreteness. More
important for our purposes here, however, both poems are paradigmatically modernist: immodest in
their claims to newness, to a radical break with the Western poetic tradition; unapologetic in their
minimalism; shorn of didacticism and moralist impulses; wary of aestheticizing their subject matter.
Depending on the line of interpretation, “In a Station of the Metro” may offer more in the way of
modernist angst. Written somewhat in the American vein, “The Red Wheelbarrow” wins on terseness
and on its disavowal of symbolism.
Whereas Williams sought, like Pound, to approximate in his verses mechanical and intellectual
perfection, he shared with America’s quintessential poet, Walt Whitman, a concern for creating a truly
and typically American poetry. “The placing of the familiar in the foreground, but with overtones of
something more radical and universal, is a cardinal feature of Williams’ work: ‘no ideas but in things’
is a repeated slogan of his which sums up his inheritance from the Imagists an his insistence to see the
universal as inherent in the local and particular.” (Draper 1999, 23) While his broader artistic interests
elevated his poetry above parochialism, he remained in touch with America’s rhythms and sensibilities.
Unlike Robert Frost, another important American poet of the modernist era, he did not stop at probing
the recesses of native idioms, but tried instead to capture the nation’s identity in its dynamic, urban
explosiveness. A telling example in this respect is Williams’ lifework, the gigantic – in length, not
mood – poem Paterson, partly conceived as a response to Eliot’s pessimistic (and allegedly anti-
American) The Waste Land. As a result, William proved a lasting influence on later generations of
poets (among whom, for instance, Americans Allen Ginsberg and Robert Lowell).
Relying strongly on his visual perceptiveness, William Carlos Williams experimented with
various literary forms, including prose and montage, in an attempt to explore the poetic qualities of
common language. Using idiom and the rhythms of ordinary discourse, as well as glimpses of ordinary
characters and of the city life, he sought to create poetry for and about everyday existence. “Spring and
All”, published in the volume of the same title (which also included “The Red Wheelbarrow”), is one
of his best known attempts in this last respect:
By the road to the contagious hospital

under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
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northeast – a cold wind. Beyond, the

waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen
patches of standing water

the scattering of tall trees
All along the road the reddish

purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines –
Lifeless in appearance, sluggish

dazed spring approaches –
They enter the new world naked,

cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind –
Now the grass, tomorrow

the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf
One by one objects are defined –

It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf
But now the stark dignity of

entrance – Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted they
grip down and begin to awaken.
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Like the shorter piece discussed before, “Spring and All” is a visual poem. It is, however, no
longer a static snapshot, but a moving picture, shifting snappily from the distance into proximity – from
the horizon line (the “contagious hospital” is just under the clouds “driven from the northeast”), further
down along the road (with its “twiggy bushes”, dead trees and “leafless vines”), finally to the viewer’s
feet (“Now the grass, tomorrow the stiff curl…”). It is here that the viewer’s gaze focuses (“One by one
objects are defined”), at exactly the point where spring makes a timid yet ineluctable “entrance”. The
impression is of something recorded quickly, in a rush.
The tone of the poem is empirical, its gaze clinical. It opens with a cold, malaise-inducing
description of a road by a hospital, which spills its staleness into the surrounding environment: a “waste
of broad, muddy fields”, dried weeds standing and fallen, patches of water, scattered tall trees. A cold
wind, announcing that winter – as well as contagion – are not yet left behind, envelops everything.
Further down the road the wasteland slowly changes into a scenery of disarray. The description is
imprecise – “reddish, purplish”, “forked, upstanding”, “twiggy stuff” –, perhaps announcing an
imminent change, or suggestive of the blurriness of the image. Contiguous to the leafless vines and
dead leaves, spring itself seems tentative: confused, lifeless, “sluggish”. It is only in the final close-up
of grass and rootage that the discovery of emergent life brings about a long-awaited clarity, though
even at this point spring advances with a certain reluctance, as if it came despite itself (“Still, the
profound change has come upon them…”).
The subject is familiar to poetry: the coming of spring. The theme was, of course, common to
pastoral verse and a topic of the Romantics’ ballads. So what is striking about “Spring and All” is its
stubbornly anti-Romantic mood. There is no trace here of the so-called pathetic fallacy, of nature in
sync with human sentiments. The material is displeasing, from the contagious hospital in the opening
lines to nature lying in disarray. “There are no blossoms in Williams’ spring poem”, as it has been
pointed out, “not European ones, not garden ones, and especially not literary, mythological ones. In
short no lilacs or hyacinths here. Instead, there is just growth…” (Bufithis 1989). Although a poem
about nature, not necessarily the theme of choice for the typical urbanite modernist, it provides a rural
counterpart to the city-poem with its selection of non-poetic, unattractive subject-matter. The choice of
idiom is local as well, preferring the loose rhythms of American dialect (“stuff”) to the precise,
calculated language of Pound or Eliot.
It is almost impossible not to associate “Spring and All” with the opening lines of “The Burial
of the Dead”, the first part of T.S. Eliot’s arguably most famous literary piece, 1922’s The Waste Land.
Indeed, it has sometimes been claimed by critics that Williams’s poem, written shortly after Eliot’s
masterwork was published, was at least an implicit response to the latter; and, furthermore, that Eliot’s
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malaise comes from his being an uprooted cosmopolitan, while Williams’ local roots make possible the
optimistic “entrance” of spring in the last stanza of “Spring and All” (“rooted they grip down and begin
top awaken”). Unlike The Waste Land, this is a redemptive poem (and hence a more conventional
spring poem) in which redemption is “born of the vital immediacy of the particular physical world
around” (Bufithis 1989). This is very much in line with Williams’s broader views. He had been critical
of his friend Pound’s association with Eliot in Europe, where they had both absconded in order to
abandon the American vein and imbibe themselves with “alien” sources of inspiration as well as
pessimism. The Waste Land, Williams notoriously charged, had set his poetry back by two decades and
had returned verse back to the academics.
Nevertheless, Eliot sought, just like Williams, an impersonal poetry as the route of escape from
the emotional. He believed, with the latter, with Pound, as well as with theorist Hulme, in the
preeminence of a public dimension in poetry, at the expense of the personal – or, more precisely, the
naively personal – one. David Rosen (2003, 481) noted that “From Wordsworth to Yeats, the faculty of
mind at work in poetry is best called ‘imagination’; after Eliot, ‘consciousness’.” This faculty enabled
the artist to seek objectivity, since it ensured freedom from the passions and preconceptions of the self,
and distilled e general truth – as Eliot claimed late in his life – from the intensely subjective
experiences of the artist. Consciousness was thus seized upon by Eliot as a badge of impersonal
authority and distance. He perceptively described its functioning in a famous essay written around the
time of The Waste Land’s publication, entitled “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919): “the more
perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which
creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.” In
this view of “transmuted”, objectified passions one can easily recognize a reaction to the confessional
poetry of the Romantics and those inspired by them. In response to the latter, Eliot “strove for
something at once more restrained and exact, more ‘scientific’.” (Draper 1999, 15-6)
Restraint and exactness are achieved through a curtness of tone not unlike that in Williams’s
“Spring and All”, best exemplified by the famous opening lines of The Waste Land, first published as a
book after it had been edited – and substantially reduced in size – by Eliot’s friend Ezra Pound.
April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
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Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain ... {lines 1-9}
Leaving aside for the moment the broader significance of these lines as revealed in the context of the
entire poem, one immediately observes in these lines the barrenness that characterized the largest part
of Williams’ poem. Eliot stands the same spring-poem tradition on its head. Already in the first line, an
explicit allusion to The Canterbury Tales (“Whan that April with his showres soote / The droughte of
March hath perced to the roote”), he parodies sarcastically the traditional, festive announcement of
springtime rejuvenation. Spring is grim (“the cruelest month”) and its regenerative power is no cause
for rejoicing. Infertility seems preferable to whatever it is that the season is able to bring into being: the
lilacs bred “out of the dead land” are unappealing, and the stirring of the “dull roots” is no cause for
exultation, but a sign of the coming desolation. Winter is introduced as the better of the two seasons,
cozier, affording at least the comforts of a numb, hibernating existence. Spring threatens to disturb it
with its cult of rebirth. The maintenance of “a little life” fed through “dried tubers”, an image which
suggests a homely comatose existence, is introduced as an achievement of sorts, which spring, with its
life-giving momentum, is on the brink of disrupting.
Like Williams in the piece he wrote as a retort to The Waste Land, and for partly similar
reasons, Eliot is at pains to create a poetry of the anti-poetic. No wonder Yates, like other
contemporaries, complained that his poetry was “grey, cold, dry” (Blamires 1986, 99). Eliot’s strategy
illustrates convincingly the modernist approach, and is therefore worth dwelling on here. As noted
above, in Western lyric the theme of spring as a time of rejuvenation is, beyond any doubt, an outworn
cliché. It is a lyrical theme by definition. Like most clichés, it has an undeniable truthful kernel – even
in The Waste Land the lilac blooms in spring and the roots below ground are stirred by rainwater. So
the task of the poet is to rejuvenate the outworn image of this traditionally chanted season. In the
opening lines of his poem, Eliot does so in a radical fashion: instead of bringing new life and a new
hope after a dull, vicious winter, spring enters the world sordid and nasty. Winter and spring ironically,
perhaps cynically, switch roles as part of a strategy which in fact underlies the whole of The Waste
Land, a poem built on a series of ironic parallelisms.
Spring’s “cruelty” stems from its being, as it is traditionally seen in fact, the season of love.
This much Eliot suggests by introducing in the second stanza of “The Burial of the Dead” several
German lines from Tristan und Isolde:
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Frisch weht der Wind

Der Heimat zu
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
They called me the hyacinth girl.”
- Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence
Oed’ und leer das Meer. {lines 31-41}
As a season of revival, spring is therefore perceived as a menace, because the reawakening of love (the
“mixing [of] memory and desire” of the first stanza) signals a regeneration of pain and suffering. The
season rekindles memories of the lost lover (of Isolde), whose arrival by sea never happens (“leer das
Meer” – “the sea is empty”). The purple of the “hyacinth girl”, memories of whom haunt the speaker,
recalls the color of the lilac whose springtime blossoming is awaited without anticipation in the first
stanza.
The strategy employed by Eliot in these lines is that of radical defamiliarization, evident in the
change of valuation of spring and winter, or in the fact that spring, though steeped in its traditional
poetic associations, becomes the season not of rebirth, but of painful recollection. Of course, in practice
defamiliarization is far more thorough, more systematic in The Waste Land, which explains why it is
considered the quintessential modernist poem. “The Burial of the Dead” serves once again – like any
other major part of this poem, in fact – as an excellent illustration. What begins as a spring poem (albeit
one with a twist) ostensibly turns into a monologue (“Summer surprised us… / … we stopped in the
colonnade”). The interest shifts from a philosophical musing on the significance of seasons in general
to one particular summer, recollected by the / a speaker. (Is it the same speaker as in the first seven
lines?) Winter, shockingly the season of oblivious comfort in the opening lines, becomes the season of
conventional winter-sports (sledding). The setting also shifts, from illo tempore to the city of Munich
presumably (it will later on return to illo tempore in the hyacinth garden). Other voices, such as that of
March 2008
the German girl from Lithuania, are summarily introduced, without the quotation marks employed
elsewhere in the text, and then abandoned just as swiftly:
Summer surprised us, coming over Starnbergersee

With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter. {lines 8-18}
The relationship between the two parts of the first stanza of “The Burial of the Dead”, separated
by a sharp break, is never clarified. The contemporary scene, apparently inspired by the biography of a
German countess, seems to tell in a few images and fragments of dialogue the story of upper-class
decadence in pre-World War I Europe. The sudden introduction of German text is disconcerting,
amplifying the sense of disconnectedness between the two parts. It is followed by another German
quote, from Tristan und Isolde, in the next stanza, but the contrast between the two – the first is a piece
of ordinary talk, the second a melodramatic excerpt from a classical Western legend – actually
underscores the rupture. Among the fragments of dialogue, “In the mountains, there you fell free”
seems like a snippet casual philosophizing at the dinner table, made predictable by the upper-class
German setting but sharply contrasting with the grave, serious, unsettling musings in the opening lines
of the poem.
The stream of discontinuities continues in the second stanza:
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
March 2008
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only

There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust. {lines 19-30}
For a brief moment, the poem promises to restore referential order as the theme of the spring-poem
seems to be brought back into play by the mention of roots and growing branches. The first two lines
are phrased as a philosophical question, by now a familiar tone. But then the somber admonition “Son
of man, / You cannot say, or guess…” places the voice firmly in an oracular tradition. Indeed, Eliot’s
notes to the poem point to references in the Biblical books of Ezekiel, Ecclesiastes, and Isaiah. Further
down at line 42, the last one of the second stanza, the voice changes to that of another augur, the sailor
who announces to Tristan that Isolde’s ship is nowhere to be seen. And, of course, the third stanza
famously introduces, with another ironic contrast, more prophets, in particular Madame Sosostris, the
“famous clairvoyante” and “the wisest woman in Europe”, as well as a slew of other mythical
characters. The references culled from Ecclesiastes and Isaiah (lines 23 and 25, respectively) suggest a
new theme, the desolation – and comforts – of old age, a familiar interpretation of the cycle of seasons.
But then the setting changes again, and just as abruptly, with the introduction of the Tristan und Isolde
text and of a mythical spring-garden, suggesting a failed rebirth, a failed ritual of initiation, or an
abortive harmonic reunion (since Isolde never comes).
It is clear by now that The Waste Land does not suffer from a lack of dots waiting to be
connected. The fragmentariness is, in part, merely apparent. Nevertheless, regularities such as, in the
fragment discussed, the presence of oracles or the persistent (one may say, cyclical) return of the
seasons are hardly sufficient to establish an underlying order in the poem. If anything, the tantalizing
prospect of emergent order is perpetually frustrated by the changes in voice, setting, symbols, and point
of view. We are dealing with the versified equivalent of the stream-of-consciousness, indeed of
interlocking streams of consciousness. Some form of closure is repeatedly promised – nowhere is this
promise more clear than in the title, which invites a unitary, thematic reading of the poem –, and some
balance is occasionally restored. But harmony is always eventually withheld, just like it is in the
hyacinth garden.
March 2008
Conclusions
With reference to Ezra Pound’s Cantos, a monumental yet ostensibly loosely structured poem
once called by its author “too too too abstruse and obscure for human consumption”, R.P. Blackmur
identified at the core of this type of poetic discourse the “anecdotal method”. This method
is that of the anecdote begun in one place, taken up in one or more other places, and finished, if
at all, in still another. This deliberate disconnectedness, this art of a thing continually alluding to
itself, continually breaking off short, is the method by which the [poems] tie themselves
together. So soon as the reader’s mind is concerted with the material of the poem, [the poet]
deliberately disconcerts it, either by introducing fresh and disjunct material or by reverting to
old and, apparently, equally disjunct material.
This is as good a definition of defamiliarization as it gets. The immediate questions which T.S. Eliot
had in mind in writing The Waste Land do not concern us now, as “The Burial of the Dead” is used
chiefly as an illustration of the modernist approach to writing poems. But it is appropriate to ask what
Eliot – and Pound, the editor of the poem, and the modernist poets in general – expected to achieve in
writing this type of verse.
The result, in a nutshell, is a radical revision of poetic tradition. Modernist poetry was
“insubordinate” – to use the term applied by American poet and literary critic John Crowe Ransom to
The Waste Land – in the literal sense of refusing subordination to preordained literary hierarchies.
Traditional lyrical themes were replaced by topics previously considered ill-suited for poetry (such as
dissolution, dehumanization, decay, depression and so on); poetic language by vernacular (by idioms
and ordinary discourse); poetic objects by anti-poetic ones; highly charged symbols by nude or abstract
or arbitrary images; established meter and rhyme by vers libre or irregular patterns. Canonical
references were shamelessly mixed with subcultural iconography, the native tradition – or the Western
tradition – was replaced by unabashed cosmopolitanism. Fragmentariness, loose epic structure,
referential free-play, willed obscurity, multi-tonality were substituted to rational poetic discourse.
Bibliography
1. This is the full list of poems discussed during the course and which must be read closely, studied,
and analyzed for the final examination:
March 2008
Week 2
Ezra Pound, “In a Station of the Metro”
William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow”
William Carlos Williams, “Spring and All”
Wallace Stevens, “The Emperor of Ice-cream”
Week 3
T.S. Eliot, “The Burial of the Dead” (Part I of The Waste Land)
T.S. Eliot, “Gerontion”
Week 4
T.S. Eliot, “Portrait of a Lady”
Ezra Pound, “Portrait d’une femme”
William Carlos Williams, “Portrait of a Lady”
Week 5
Carl Sandburg, “Cool Tombs”
William Carlos Williams, “Pastoral”
Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”, Part 15
Allen Ginsberg, “Howl”, Part 2
Week 6
W.B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium”
W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”
e.e. cummings, “(of Ever-Ever Land i speak”
W.H. Auden, “The Fall of Rome”
Week 7
Emily Dickinson, “I never lost as much...”
Emily Dickinson, “I felt a funeral...”
Emily Dickinson, “After Great Pain...”
Dylan Thomas, “The Force that Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower”
Ted Hughes, “Hawk Roosting”
Week 8
Sylvia Plath, “Daddy”
Sylvia Plath, “Lady Lazarus”
Elizabeth Bishop, “In the Waiting Room”
Adrienne Rich, “Solfeggietto”
Week 9
John Ashbery, “Paradoxes and Oxymorons”
March 2008
Frank O’Hara, “Why I Am Not a Painter”

Philip Larkin, “Continuing to Live”
Week 10
W.B. Yeats, “Easter 1916”
Seamus Heaney, “Act of Union”
Seamus Heaney, “The Harvest Bow”
W.H. Auden, “Spain 1937”
Week 11
Adrienne Rich, “Living in Sin”
Stevie Smith, “Major Macroo”
Grace Nichols, “Configurations”,
Grace Nichols, “The Body Reclining”
Gwendolyn Brooks, “We Real Cool”
2. Books and other resources on British and American modern poetry:
Neil Corcoran, English Poetry Since 1940 (London, Macmillan, 1993)

[available at the British Council]
R.P. Draper, An Introduction To Twentieth-Century Poetry in English (London, Palgrave, 1999)
[available at the British Studies Room, Facultatea de Limbi Străine, Univ. Bucureşti, Str. Pitar Moş]
Cary Nelson, ed., An Online Journal and Multimedia Companion to the Anthology of Modern American
Poetry (New York, Oxford University Press, 2000)
[available at http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/index.htm]
Another very useful and easily accessible resource is Marjorie Perloff’s homepage at
http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/perloff/

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UNIVERSITATEA SPIRU HARET Page 1 of 29 LIVIU ANDREESCU

MODERN ANGLO-AMERICAN POETRY

Lector dr. Liviu Andreescu

Defamiliarization, the autonomy of art, and the audience

Anglo-Saxon poetic modernism

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

glazed with rain

beside the white

By the road to the contagious hospital

northeast – a cold wind. Beyond, the

patches of standing water

All along the road the reddish

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish

They enter the new world naked,

Now the grass, tomorrow

One by one objects are defined –

But now the stark dignity of

April is the cruelest month, breeding

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

Frisch weht der Wind

Summer surprised us, coming over Starnbergersee

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

And the dry stone no sound of water. Only

Frank O’Hara, “Why I Am Not a Painter”

2. Books and other resources on British and American modern poetry:

Neil Corcoran, English Poetry Since 1940 (London, Macmillan, 1993)

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