Modernism continued

Modernism, like any largescale poetry movement is chock full of a vast array of different styles. With the imagists we saw poets who stressed a breal from Romanticism (as evidenced by Pound's poem "The Pact," in which he begrudgingly acknowledges Whitman's importance).

With Wallace Stevens, D. H. Lawrence, and Hart Crane (and to a lesser extent, Moore, MacLeish and Auden) we see a questioning attitude, especially toward Nature and God/divinity, a more "Modern" doubt, but nonetheless we can trace these poets' lineage back to Whitman, Dickinson, and also Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake and other Romantic poets.

In fact, Pound and Stevens, though both Modernist poets, were at opposite poles in the era, and neither seemed to particularly like/respect the other poet. As Marjorie Perloff writes in Pound/Stevens: Whose Era--

"On October 26 1955 William Carlos Williams wrote to Ezra Pound at St. Elizabet's, asking him if he would care to comment on the obituary essay he had just written on Wallace Stevens, then two months dead, for Poetry Magazine. Pound replied:

. . .as to yr/ pal/ Wally S/ . . .it wd/ be highly improper for
me to have opinions of yr/ opinion of a bloke I haven't read
and DOUBT like all hell
that yu will be able to PURR-suade me to venture on
with such a
hellUVAlot I don't know and WANT to find out.


If this sounds unnecessarily dismissive, compare it to Stevens' curiously similar response to Pound. In 1947 Theodore Weiss invited Stevens to write something for a special Pound issue of the fledgling Quarterly Review of Literature. Stevens replied curtly: "Nothing doing about Pound. I should have to saturate myself with the work and I have not the time."
Time for you and time for me--it seems that neither Pound nor Stevens could allow for it. We, reading these two great Modernists in the late decades of the twentieth century, tend to ignore such mutual distrust, positing that of course Pound and Stevens are among the four or five great American poets of the century."


As you can see, these poets, and others of the time, did not always see eye to eye when it came to ideas of poetry.

Stevens, besides his poems, wrote many essays about the Nature of poetry, and of writing poetry--being very very opinionated on the subject.

"In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all."

"The poet is the priest of the invisible."

"Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking."

"The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself."

Here are links to some Brief guides from Poets.org from the Academy of American Poets.


A Brief Guide to Modernism


A Brief Guide to Imagism