Twelve experienced faculty members from across the United States present their analyses of ground-breaking modern American poets in richly illustrated video lectures. The course highlights both major poets—from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson through T.S. Eliot, H.D., Amy Lowell, Hart Crane, Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser, and many others—and influential movements. The course mixes historical overview with close readings of individual poets and poems. Most courses give only one instructor’s point of view. This one matches the diversity of US poetry with lectures by a score of talented faculty. They bring their special perspective to the material while also presenting a coherent view of more than fifty years of US poetry. Throughout the course the lectures are illustrated with vivid images of the events, people, and places mentioned in the poems themselves. Readings by both the poets themselves and experienced faculty highlight the texts. On screen displays of text and quotations make it easy to follow the material. This is a course that takes advantage of the medium to bring you sights and sounds that would be difficult to incorporate in classroom lectures.
Modern American Poetry, 1899-1950 (Part 1)
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From the course by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Modern American Poetry
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From the lesson
Module 1
Reassessing Modernism's Origins
Meet the Instructors
Cary NelsonJubilee Professor of Liberal Arts & Sciences
English Department
[MUSIC]
Where to begin the course is linked to a very basic question,
which is where and when does modern poetry begin?
And that, I suppose is the obvious opening question for
any story that you want to tell about the emergence of 20th century American poetry.
It's also a question that powerfully determines when you answer it.
In some ways, everything else that you say about the topic.
Where you begin has a lot to do with what you end up saying.
Any single answer often establishes a particular point of origin.
A place where modern American poetry starts, but
it's inevitable that as soon as you do that, you marginalize or
eliminate other traditions that begin at other moments of time and
that begin in very different contexts.
Even if you try a story that has several beginnings,
you don't opt for just one, you opt for several.
You're going to treat typically some as major and others as minor.
A number of canonical poets and a still larger number of literary
critics have traditionally preferred modern poetry origin
stories that are grounded in a fundamental break with the past.
That is a story that says, this was a moment of time when poets
decided to sever their link with past literary traditions to start anew.
To make a new world for poetry in part,
in response to the new world that they were living in as the century began.
But actually, there are poets who value continuity with the past.
Who value their ability to take traditions that date back through
the 19th century and earlier, and do something different with them.
Adapt them to the modern period.
So, if anyone opts or a story about complete break with the past.
In some ways,
there are already falsifying the variety of poetry that’s part of our tradition.
One story, if it dominates others, also particular audience as your poetry,
because the story about modern poetry is not just about the poetry itself.
It's about who read that poetry and the number of people who read it
varied widely, as well and the audiences for poetry throughout a good
deal of the 20th century were larger than they are for poetry now.
So, it's not just the diversity
of our literary heritage that's at stake in these decisions.
You also risk losing the aesthetic, religious, aspirational,
social and political investments
that particular audience has made in American poetry at any given time.
And the investments that they've made varied according to history,
culture and politics.
That means that you can risk losing the different kinds of cultural and
intellectual work that poetry was able to do.
The kind of social functions that poetry served in people's lives.
And fundamentally, the range of meanings that poems and
poetry had in American history.
Now you can't write one story that does justice to all of this, it's not possible.
For a long time, literary historians tried to do that and they always failed,
but it is possible to try to tell a story that looks at some of the differences and
that from time to time reflects on its own limitations.
Some of the key poetry collections we will need to understand or
even early 20th century literary history, as we'll see,
were not actually published until the last 20 years.
So factually, we now can know certain things about modern American poetry
that we couldn't have known 30 years ago, 50 years ago, let alone 100 years ago.
In the modern poetry narratives that have dominated criticism for
decades, several dates standout.
The appearance of Poetry Magazine in Chicago in 1912.
The opening of the Armory Show officially titled,
the International Exhibition of Modern Art in Manhattan in 1913,
which introduced American audiences for
the first time on a large scale to several of the experimental artistic
traditions at that point alive in Europe and elsewhere like cubism.
And perhaps, the first publication of another
magazine called Others in New York in 1915.
So for a long time, those dates dominated the story of
how modern poetry began in the United States.
Two of these events, of course are in New York and those events help
tell the story of modern poetry as something that breaks with the past.
In retrospect at least, Ezra Pound's rally cry to quote,
make it new has come to seem the implicit
intent driving the whole history of modernist invention.
Yet, we also know that some of what was new took up its
inspiration from 19th century poets, Walt Whitman.
And even if unknowingly, took up a tradition inaugurated by
Emily Dickinson and waiting to be revived decades after her death and
you're going to learn something about that in the next lecture of the course.
In their shared deployment of syntactical elision and disjunction,
what you might call their associational leaps and the special demand that they
make on the reader, their thoughts about gender, their assaults on convention.
The poems of Dickinson and a later poet,
Mina Loy can now said to be in conversation with one another.
Tell all the truth, but tell it slant.
Dickinson wrote in the late 1860s.
Loy's songs to Joannes began to appear in others in 1915.
Although poetry magazine and others had some poets in common, including Pound.
Poems like Loy's helped give others a more consistently experimentalist image.
On the screen, we're going to show you just one passage from Dickinson
on the left and a passage from Mina Loy on the right.
Dickinson separates words and phrases with a dash,
Loy separates words and phrases with a sezora.
Here's Dickinson.
Title divine is mine.
The Wife without the Sign.
Acute Degree conferred on me.
Empress of Calvary.
Royal all, but the crown.
God sends us Women.
Now Mina Loy.
Spawn of Fantasies.
Silting the appraisable.
Pig cupid, his rosy snout rooting erotic garbage.
Once upon a time, pulls a weed, white, star-topped.
Loy moved to New York in 1916.
Her songs display only elliptical and minimal vestiges of narrative.
They don't tell a very easily reconstructed story.
As it begins, the speaker in her poem sequence has already failed
at anything like conventional romance, which for
Loy is steeped in a drama of stereotyped emotions about love.
But contrary to what some critics think, Loy's speaker doesn't opt instead for
a kind of simple animal sexuality, but for
something unconventional like verbally inventive biological union.
Throm's a lot about physicality, but in a completely unconventional way.
Loy's sequence relentlessly offers up illusory dramas of gender.
Quote, I am the jealous storehouse of the candle-ends
that lit your adolescent learning.
Only, rapidly to reject them.
Loy offers us versions of sexual intercourse that invent figures for
bodily fluids and anatomy, laughing honey,
spermatozoa in the milk of the Moon shuttle cock and battle door.
Some critics have concluded that these represent images of degraded lust.
They seem instead to be very anti-romantic,
very unsentimental to say the sure, but they're celebratory.
Moreover, their variety and
surprising capacity to rewrite the rhetoric of romance.
She uses terms and phrases like honey, the milk of the Moon, pink love,
feathers that actually reposition standard romance images.
They demonstrate that a kind of degendered human
sexuality without obvious markers of male and female,
one free of cultural cliches about men and women need not be impoverish.
The rediscovery and reevaluation of Loy's work was finally made
possible by the publication of a reliable collected poems in 1996.
Very hard to read all of Loy's poems before that date.
[MUSIC]
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