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American Literature:
Lecture 8
Modernism
(1914 - 1945)
退出
American Literature (I) Autumn
2008
Objectives
To enable the Ss to get a general idea
about American Modernism;
To enable the Ss to get in touch with
some important modern poets such as
Robert Frost and Ezra Pound;
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Teaching Materials
Robert Lee Frost
“The Pasture”
“The Road Not Taken”
“Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening”
Ezra Pound
“In a Station of the Metro”
“A Pact”
“Salutation”
“The Garden”
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Part I
An Introduction
to American
Modernism
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I. Reasons for the coming
of Charles
American
modernism
Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) radically
altered the nineteenth century romantic view that nature,
especially human nature, was benign.
Herbert Spencer and the "Gospel of Wealth" or Social
Darwinism: reconciled individualism with capitalism by
suggesting that the interests of each citizen as well as
the interests of the state are served by free economic
expansion.
The work of Marx, and Freud, as well as other great
intellectual explorers and rebels had mounted an assault
against orthodox religious faith that lasted into the
twentieth century.
World War I in particular deepened doubt and
reauthorized disillusionment.
Another source of disillusionment was the rapid
transformation of American society that accelerated with
World War I.
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II Major Features of Modernism
1)
2)
Modernism is a cultural movement that generally includes
the progressive art and architecture, design, literature, music,
dance, painting and other visual arts which emerged in the
beginning of the 20th century , particularly in the years
following World War I. It was a movement
of artists and
th
designers who rebelled against late 19 century academic
and historicist tradition, and embraced the new economic,
social and political aspects of the emerging modern world.
The avant-garde movements that followed-including
Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism,
Expressionism, Constructivism and Abstract Expressionismare generally defined as Modernist.
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II Major Features of Modernism
3)
4)
5)
Modernism in literature is not easily summarized,
but the key elements are experimentation, antirealism, individualism and a stress on the cerebral
rather than emotive aspects.
The work of Modernist writers is characterized by
showing the disenchantment, dislocation, and
alienation of men in the world, and by the
emphasis on experimentation and formalism and
objectivism which are, in most cases, a reaction to
the cataclysm known as the Modern Age.
Among American writers, the best-known
Modernists are T.S.Eliot, Ezra Pound, F.Scott
Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner
and so on.
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III. The Schools of American
Modernism
1)
Modern poetry: experiments in form (Imagism)
2)
Prose Writing: modern realism (the Lost Generation)
3)
Novels of Social Awareness (Sinclair Lewis and John
Steinbeck)
4)
The Harlem Renaissance (Langston Hughes)
5)
The Fugitives and New Criticism
6)
The 20 Century American Drama (Eugene O’Neill)
th
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1)Part Two:
Modern poetry:
experiments in
form (Imagism)
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I. Imagism:
1) It is a Movement in U.S. and English poetry
characterized by the use of concrete language and
figures of speech, modern subject matter, metrical
freedom, and avoidance of romantic or mystical
themes, aiming at clarity of expression through
the use of precise visual images.
2) It grew out of the Symbolist Movement in 1912 and
was initially led by Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and
others.
3) The Imagist manifesto came out in 1912 showed
three Imagist poetic principles: direct treatment of the
“thing”（no fuss, frill, or ornament）, exclusion of superfluous
words（precision and economy of expression）, the rhythm
of the musical phrase rather than the sequence of a
metronome（free verse form美国文学
and music）.
4) Pound defined an image as that which
presents an intellectual and emotional
complex in an instant of time, and later he
extended this definition when he stated that
an image was “a vortex or cluster of fused
ideas, endowed with energy.”
5) There existed great influence of Chinese
poetry on the Imagist movement. Imagists
found value in Chinese poetry was because
Chinese poetry is, by virtue of the
ideographic and pictographic nature of the
Chinese language, essentially imagistic
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poetry.
II. The Major Representatives of the
Modern Poetry:
 Ezra Pound (1885- 1972)
 T.S.Eliot (1888 - 1965)
 Wallace Stevens (1879 - 1955)
 William Carlos Williams (1883 - 1963)
 Robert Frost (1874 - 1963)
 e.e.cummings (1894 - 1963)
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I. T. S. Eliot (1888 - 1965)
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I. About the author:
1)
2)
3)
4)
Thomas Stearns Eliot, American-British poet and critic, was
born from a middle-class family in St. Louis in 1888.
During his studies at Harvard in America, the Sorbonne in
Paris, and Oxford in England, Eliot mastered French, Italian,
English literature, as well as Sanskrit.
In 1914 Eliot accepted a job in London as a bank clerk
establishing his residence in London. Soon the erudite
young man joined the literary circle of Pound and Yeats
and started to write poetry. In 1917 his first poem was
published and caused a great deal of comment on both
side of the Atlantic.
After the bank clerk, Eliot worked as an assistant editor of
the Egoist (1917–19) and edited his own quarterly, the
Criterion (1922–39). With the help of Pound he published
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his best-known work, The Waste
5) His first marriage in 1915 was troubled and ended
with their separation in 1933. His subsequent
marriage in 1957 was far more successful.
6) In 1925 he was employed by the publishing house
of Faber and Faber, eventually becoming one of its
directors, a position which he held until his death.
In 1927 he became a British subject remaining in
England where his entire life was devoted to
literature.
7) He wrote several plays, but his best work is a
group of four long poems entitled Four Quartets,
written between 1935 and 1941, which led to his
receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1948 and made him
one of the most distinguished
literary figures of the
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20th century.
II. His works:
1. Poetry
1) Eliot’s early poetical works—Prufrock and Other
Observations (1917), Poems (1920), and The
Waste Land (1922)—employing myths, religious
symbolism, and literary allusion, signified a break
with 19th-century poetic traditions, express the
anguish and barrenness of modern life and the
isolation of the individual, particularly as reflected
in the failure of love. Their models were the
metaphysical poets, Dante, and French Symbolists.
Their meter ranged from the lyrical to the
conversational.
2) his later poetry, notably Ash Wednesday (1930)
and the Four Quartets (1935–42),
Eliot turned from
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spiritual desolation to hope for human salvation.
2. Eliot was an extraordinarily influential critic,
rejecting Romantic notions of unfettered originality
and arguing for the impersonality of great art. His
later criticism attempts to support Christian culture
against what he saw as the empty and fragmented
values of secularism. His outstanding critical works
are contained in:
 The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933)
 Essays Ancient and Modern (1936)
 Notes towards a Definition of Culture (1948).
3.
His plays attempt to revitalize verse drama and
usually treat the same themes as in his poetry. The
most important is:
 Murder in the Cathedral美国文学
(1935), dealing with the
final hours of Thomas Becket.
III. His Style of Poetry:
1) Eliot attempted to produce “pure imagery” with no
added meaning or symbolism.
2) He began adding one image to another in such a
way that his attitude and mood became clear. In
his best works, the image, his own philosophy and
the music of words are all harmoniously blended
although he mingled grand images with
commonplace ones and combined trivial and
tawdry images with traditional poetic subjects.
3) Eliot rarely made his meaning explicit. The internal
logic of his poems is carried out by swiftly
accumulating images, suggestions and echoes,
depending for their interpretation upon the
imagination of the reader.
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II. Robert Frost
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I. His life:
1.
2.
3.
Robert Frost was a great poet who was born on March 26, 1874
in San Francisco, California. When Frost was two years old, his
mother fled to Lawrence, Massachusetts, to get away from her
husband, who was a drunkard. She stayed there until her second
baby was born, Jeannie, Robert's sister. Then they went back to
San Francisco on a train. A few years later, Robert's father died,
so they took the body to Lawrence to be buried in the family
cemetery. By the time he was 11, Robert Frost had crossed the
U.S. three times.
After this rough beginning, Robert went on to become a great
poet. He married Elinor White and had 2 kids. Robert never in
truth had any jobs, except being a poet, but he published many
poems in his lifetime.
Robert won four Pultizer awards and read The Gift Outright at the
inauguration of John. F. Kennedy. He died on January 29, 1963 of
a heart attack. He was 88 years美国文学
old.
II. His works:
1.
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)
6)
2.
1)
2)
3)
4)
Collection of poems:
A Boy’s Will（1913）
North of Boston（1914）
New Hamphshire（1923）
Collected Poems（1930）
A Further Range（1936）
A Witness Tree（1942）
Poems:
Birches
After Apple-Picking
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
The Road Not Taken
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III. Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
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He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
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雪夜伫立林边有感
小马摇缰铃，
似问有否误，
林主曾相识，
唯闻飒飒声，
村中有其舍，
寒风共雪舞。
未悉我在此，
凝视林中雪。
密林景色美，
信誓不可移，
小马颇多疑，
安眠不可得，
荒野何伫立？
尚须行数里。
林边冻湖间，
岁末黑夜里。
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 It is a peaceful poem and makes man feel relaxed
when we read the lines: "The only other sounds
the sweep of easy wind and downy flake." Frost
also uses alliteration and repetition in his poems.
The rhyme scheme he uses is a-a-b-a.
 It is one of the most quietly moving of Frost’s lyrics.
On the surface, it seems to be simple, descriptive
verses, records of close observation, graphic and
homely pictures.
 It uses the simplest terms and commonest words.
But it is deeply meditative, adding far-reaching
meanings to the homely music. It uses its superb
craftsmanship to come to a climax of responsibility:
the promises to be kept, the obligation to be
fulfilled. Few poems have said so much in so little.
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III. Ezra Pound (1885 - 1972)
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1. His Life:
1)
2)
3)
Born in Idaho in 1885 and raised in Pennsylvania, Ezra
Pound spent most of his life in Europe and became one of
the 20th century's most influential -- and controversial -poets in the English language.
Pound was undoubtedly a genius. Before he graduated
from university, he had mastered 9 languages as well as
English grammar and literature. After college in
Pennsylvania and a brief stint as a teacher, in 1908 Pound
travelled to Venice and then to London, where he refined
his aesthetic sensibilities and edited the anthology Des
Imagistes (1914).
Pound championed the likes of T. S. Eliot, William Carlos
Williams and James Joyce and, influenced by Chinese and
Japanese poetry, advocated free meter and a more
economical use of words and images in poetic expression,
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leading the Imagist Movement of poetry.
4)
5)
6)
7)
He moved to Paris in 1920 and got acquainted with
Gertrude Stein and her circle of friends (which included
Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso), then settled in
Italy in 1924.
Enamored with Benito Mussolini, Pound made antiAmerican radio broadcasts during World War II. He was
arrested as a traitor in 1945 and initially confined in Pisa.
He was then sent to the U.S., where he was deemed
mentally unfit to stand trial for treason.
Pound was confined for 12 years in a hospital (actually
prison) for the criminally insane in Washington. During
this time he translated works of ancient Greek and
ancient Chinese literature. While in prison, he was
awarded a prestigious poetry prize in 1949 for his last
Cantos.
In 1958 he returned to Italy,美国文学
where he continued to write
and make translations until he died in 1972.
2. His works:
1) Pound wrote 70 books and over 1500 articles in
his life.
2) His major work of poetry is The Cantos, a long
poem which he wrote in sections between 1915
and 1945.
3. His masterpiece: The Cantos
1) In this poem, he traces the rise and fall of eastern
and western empires, the destruction caused by
greed and materialism.
2) He deplores the corruption of America after the
heroic time of Jefferson,
3) The last part, produced from his own suffering, is
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the most moving.
4. His poetic features:




Ezra Pound is often considered as the poet who is most
responsible for defining and promoting a modernist
aesthetic in poetry. His critical theories have great influence
on many important American and British poets.
Throughout the 1920s, he was much involved in most of
the major artistic movements. He was the leader of the
Imagist school in poetry. He believed that good poetry was
based on images rather than ideas.
As an imagist himself, he advocated and followed the
imagist credo, writing succinct verse of dry clarity and hard
outline in which an exact visual image made a total poetic
statement.
His technique came from classical Chinese and Japanese
poetry. On one hand the stressed clarity, precision, and
economy of language. On the other hand, Pound mused
the traditional rhyme and meter in order to, as Pound put it,
“compose in the sequence of
the musical phrase, not in the
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sequence of metronome”.
A Chinese imagistic poetry:
Autumn
Evening crows perch on old trees wreathed with withered vine,
Water of a stream flows by a family cottage near a tiny bridge.
A lean horse walks on an ancient road in western breeze,
The sun is setting in the west,
The heart-broken one is at the end of the Earth.
《天净沙·秋思》
马致远
枯藤、老树、昏鸦，小桥、流水、人家，
古道、西风、瘦马，夕阳西下，断肠人在天涯。
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 There are nine nouns or nominal phrases
placed in the first three lines in isolation from
each other.
 To appreciate the poem you should link the
scenes produced through these words up in
your imagination by way like montage in
movie art. So, a vivid picture like a story will
be displayed in your mind: In sight of the
beautiful scenery with withered vine, old tree,
crow returning home at dusk, small bridge,
river and households, a man, accompanied
by west wind and a thin horse on the ancient
road, is suffering from homesickness
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5. In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
人群中幽然浮现的一张张脸庞，
黝黑的湿树枝上的一片片花瓣。
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 About the poem:
① The “Metro” is the underground railway of
Paris.
② The word “apparition”, with its double
meaning, binds the two aspects of the
observation together:
 Apparition meaning “appearance”, in the
sense of something which appears, or
shows up; something which can be clearly
observed.
 Apparition meaning something which seems
real but perhaps is not
real; something
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③ The poem is an observation of the poet of the
human faces seen in a Paris subway station. It
looks to be a modern adoption of the Japanese
haiku.
④ He tries to render exactly his observation of
human faces seen in an underground railway
station. He sees the faces, turned variously
toward light and darkness, like flower petals
which are half absorbed by, half resisting, the wet,
dark texture of a bough.
⑤ Repeating it, you can have a colorful picture, also
you can feel the beauty of music through it’s
repetition of different vowels and consonants,
such as /p/ and /au/. Especially
the repetition of
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⑥ In this brief poem, Pound uses the fewest
possible words to convey an accurate image,
according to the principles of the “Imagists”.
Pound wrote an account of its composition,
which claims that the poem’s form was
determined by the experience that inspired it,
evolving organically rather than being
chosen arbitrarily.
⑦ Whether truth or myth, the piece has
become a famous document in the history of
Imagism.
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A Pact
I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman—
I have detested you long enough.
I come to you as a grown child
Who has had a pig-headed father;
I am old enough now to make friends.
It was you that broke the new wood,
Now is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root—
Let there be commerce between us.
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A Pact
The ambivalence of Pound’s response to his poetic
forefather Walt Whitman reflects his complex sense
of his American literary heritage. As he was well
aware, whatever he might say in explanation of
Whitman would also in some measure define himself.
While Pound recognized the authentic American
eloquence of Whitman’s "barbaric yawp," the selfconscious craftsman in him winced at the "exceeding
great stench" of Whitman’s "crudity," "an exceedingly
nauseating pill" which he parodically exemplified as
"Lo! Behold, I eat watermelons."
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A Pact
In his 1909 essay "What I Feel About Walt Whitman," his
distaste for Whitman’s expansive self-singing struggles with an
even more powerful conviction that Whitman "is America. . . .
He does ‘chant the crucial stage’ and he is the ‘voice
triumphant.’" In the end, Pound subordinates the superficial
quarrel with Whitman’s poetic means to the profound bond of
their common origin and message. Whitman is to America
"what Dante is to Italy"; "the vital part of my message, taken
from the sap and fibre of America, is the same as his"; "It is a
great thing, reading a man to know, not ‘His Tricks are not as
yet my Tricks, but I can easily make them mine’ but ‘His
message is my message. We will see that men hear it.’"
from A Guide to Ezra Pound’s Selected Poems. Copyright 1982,
1983
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A Pact
Hugh Witemeyer
Pound’s new style in Lustra was due in part to his reconciliation
with Whitman - or more accurately, to his giving freer rein to the
Whitman in himself. He had recognized (and suppressed) this
aspect of his poetic personality since 1909, the date of his
essay on "What I Feel About Walt Whitman." There he admitted:
"The vital part of my message, taken from the sap and fibre of
America, is the same as his. Mentaly, I am a Walt Whitman who
has learned to wear a colar and a dress shirt (although at times
inimical to both)." The image was apt, for he distrusted
Whitman’s nakedness and considered him something of an
artistic barbarian. "Now Whitman was not an artist," he declared
in another mood, "you cannot call a man an artist, until he
shows himself capable of reticence and restraint. . . ." Pound’s
attitude toward Whitman was highly ambivalent.
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A Pact
The ambivalence is reflected in "A Pact,"
which registers Pound’s reconciliation with
Whitman in 1913, but adds an important
qualification: . . . the demand for greater
conscious technique implied by "carving."
Whitman broke the "new wood" of free verse,
and Pound seeks to carve a finer product
(with the chisel of absolute rhythm).
Whitmanism is thus tempered with the ideal
of "poetry-as-sculpture" which Pound took
over from Gautier.
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A Pact
The result of this mixed acceptance was a curious
hybrid form - the Whitmanian envoi. This form
combined the democratic stance of Whitman with the
artistic sophistication of the Troubadours, the
vagabondism of the American open road with the
vagabondism of the Proven鏰l byways, Whitman’s
democracy of the spirit with Daniel’s aristocracy of
craftsmanship. Pound raised the medieval envoi to a
satiric form by infusing it with Whitman’s scope and
inclusiveness.
From The Poetry of Ezra Pound: Forms and
Renewal, 1908-1920. Copyright 1969 by The
University of California Press.
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Assignment
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Long Way Out
“The roaring twenties” “the jazz age”
Ernest Hemmingway
A Farewell to Arms
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