现代主义诗歌 美国文学

The Fog by Carl Sandburg
The Fog The fog comes on little cat feet. It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on.
Works of Carl Sandburg
Modernist Poetry
Background Information
Silence of American Poetry after the death of Whitman and Dickinson at the turn of 20th Century American poetry in the Genteel Tradition of British Romanticism
Southern farmers as Adams Self-contained plantation as the Paradise Northern industrialists and merchants as Satans Modern cities as Hells William Faulkner, Catherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor
Modern American Poetry Modern British Poetry The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer
Carl Sandburg
Carl Sandburg
“Indubitably an American in every pulse-beat.” (H. L. Mencken) Sympathizer of Whitman and works in Whitman’s tradition (barbaric language, overflowing of emotions) Life of the lower classes and corrupted urban civilization as well as exaltation of modern cities Everyday language often of the working class, even slang Realistic atmosphere Vivid images of “indecent” places
H.D. continuing imagist creation Sign of imagism in William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, E. E. Cummings, Robert Bly, James Wright, Louis Simpson
Imagism and Imagist Poets
Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle, Amy Lowell, John Fletcher; Richard Aldington, F. S. Flint, D. H. Lawrence Origin of imagism
Combination of Oriental poetic art (Chinese classical poems and Japanese Haiku) and Western empiricist philosophy as well as modern painting and sculpture Discarding of decadence and sentimentality of 19th poetry
Chicago Poems (1916) Complete Poems (1950) Cornhuskers (1918) Good Morning, America (1928) Harvest Poems (1950) Honey and Salt (1963) In Reckless Ecstasy (1904) Selected Poems (1926) Slabs of the Sunburnt West (1922) Smoke and Steel (1920) The People, Yes (1936)
John Crowe Ransom
Allen Tate
Donald Davidson
Robert Warren
Ralph Ellison
Agrarians
Ransom, Davidson, Tate, Robert Warren (after 1928) Criticism on northern industrialism which deprive man of happy life and artistic cultivation and which destroys nature and man’s relationship with nature Impractical worship of southern agricultural life typical of the slave-holding south Great influence on American literature
Vachel Lindsay
Vachel Lindsay
Father of modern singing poetry Prairie Troubadour “General William Booth Enters into Heaven” “The Congo” “The Santa Fe Trail” The Chinese Nightingale and Other Poems
Vorticist Picture
David Bomberg, The Mud Bath
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Leabharlann Baidu
Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Founder of imagist and Vorticist poetry Tutor of younger generation of poets and novelists (T. S. Eliot, James Joyce Radical or eccentric political views (London—Paris—Italy and his anti-Semitism) Expatriate poet (Yeats, T. E. Hulme, Ford madox Ford, F. S. Flint) Theorist of new poetic theories (I Gather the Limbs of Osiris) Cycle of life and death as symbol of poetic creation Literary criticism, essays and conversation as a form of poetic creation Translation as poetic creation Parody as creation Musical poetics combined with criticism in creation Combiner of oriental and western culture and literature (Japanese Haiku and Li Bai’s poem and Confucius and Mencius)
Exaltation of nature, love and life Breach with reality Traditional form Classical literary and mythical allusion (Vachel Lindsay, E. A. Robinson, Robert Frost)
H. D.
Amy Lowell
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F. S. Flint
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Imagism and Imagist Poets
Principles of imagism
Pound’s “A Few Don’ts” F. S. Flint’s “Imagism”
Direct depiction of objects (images; form serves content) No useless words or phrases (without comment or explanation or exclamation, no descriptive language, even no verbs and conjuncts) Use of musical sentences instead of rhythmic beats
Background Information
Diversity of poetic forms
Symbolism Impressionism Futurism Super-realism Japanese Haiku Free verse (Whitman+Sandburg/catalogue/meterless vs. Eliot and Pound/rhythm and musicality) Prose poem imagism
Harriet Monroe and Louis Untermeyer
Harriet Monroe
Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (1912) You and I Chose Poem The New Poetry: An Anthology
Louis Untermeyer
Modernistic reform in form and imagery
Background Information
Two poetic trends
T. S. Eliot—John Crowe Ransom—Allen Tate (emphasis on profound knowledge and European cultural tradition) Ezra Pound—William Carlos Williams—Hilda Doolittle (emphasis native American landscape)
The Fugitives
Southern Renaissance John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, Robert Penn Warren The Fugitives (including Eliot and Pound’s modernist poems) Southern cultural tradition (different from the avant-gardes and the lost generation): southern prejudice, values, emotions Revolt against northern industrialism Revolt against the romantic sentimentality; both conservative and revolutionary (Tate more avantgarde)
Pound turning to vorticism Amy Lowell leading imagism
Amy Lowell’s principles of imagism
Everyday language Creation of new cadence Free choice of subject Exact image Precision and clarity Compact and tightness Three editions of Some Imagist Poets and dismission of imagism