Modernist poetry in English
Like other modernists, Imagist poets wrote in reaction to the perceived excesses of Victorian poetry, and its emphasis on traditional formalism and ornate diction.
The roots of English-language poetic modernism can be traced back to the works of a number of earlier writers, including Walt Whitman, whose long lines approached a type of free verse, the prose poetry of Oscar Wilde, Robert Browning's subversion of the poetic self, Emily Dickinson's compression and the writings of the early English Symbolists, such as Arthur Symons.
[citation needed] These poets largely remained true to the basic tenets of the Romantic movement and the appearance of the Imagists marked the first emergence of a distinctly modernist poetic in the language.
They started meeting with other poets at the Eiffel Tower restaurant in Soho to discuss reform of contemporary poetry through free verse and the tanka and haiku and the removal of all unnecessary verbiage from poems.
[citation needed] That month Pound's book Ripostes was published with an appendix called The Complete Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme, which carried a note that saw the first appearance of the word Imagiste in print.
The latter contained this succinct statement of the group's position: In setting these criteria for poetry, the Imagists saw themselves as looking backward to the best practices of pre-Romantic writing.
In 1913, Pound was contacted by the widow of the recently deceased Orientalist Ernest Fenollosa, who while in Japan had collected word-by-word translations and notes for 150 classical Chinese poems that fit in closely with this program.
In Chinese, the first line of Li Po's, called "Rihaku" by Fenollosa's Japanese informants, poem "The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter," is a spare, direct juxtaposition of five characters that appear in Fenollosa's notes as mistress hair first cover browIn his resulting 1915 Cathay, Pound rendered this in simple English as While my hair was still cut straight across my foreheadBetween 1914 and 1917, four anthologies of Imagist poetry were published.
[4] The Baroness’s poem “Klink-Hratzvenga (Death-wail)”, written in response to her husband’s suicide after the war’s end, was “a mourning song in nonsense sounds that transcended national boundaries”.
Although he was never formally associated with the Imagist group, his work was admired by Pound, who, in 1915, helped him publish "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", which brought him to prominence.
When Eliot had completed his original draft of a long poem based on both the disintegration of his personal life and mental stability, and the culture around him, he gave the manuscript, provisionally titled "He Do the Police in Different Voices", to Pound for comment.
The addition of notes to the published poem served to highlight the use of collage as a literary technique, paralleling similar practice by the cubists and other visual artists.
From this point on, modernism in English tended towards a poetry of the fragment that rejected the idea that the poet could present a comfortingly coherent view of life.
Contributors also included Pound, Eliot, H.D., Djuna Barnes, Amy Lowell, Conrad Aiken, Carl Sandburg, and Wallace Stevens.
Williams, a doctor who worked in general practice in a working-class area of Rutherford, New Jersey, explained this approach by saying that he made his poems from 'the speech of Polish mothers'.
An admirer of Joyce and Pound, MacDiarmid wrote much of his early poetry in anglicised Lowland Scots, a literary dialect which had also been used by Robert Burns.
Though the poets of the group made little headway for the next twenty years, they were ultimately successful in establishing a modernist hegemony and canon in that country that would endure until at least the end of the 20th century.
With the publication of The Waste Land, modernist poetry appeared to have made a breakthrough into wider critical discourse and a broader readership.
The economic depression, combined with the impact of the Spanish Civil War, also saw the emergence, in the Britain of the 1930s, of a more overtly political poetry, as represented by such writers as W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender.
The key group to emerge during this time were the Objectivist poets, consisting of Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff, Carl Rakosi, Basil Bunting and Lorine Niedecker.
The basic tenets of Objectivist poetics were to treat the poem as an object and to emphasise sincerity, intelligence, and the poet's ability to look clearly at the world, and in this they can be viewed as direct descendants of the Imagists.
Around the same time, a number of British surrealist poets were beginning to emerge, among them David Gascoyne, George Barker and Hugh Sykes Davies.
Like the Objectivists, these poets were relatively neglected by their native literary cultures and had to wait for a revival of interest in British and Irish modernism in the 1960s before their contributions to the development of this alternative tradition were properly assessed.
A number of long poems were also written during the 1920s, including Mina Loy's 'auto-mythology', Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose and Hugh MacDiarmid's satire on Scottish society, A Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle.
David Jones' war poem In Parenthesis was a book-length work that drew on the matter of Britain to illuminate his experiences in the trenches, and his later epic The Anathemata, itself hewn from a much longer manuscript, is a meditation on empire and resistance, the local and the global, which uses materials from Christian, Roman and Celtic history and mythology.
One of the most influential of all the modernist long poems was Pound's The Cantos, a 'poem containing history' that he started in 1915 and continued to work on for the rest of his writing life.
A long poem that is often overlooked, because it first appeared in the commercially unsuccessful 1936 anthology New Provinces, is Canadian poet A. M. Klein's meditation on Spinoza, "Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens."
Poetic modernism was an overtly revolutionary literary movement, a revolution of the word, and, for a number of its practitioners, this interest in radical change spilled over into politics.
Among the Beats, Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg studied Pound closely and were heavily influenced by his interest in Chinese and Japanese poetry and the ecological concerns evident in the later Cantos.
Origin also published work by Louis Zukofsky, Lorine Niedecker and Wallace Stevens, helping to revive interest in these early modernist writers.
