This week was a slog for me. I actually gave up and read ahead on some novels. I have a tough time studying poetry, I admit it... but I do kind of like Hart Crane. However, I'd rather just let him wash over me. I like Hart Crane very much -- he's kind of like Eliot, but his allusions are not so numbingly highbrow. His dialogue and multiple voices, however, are not as effective. What do we make of Crane's obsession with history and past American historical/literary figures?
A side note: the Americans vs. the expats. Oy. I barely know what to do here -- the influences are confusing to me, especially since they all went through various different movements! If Brent would like to teach us about those movements, I would be very happy... I think the French Symbolists are important here, and of course the Imagists. Even the Cubists -- in a way, Crane seems more Cubist to me in the sense that his images are EXTREMELY important, but without the obsessive need to be "concentrated" and "pure" as in Imagism. His images are more fragmented, the varying parts making a whole that doesn't seem like it would come out of the parts. Yes? No? I need sleep?
I did better with Frost. I love the multiple levels of "Out, Out..." What a great poem! It sets up the beauty of the countryside, with the sight of faroff inaccessible mountains (so where are we? some lesser pastoral location) which is then interrupted by the SOUND of the saw. Synaesthetic, in a way, like Crane hearing faces on the subway (which is in turn a great contrast with Pound's Imagistic petals on a wet, black bough). Putting aside Frost as country vs. city, blah blah blah, what about parent vs. child in "Out, Out..."? "They" should have given him a half hour off. "They" turn to other things when he is dead. Who are "they"? Parents who are like the father in "Home Burial"? Are we supposed to judge "them"? Frost is fantastic at the unspoken. Also, how reliable are his narrators, after all? The Wood-Pile -- why should we believe the narrator when he decides that the pile was made by someone who likes to turn to new tasks all the time? Maybe he's an idiot and doesn't notice that there used to be a road nearby...
I took a long time on the reading for this week, partly because Molly just showed up, and partly because I really wanted to devote a lot of time to it. In fact, I am not yet done. Too bad I have to move on.
The way I come at American Modernist poetry is more through individuals than movements or political affiliations or national loyalties. The reason, I think, Stevens, Eliot, Crane, et al, are still read, is less that they were typical of a certain genre than that they have idiosyncrasies that distinguish them. Everyone wants to link Stevens, especially, to the French and the Imagists in particular, but I think the issue of voice is a far more relevant concern amongst all of the Modernists we read for this week(s).
Part of the issue of voice, I think (and very explicit in some of Pound), is the issue of the poetic vocation, in which socioeconomic status plays a strong role. There's been some good work done (by whom I forget) on the Modernists and their reaction to the aesthetes (in particular Wilde) of the 1890s -- what is to be done by someone who considers herself a poet in an age of rapid industrialization and nationalization? What is at stake in choosing the identity "poet"? (In Stevens, who was the VP of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, critics have made much of this issue. Thomas Grey, dean of Stanford's law school, has an interesting book on the legal workings involved in Stevens' verse.)
Form, form, form. I recommend Paul Fussell's book on poetic meter and poetic form -- he talks about the Modernists a lot. For Frost, especially, form is key. (Of course, Frost famously said that free verse is like tennis with the net down, although he also said that English is capable of only two meters: strict and loose pentameter.) Our selections include a number of sonnets with peculiar rhyme schemes, including one ("Design," appropriately) that uses only three different rhymes (very tough in English). In poems like "Mowing," "The Wood-Pile," and "Design," the style is explicitly the substance. Frost's manipulation of meter and rhyme often gets lost under his insistently demotic diction. The diction generally supports the theme, proleptically directed against what I can only assume to be an Eliotic sensibility: "The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows." Frost abstracts "labor," I think, not in lament or as a class warrior: it is no longer "I" or "the laborer," but a man who labors, in an Emersonian sense ("The Poet").
Thinking about voice, you guys should really read Maud Ellmann's article in the Norton edition of The Waste Land. I found the poem very interesting after reading Wharton -- thinking about the degree of satire involved in depictions of class sensibilities. Is Lily Bart a waste-lander? a Thames-daughter? Is Carrie Fisher a bored typist? or is she just Princess Leia?
I found the rhetoric about self-surrender and self-evacuating in "Tradition" interesting as well. In return for the "continual extinction of personality," we get the recompense of the impersonal and therefore significant emotion.
I read somewhere that Spring and All is generally read as a response to The Waste Land. This has to be part of a larger discussion.
Stevens isn't much of a narrative poet. Even his long narrative poem "The Comedian as the Letter C" has the simplest of narratives. See my previous post on Stevens. I could talk for hours about this guy.
One more note on Crane: I don't see him as imagist-inflected as someone like Williams (the wheelbarrow and composition in particular). The images certainly get fractured, but it seems to me (again) that the most interesting things going on here involve Crane's poetic voice. Elizabethan-Whitmanian-demotic-rarefied -- what weird diction, putting Crane in an un-occupiable social space, speaking a language that is no one else's. The "Proem" in particular takes up this outsider's perspective, somehow appropriate in a Whitmanian disciple. The bridge unifies, but not as a victory by and for industrial America; rather, the bridge becomes the "prayer of Pariah," a gift of anonymity. I want to spend a lot more time on this idea, but I really need to get to Faulkner.
3 Comments:
This week was a slog for me. I actually gave up and read ahead on some novels. I have a tough time studying poetry, I admit it... but I do kind of like Hart Crane. However, I'd rather just let him wash over me. I like Hart Crane very much -- he's kind of like Eliot, but his allusions are not so numbingly highbrow. His dialogue and multiple voices, however, are not as effective. What do we make of Crane's obsession with history and past American historical/literary figures?
A side note: the Americans vs. the expats. Oy. I barely know what to do here -- the influences are confusing to me, especially since they all went through various different movements! If Brent would like to teach us about those movements, I would be very happy... I think the French Symbolists are important here, and of course the Imagists. Even the Cubists -- in a way, Crane seems more Cubist to me in the sense that his images are EXTREMELY important, but without the obsessive need to be "concentrated" and "pure" as in Imagism. His images are more fragmented, the varying parts making a whole that doesn't seem like it would come out of the parts. Yes? No? I need sleep?
I did better with Frost. I love the multiple levels of "Out, Out..." What a great poem! It sets up the beauty of the countryside, with the sight of faroff inaccessible mountains (so where are we? some lesser pastoral location) which is then interrupted by the SOUND of the saw. Synaesthetic, in a way, like Crane hearing faces on the subway (which is in turn a great contrast with Pound's Imagistic petals on a wet, black bough). Putting aside Frost as country vs. city, blah blah blah, what about parent vs. child in "Out, Out..."? "They" should have given him a half hour off. "They" turn to other things when he is dead. Who are "they"? Parents who are like the father in "Home Burial"? Are we supposed to judge "them"? Frost is fantastic at the unspoken. Also, how reliable are his narrators, after all? The Wood-Pile -- why should we believe the narrator when he decides that the pile was made by someone who likes to turn to new tasks all the time? Maybe he's an idiot and doesn't notice that there used to be a road nearby...
I took a long time on the reading for this week, partly because Molly just showed up, and partly because I really wanted to devote a lot of time to it. In fact, I am not yet done. Too bad I have to move on.
The way I come at American Modernist poetry is more through individuals than movements or political affiliations or national loyalties. The reason, I think, Stevens, Eliot, Crane, et al, are still read, is less that they were typical of a certain genre than that they have idiosyncrasies that distinguish them. Everyone wants to link Stevens, especially, to the French and the Imagists in particular, but I think the issue of voice is a far more relevant concern amongst all of the Modernists we read for this week(s).
Part of the issue of voice, I think (and very explicit in some of Pound), is the issue of the poetic vocation, in which socioeconomic status plays a strong role. There's been some good work done (by whom I forget) on the Modernists and their reaction to the aesthetes (in particular Wilde) of the 1890s -- what is to be done by someone who considers herself a poet in an age of rapid industrialization and nationalization? What is at stake in choosing the identity "poet"? (In Stevens, who was the VP of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, critics have made much of this issue. Thomas Grey, dean of Stanford's law school, has an interesting book on the legal workings involved in Stevens' verse.)
More in particular on the poems in a moment.
Form, form, form. I recommend Paul Fussell's book on poetic meter and poetic form -- he talks about the Modernists a lot. For Frost, especially, form is key. (Of course, Frost famously said that free verse is like tennis with the net down, although he also said that English is capable of only two meters: strict and loose pentameter.) Our selections include a number of sonnets with peculiar rhyme schemes, including one ("Design," appropriately) that uses only three different rhymes (very tough in English). In poems like "Mowing," "The Wood-Pile," and "Design," the style is explicitly the substance. Frost's manipulation of meter and rhyme often gets lost under his insistently demotic diction. The diction generally supports the theme, proleptically directed against what I can only assume to be an Eliotic sensibility: "The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows." Frost abstracts "labor," I think, not in lament or as a class warrior: it is no longer "I" or "the laborer," but a man who labors, in an Emersonian sense ("The Poet").
Thinking about voice, you guys should really read Maud Ellmann's article in the Norton edition of The Waste Land. I found the poem very interesting after reading Wharton -- thinking about the degree of satire involved in depictions of class sensibilities. Is Lily Bart a waste-lander? a Thames-daughter? Is Carrie Fisher a bored typist? or is she just Princess Leia?
I found the rhetoric about self-surrender and self-evacuating in "Tradition" interesting as well. In return for the "continual extinction of personality," we get the recompense of the impersonal and therefore significant emotion.
I read somewhere that Spring and All is generally read as a response to The Waste Land. This has to be part of a larger discussion.
Stevens isn't much of a narrative poet. Even his long narrative poem "The Comedian as the Letter C" has the simplest of narratives. See my previous post on Stevens. I could talk for hours about this guy.
One more note on Crane: I don't see him as imagist-inflected as someone like Williams (the wheelbarrow and composition in particular). The images certainly get fractured, but it seems to me (again) that the most interesting things going on here involve Crane's poetic voice. Elizabethan-Whitmanian-demotic-rarefied -- what weird diction, putting Crane in an un-occupiable social space, speaking a language that is no one else's. The "Proem" in particular takes up this outsider's perspective, somehow appropriate in a Whitmanian disciple. The bridge unifies, but not as a victory by and for industrial America; rather, the bridge becomes the "prayer of Pariah," a gift of anonymity. I want to spend a lot more time on this idea, but I really need to get to Faulkner.
One final question: is poetry "cute"?
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