American Modernist Poetry
“A Poem should not mean but be”
----the definition of the modernist aesthetic of American poetry
Modernist poetry is generally considered to have emerged in the early years of the 20th century with the appearance of the Imagists. In common with many other modernists, these poets wrote in reaction to the perceived excesses of Victorian poetry, with its emphasis on traditional formalism and ornate diction.
William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams, a poet who had an immense influence on the course of 20th century poetry. He wrote in varying style and technique and was often radically experimental. His work is fresh and clear, rejecting sentimentality and vagueness. It also reflects emotional restraint and heightens the sensory experience with articulated common speech. Williams's work inspired many poets and many generations to follow. His work is both easy and enjoyable to read.
In general, modernists saw themselves as looking back to the best practices of poets in earlier periods and other cultures. Their models included ancient Greek literature, Chinese and Japanese poetry, Dante and the English Metaphysical poets. Much of early modernist poetry took the form of short, compact lyrics. As it developed, however, longer poems came to the fore.
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, Emily Dickinson's compression and the writings of the early English SymboliThe Waste Land" as example of a Modernist Text
"The Waste Land" as example of a
Modernist Text
T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" is a foundational text of modernism, representing the moment at which imagism moves into modernism proper. Broken, fragmented and seemingly unrelated slices of imagery come together to form a disjunctive anti-narrative. The motif of sight and vision is as central to the poem as it is to modernism. The reader is thrown into confusion, unable to see anything but a heap of broken images. The narrator, however (in "The Waste Land" as in other texts), promises to show the reader a different meaning: that is, how to make meaning from dislocation and fragmentation. This construction of an exclusive meaning is essential to modernism.
William Carlos Williams
The Red Wheelbarrow so much depends
upon
a red wheel barrow
glazed with rain water
beside the white chickens.
The Red Wheelbarrow is a poem by and often considered the masterwork of American 20th-century writer William Carlos Williams. The 1923 poem exemplifies the Imagistinfluenced philosophy of “no ideas but in things”. This provides another layer of meaning beneath the surface reading. The style of the poem forgoes traditional British stress patterns to create a typical “American” image.