Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

During his own lifetime, he became not only the most beloved American poet of the period,
but also one of the most famous poets in the English-speaking countries. He contributed to the so
called “flowering of New England” both writing about the American scene and by dealing with
feneral themes which appealed to a very wide audience all over the world.
Since ordinary people read his poems with great enjoyment in a period when the love of
poetry was far common than it is today, he came known as one of the “Fireside Poets” whose
pleasurable compositions could be shared by whole famiies
Because he was highly respected and and admired on both sides of the Atlantic, a memorial
bust was placed in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey in London after his death, Longfellow
being the first American to receive this British honour.

He was born in Portland, ME and was educated and graduated at Bowdoin College. When
he graduated he was offered a teaching position which allowed him to further study Romance
languages in Europe. Back in America, he took up his teaching duties as Professor of Modern
Languages between 1829 and 1834. Later that decade, he accepted the offer to become Professor
at Harvard College, which carried the stipulation to stay in Europe. He traveled with his wife but
she died after settling in Heidelberg.

Back to Harvard in 1836, he presided over the modern language program and taught a wide
range of European literatures (including Spanish) for eighteen years. He often felt that the
constant pressure of academic work was distracting him from writing. Finally in 1855 his
financial success encouraged him to resign his professorship at Harvard in order to be able to write.

Longfellow’s life had none of the dramatic excitement which characterized so many of his
contemporary fellow writers. He remarried had several children and led a happy domestic
existence until the death of his second wife in 1861. He disliked extremes, usually avoided
controversy, and was fond of harmony and concord in all his relations.

His works.
His first collecion of poems, Voices of the Night (1839), was a best-seller. Poems on
Slavery (1842) was set on eight antislavery poems prompted by the African slave revolt aboard the
Amistad and the subsequent momentous trial, whose details he had followed in the newspapers.
Evangeline: a Tale of Acadie caused a sensation when it came out in 1847, almost a century afte
the tragic events which inspired Longfellow’s famous poem had taken place. Although Evangeline
Bellafontaine did not actually exist, the poet made her stand out as a symbol of the expulsion of
14000 French-speaking protestants from what is now the Canadian province of Nova Scotia.
The British military deported these settlers in 1755. Evangeline endures many hardships as she
searches most of the Eastern United States for her beloved Gabriel. Both the melodramatic plot
and the easy to memorize dactyilic hexameters accounted for much of its popular success. The
Song of Hiawatha (1855) was greeted with similar enthusiasm in Amrica and Europe. Longfellow
attempted to create an American epic that would satisfy the patriotism of his fellow citizens and at
the same time exemplify the genuine spirit of his country abroad.

American Poetry 1800-1850

Apart from Puritan poets and the particular views of some Trascendentalists like Ralph
Waldo Emerson; apart from Edgar Allan Poe, with his particular Dark Romanticism tome, and
leaving aside Herman Mmelville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, there is an important poetic tradition in
America from the beginning of the C19TH to the first edition of Leaves of Grass.
In the first half of the century, poets sough to entertain, to inform and to put into
memorable language America’s history, but they did not seek to forge a radical new poetic
tradition. Their poetry built upon tradition, and they met the first goal of American poetry: be able
to compete in quality, intelligence, and breadth with British poetry. Bbut just as they achieved this
goal, poetic aspirations began to change.

The Fireside Poets

They earned this nickname because they frequently used the hearth as an image of comfort
and unity, a place where families gathered to learn and tell stories (also called “Schoolroom or
“Household” poets). They were the first American poets to rival British poets in popularity in either
country. The consensus of American critics was that the Fireside Poets first put American poetry on
an equal footing with British poetry.

Their verse may seem more Victorian in sensibility than romantic, perhaps overly
sentimental or moralizing in tone, but as a group they are notable for their scholarship, political
sensibilities and the resilience of their lines and themes. Preferred conventional forms over
experimentation. Often used American legends and scenes of American life as their subject matter.

William Cullen Bryant (1794 – 1878)

Gained public recognition first and is best remembered for “Thanatopsis”, published in
1821 but written when he was a teenager. This poem remained the high point of Bryant’s era,
roughly the quarter century between the War of 1812 and Longfellow’s rise to prominence at the
end of the 1830’s.
Still widely anthologized, this poem offers a democratic reconciliation with death, as the
great equalizer and a recognition that the “still voice” of God is embodied in all processes of
nature.
During a busy life as a lawyer and editor of the New York Evening Post, Bryant wrote
accomplished, elegant and romantic descriptions of a nature suffused with spirit.

James Russel Howell (1819-1891)

He was a vital force in the history of American poetry and though during his lifetime. His
range and perspicacity in literary criticism are unequaled in nineteenth-century America. The
Biglow Papers (1848) ranks among the finest political satires in American literature. In it, creates
Hosea Biglow, a shrewd but uneducated village poet who argues for reform in dialect poetry.
Lowell writes in the same vein, linking the colonial “character” tradition with the new realism and
regionalism based on dialect that flowered in the 1850s. Lowell became a liberal remormer,
abolitionist and supporter of women’s suffrage and laws ending child labor.

James Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892)

The most active poet of the era, had a background very similar to Walt Whitman’s. He
was born and raised on a modest Quaker farm in Massachussets, had little formal education, and
worked as a journalist. Whitties is respected for anti-slavery poems such as “Ichabod”, and his
poetry is sometimes viewed as an early example of regional realism.
Whittier’s best work, the long poem “Snow Bound”, uses sharp images, simple
costructions, and ballad-like tetrameter couplets. It vividly recreates the poet’s deceased family and
friends from his childhood, huddled cozily around the blazing hearth during one of New England’s
blustering snowstorms. It affirms the eternity of the spirit, the timeless power of love in the
memory, and the undiminished beauty of nature, despite violent outer political storms.

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)

He was a celebrated physician and professor of anatomy and physiology at Harvard, is the
hardest of the group to categorize because his work is marked by a refreshing versatility. Wrote
several memorable short poems as “The Chambered Nautilus”(1858).
Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
Key facts:
Along with Melville, Hawthorne, Emerson and Thoreau, he started the so called American
Renaissance. Thus he is also influenced by two other literary movements Transcendentalism and
Realism – that can be traced in his work. He is among the most influential poets in the American
Canon, and often called the “Father of free verse”. His work was very controversial in its time,
particularly his book “Calamus” which was described as obscene for its overt sexuality. There is
disagreement among his biographers who continue to debate his sexuality as to whether he had
actual sexual experiences with men.
Whitman was concerned with politics throughout his life. He supported the Wilmot Proviso
(1846, which proposed that slavery be prohibited from territory conquered from Mexico) and
opposed the extension of slavery generally. His poetry presented an egalitarian view of the races,
and at one point he called for the abolition of slavery. Whitman gave Emerson his interpretation of
the poet’s role: a democratic spokesperson, speaks from and within the body, writes outside in
Nature.

General features of Whitman’s poetry.

Whitman’s great subject was America, but he wrote on an expansive variety of smaller
subjects to accomplish the task of capturing the essence of America.
Slavery, democracy, the processes of reading and writing, the various occupations, the
landscape, the sea, the natural world, education, aging, poverty or social change are his most used
themes.

Whitman’s greatest legacy is his invention of a truly American free verse. His
groundbreaking, open, inclusive and optimistic poems are written in long, sprawling lines and span
an astonishing variety of subjects and POVs. His catalogs are used in many of his poems to
indicate the breadth of types of people, situation or objects in a particular poem. Whitman’s mastery
of the catalog has caused critics to praise his endless generative powers, his seeming ability to cycle
through hundreds of images while avoiding repetition and producing astounding variety and
newness.
Anaphora is a literary device used by Whitman which employs the repetition of a first word
in each phrase. (Each line beginning with The or And). He uses anaphora to mimic biblical syntax
and give his work aa weighty, epic feeling, but also to create hypnotic rhythms that take the place
of more formal verse. Whitman’s poetics also relies on careful control of the indicative and
imperative moods.

Leaves of Grass.
Begun in 1847, Leaves of Grass was printed in several different forms and grew
tremendously in volume and content over a span of nearly forty years until his death in 1892.
During this time both the nation and Whitman’s work underwent rapid change. As
Whitman’s personal outlook changed because of the passing of events, the tone and content of his
poetry also evolved. What began as a highly optimistic treatise on the virtues of democracy and
the unquestionable notion of progress turned into a work with a more sober outlook.
As he created and revised his masterwork, Whitman continued to change his persona.
Unconventional in character as well as in poetic vision, he reacted to challenges of political
upheaval and Civil War, family dysfunction, censorship… He was encouraged by friends and
admirers as well as by his own optimism, and emerged with his reputation intacct as the beloved
“great gray poet” of American letters.
Whitman published Leaves of Grass without the author’s name on the title page. He used an
engraving of himself in laborer’s clothes as the frontispiece. Known as “the carpenter”, the image
is an icon of the American poet.

The 1st edition of 1855

The first edition was substantially optimistic in tone. It celebrates the idea of democracy as
Whitman perceived it: a world with no racial, religious, class, or gender barriers; a world of equal
opportunity and no formal code of behavior. A calculated spontaneity characterizes the first
edition which lacks the titles and section numbers that appear in later editions. This absence of
signpost seems appropriate for the predominant themes of Whitman’s poetry.
The speaker directly addresses the reader with sweeping pronouncements and challenges.
Images accumulate or pages at a time, suggesting a desire to encomass the entire range of human
experience. The focus change abruptly, as if something has suddently occurred to the speaker that
must communicate immediately.

The 2nd edition of 1856

Whitman has Emerson’s praised printed on the spine in gold letters: “I greet you at the
beginning of a great career”. The form as well as the substance of the second edition reflected
Whitman’s growing disillusionment,
New poems included in the volume illustrated the political turmoil caused by the slavery
issue and the lack of substantive national leadership as well as a poem that clearly drew a parallel
between failed European rvolutions and the American Revolution,

The 3rd edition of 1860-61 (aka the “Blue Book”)

In 1860, with the nation on the brink of Civil War, the third edition of Leaves of Grass was
released. Much speculation has arised about Whitman’s personal life during this period and the
possible suffering that may have contributed to the frustrated, confused and dejected feelings
conveyed in the new poetry of this edition.
Certainly national events were producing such emotions, while the relative failure of his
first two volumes appears also to have contributed to the new tone and content. 146 new poems
added to the 32 poems of the 2nd edition, including “I hear America singing”. Enfans d’Adam
section, 15 poems on “amativeness” and “Calamus”, 32 poems on love between men,
The 6th edition of 1881-82
By the release of the 1881 edition, Whitman had softened somewhat. Both he and the nation
had experienced a great deal and much of his former optimism returned. He had endured the Civil
War, witnessed Reconstruction and the abolition of slavery, watched the rise and assassination of
Abraham Lincoln and traveled extensively throughout the West and Canada.
This edition was the only officially sanctioned. Because of the sexual nature of some of the
poems, the Boston district attorney ordered Osgood (the publisher) to stop publishing the book.
A Philadelphia firm, Rees Welsh, took over the publication and experienced its best sales;
the 1000 copy run of the edition sold out in a single day.
The 1881 edition conbined the substance and structure that Whitman had been struggling
to achieve since he had begun. Though additions were made later, the basic structure of the work
was established.

The 7th edition of 1891-92 (The Deathbed edition)

This is the most optimistic in tone. Whitman added thirty-five new poems in a final section
called “Good-bye My Fancy”. Mostly about religion or afterlife, the poems reflected his happy
outlook at the time.
Whitman touches on his own life, then traces human development from the Garden of Eden
through America’s west expansion, the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, takinf detours down various
roads. The poet winds up his collection commenting on death – but in an unconventional way.

With “Good-bye My Fancy”, he concludes a lifetime work regarded as a dialogue with his
soul. Whitman does not profess to know what death means or whether his soul is immortal or dies
but he is happy for the time they have shared together.

Song of Myself.
Originally the entire piece was published as one long poem in the 1855 edition, before the
Civil War. Despite the title, the theme does not deal with an egocentric self. The theme motions a
shifts:
-opens with poet-speaker.
-encompasses America > the world
-and the the full Universe.

The “I” does not reflect the poet Walt Whitman himself. The “I” is an idealized dramatized
figure: an American workman without family background, an Everyman, “one of the roughs”.
Each section runs its course by subject.

“Song of Myself” appeared as one of the twelve untitled poems of the first edition of
Leaves of Grass (1855). Regularly revised, it became “Poem of Walt Whitman, an American” in the
second edition and “Walt Whitman” in the third. Not until the sixth edition of Leaves of Grass, did
the poem undergo its final metamorphosis in name as well as form. The first and final versions o
“Song of Myself” are virtually identical in subject, style and even length.
The division of the free-flowing untitled poem into 52 numbered sections stresses the
organic principle from which the poem develops, for the poem’s unity derives less from the
numbering of its sections, according to the yearly cycle of weeks.

Speaker.
Not identifying himself by name until section 24 as “Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of
Manhattan the son”, the thirty-seven-year-old speaker strikes a decidedly proud and personal pose
and addresses the reader in a doubly direct manner free of the constraints of either poetic
convention or social decorum.
The pome presents not merely a mind thinking or a voice speaking, but an entire body
reclining on the ground leaning and loafing. Whitman situates himself and his poem outdoors and
therefore outside convention and tradition; deriberately conflates natural world and poetical word.

Subject matter.
Common, universal human experiences, often oof a rude, unrefined nature:
-America -Sexual Desire
-The grass -Corporeal experiences
-Marginalized groups
-Unpoetic settings

Structure.
The true structure of the poem is not primarily logical but psychological, and is not a
geometric figure but a musical progression. There is also a firm narrative structure, one that becoes
easier to grasp when we start by dividing the poem into a number of parts or sequences.
1-18
The self, mystical interpretation.
19-25
Degraded and transfigurated self
26-38
Life flowing in upon the self, evolution.
39-41
The superman
42-52
Questions on life, God, and mysticity.

Themes.
Multiculturalism, freedom, democratic equality, individualism, redefining what’s sacred,,
American identity-

Formal innovations.
Strategic use of catalogs, parallel syntax, free verse, extreme use of dependent clauses,
common diction, first person perspective and direct addressing to the reader.

Central images and symbols

The grass, the poem, the human body, brotherhood, breaking of physical barriers, stripping
off of restraints
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

Key facts.
Emily leftt an all-female academy, which is now Mount Holyoke College, after a year.
Homesickness and porr health are speculated reasons but another popular one is fear of
punishment after refusing to publicly profess her faith to the Congregational church.
She was engaged to Rev. Gould, a student at Amherst College, but her wealthy father broke
it off because he was just a poor student. It’s believed that her disappointment upon returning home
triggered her initial withdrawal from society.
The only time she left Amherst, MA, was a trip to Boston 12 years before her death. An eye
doctor forbade her to read and write. She struck up a correspondence with the Atlantic Monthly
editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and they became lifelong friends.
Late in life, she had a relationship with a judge, Otis Lord, a widower and friend of her
father. He even proposed marriage to her, but she turned him down.
Only seven poems published during her lifetime, and most were anonymous and against
her will. She was confident of posthumous success.
Though we now know she was no spinster (solterona), it’s believed that her decision to
seclude herself was to secure the independence to write. When ill, only let the doctor examine
from a distance. She suffered from nephritis, which caused her fainting spells.
After her death, her sister found over 800 poems in Emily’s room. She edited them and
published in three sreies, but all of her 1775 poems were not published until 1955.
Emily Dickinson was referred to as the Myth of Amherst throughout her life and, when she
took to wearing only white and not leaving her property, the “Nun of Amherst”. After her death
and subsequent fame, she became the “Belle of Amherst”.

Sources and influences of Dickinson’s poetry

Dickinson prized individuality and considered that the prime source of inspiration was
within the poet himself. She was an avid reader and her work shows the influence from four
primary sources: the Bible, Shakespears, Taylor’s poetry and Emerson’s transcendentalism.
Other influences include the novels of Hawthorne and the book of religious meditation On the
Imitation of Christ.

-The Bible
Particularly the Book of Revelations, provided material for imagery and influenced
her ability to control and manipulate cadence and language.

- Shakespeare
Dickinson may thus have admired Shakespeare most for what Keats called “negative
capability”, the art coming from the embodiment of character mor than sheer verbal skill or
a capacity to express the poet’s own feelings and thoughts. Dickinson’s admiration for
Shakespeare suggests the appeal of the role playing and hence a fondness for representing
characters other than her own

-Metaphysical poetry
Abrupt opening of the poems, love for paradox, disparate similes; use of striking
metaphors and conceits, simple diction. Imagery is drawn from the commonplace or the
remote, actual life or erudite sources, the figure itself is often elaorated with self-conscious
ingenuity.

-Edward Taylor
Puritan metaphysical poet (1642-1729) left instructions that his heirs should “never
publish any of his writings” and the poems remained all but forgotten for more than 200
years. Taylor’s poems were an expression of his deeply held religious views, acquired
during a strict upbringing and shaped in adulthood by New England Congregationalist
Puritan. His poetical images are taken from warfare, metallurgy and nature and his use of
striking tropes greatly influenced Dickinson.

-Dickinson and Puritanism

She was educated according to the Puritan and Calvinist tradition, she was well-versed in
the Bible and hymns with their metrical pattern and their rich store of religious imagery.
However, her firm conviction in the value of individual thought and with her sense of
beauty of each individual soul, she could not subscribe the notion that sin and damnation were
the destiny of those not elected.

Dickinson believed that the spiritual world could best be appreciated through the medium
of the physical world around: GOD was manifest in NATURE. For her the supernatural was only
the natural seen in a clear light, disclosing itself to whoever had the heart, mind and imagination to
see it.

Dickinson owes a two-fold debt to the tradition of New England Puritanism:

- In its hymns singins she discovered a simple yet satisfying poetic vocabulary and form.
- In its intensity and commitment she found the foundations of her individual belief in a
spiritual existence.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson’s writings influenced the thought and method of Dickinson’s poems rather than
their form or linguistic pattern. Her concern to give life to her individual inner vision may be
attributable to Emerson.
On the occasion of Emerson’s 1857 lecture he stayed with Austin and Susan Dickinson in
the house next door to where Emily was living. She wrote to Sue: “It must have been as if he had
come from where dreams are born!”.
-Dickinson and Trascendentalism
While Trascendentalism addressed an impersonsal higher reality, Dickinson addressed a
personal God directly even questionin its authority. She could not share the movement’s moral
idealism: while the Transcendental writers found a justification for evil, Dickinson took agony to
be the price paid for each moment of ecstasy.
Most of her work is not in the Trascendetal mood: some poems affirm an unbreakable
separation between man and nature; others merely show delight in the variety and spectacle of
nature.
Dickinson did not share Emerson’s optimism. While he spoke of “nature”, she spoke of a
gothic “landscape”; and while for Emerson, the interpretation of natural sings brings the perceiver
closer to the benevolent Oversoul, to Dickinson it revealed the presence of an awe-inspiring God.
While Emerson’s poetic circles reached outward, Dickinson’s mostly plunged inward.
Since Emerson believed in human being’s capacity to deduce meaning from signs, as language
clarifies and liberates, Dickinson reveals the ambiguity of signs and the predicament o the
perceiver.

Dickinson and Whitman

There are by far more differences in the writing styles of Whitman and Dickinson than
there are similarities. Whitman’s poem is the lack of any structure. Whitman’s poem tend to run
on and one; there was no set length for his poems, stanzas or lines. Dickinson, on the other hand,
wrote poems with a definite structure. She wrote ballad stanzas, which were four line stanzas
alternating in iambic tetrameter and trimeter.
Modern ideas and concepts in their poetry. One of the poetic tools which Whitman used is
cataloguing. One of Dickinson’s was her use of shocking imagery. Whitman can be introduced as a
public poet on the surface intensely interested in civil issues, while Dickinson can be introduced as
a private poet who, again on the surface, is most intensely interested in the self.
Whitman would seek to become the poet of the self, while Dickinson would explore the self
in relation to the largest social and metaphysical structures then imaginable.

Dickinson’s style.
Dickinson’s central concerns are the traditional themes of man’s relationship with Nature
and with God. Within this framework, she explores the timeless mysteries of love and death, and
sublime spiritual experiences – agony, ecstasy.
She repeatedly links the sublime with enriched meaning and energy about to pour forth,
explode or break out of the confines of consciousness.
She frequently uses words in unusual ways where the obvious meaning does not fit
comfortably. This is because Dickinson often uses subtle wordlplay based on the radical
meaning of words, that is, the meaning derived from their Greek and Latin roots. It is thus essential
to consider all possible definitions of her words, including archaic and secondary meanings. Her
poems are webs of associated meanings.
Beyond common pronouns, articles and adjectives, Dickinson used favorite words in her
poetic vocabulary. Here is the frequency of her favorite words in her 1775 poems: Sun, death,
face, God, time.

Imagery
Readers got struck by the contrast between Dickinson’s innovative style and the simplicity
of her romantic imagery. Images suggestive of sumptuous objects like jewel, diamond or alabaster
are comparatively rare. So are those calling up violent conflicts like storm, thunder or volcano,
which have caught the attention of feminist criticism.
By contrast, nature imagery abounds in most poems. Some images like bird recur by the
dozen. Also frequent are images focusing on natural events associated with passage of time.
Animals like tiger, lamb or dog briefly appear but insects come out uppermost.

The use of dash

Dickinson’s use of the dash is one of the most obvious of her stylistic features. It gives her
work a sense of energy, and her language often appears to be at breaking point as it strains to
convey intense meaning. The dash also suggests her care and thoughtfulness and perhaps
uncertainty as she reflects on the material.
The dash frees her from the formality of traditional punctuation and allows her to do a
number of things: mark an interruption of thought, a pause, lo del color negro, and to leave a line
incomplete.
She uses it too to connect and separate ideas, to introduce a list, for emphasis and for
compression and energy.

The use of capitalization

In the 18th c., it was a common feature in English style for the initial letter of nouns, in the
19th c. was abandoned. Emily Dickinson used capital letters not for all nouns, or adjectives; even in
words which would commonly take it, such as adverbs or conjunctions.
She uses them to indicate emphasis. The eye and, indeed, the mind are strongly drawn to
words which are capitalized.

Form and verse structure.

Few radical innovations to verse forms and rarely use of free verse. Puzzle & nursery
rhyme-like qualities: pure delight and play in language for its own sake. Wrenched grammar and
syntax: omission of articles, prepositions, auxiliary verbs -- highly condensed poetry –. Deletions
occur so often that almost no poem is without a sudden absence of connective language.

Meter
Her meters are derived from hymns: The books by Isaac Watts’ Christian Psalmody &
Psalms were in her house. They described the many meters common hymns and songs.
Rhythm
The majority of Dickinson’s poems are written in “common meter”:
- 4 lines stanzas, 3-4 feet per line (ballad stanza).
Use of trochaic and dactylic meters and variations with these.
Rhyme
Structures of 8/6 syllable lines. Uses identical rhyme (sane, insane).
She also uses eye rhyme (though, through), vowel rhyme, imperfect rhyme and suspended
rhyme.
Uses assonance & consonance to create “sonorous” phrases.
American Modernist Poetry
Pound & Williams

A definition of Modernism
“A general term applied retrospectively to the wide range of experimental and avant-garde
trends in the literature (and other arts) of the early 20th c. Modernist literature is characterized
chiefly by a rejection of 19thc. Traditions and the conventions of realism
The new lyrics would be “modern” because it would implicitly stand as a political rebuke to
traditional literature: revolutionary because heterogeneous in form, style, diction, subject, social
origin and social reference. It would be an expressive medium of the collage of cultures America
was fast becoming.

The US at the turn of the century

The USA saw a change as a result of industrialization. Cities began to grow and technology
suddenly had the power to change everything.
Many nations saw their best and brightest young men die in World War I. Although the
U.S. involvement in battle was limited to just over a year, the country mobilized itself for true
worldwide conflict, raised money, and whateveer else could help, supported allied powers and
prepared over four million personnel for battle. Technology led to advancements in weapon
development and war became about mass casualties, over 9 million deaths. The only fact that was
decidedly clear was that the U.S. had just been catapulted into modern warfare in a very modern
world.
Dazed from the war, many of the younger generations no longer felt patriotic, content or
safe. This generation became known as the “Lost Generation”. A young culture emerged – one in
which free expression and a deliberate break from tradition became defining characteristics.
While America continued to evolve and change (the 19th amendment gave woment the
right to vote, and the stock mrket crash of 1929 changed everything), modernist in American
literature continued to reflect varying experiences with change from 1914-1945.

Influences of Modernism
·Chicago Renaissance (1912 -1925)
Chicago harbored the creative dynamism of Sherwood Anderson, Carl Sandburg
and E. Lee Masters, who relied on the rhetorical strategies inherited from the oral tradition
on a simple nonacademic styles and incorporated European, Asian and African rhythms
and forms to their work.

·French Symbolist poets (1885 – 1898)

Mallarmé, Bbaudelaire, Rimbaud & Verlaine conceived the poet as a kind of
visionary agent, able to trascend the real world and suggest the world beyond through the
evocative power of language. They explored the metaphor and metonymy and the
musicality of words, as well as a wide use of synesthesia. Mallarmé proclamation on verbal
craftmanship was significant: “To name and object is to suppress three quarters of the
enjoyment of the poem. To suggest it, there’s the dream.”

Imagism
Imgism constitued the most important poetic movement within Modernism. Imagists’s aim
was to find the exact image capable of suggesting the emotion.
The Symbolists had a number of descendants that shared a surrealist approach to arte. The
Imagists contributed to the Modernist non-referential poetic method in their efforts to overcome
the excessive documentation of the 19th. C. Imagists searched for the immediacy and impression
left by images. Ezra Pound defined the basic instrument of Imagism the image as: “that which
represents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time”,
This conceptualization of poetic composition resulted in very concise and clearly outlined
poems. They greatly relied on the clarity of expression that could be conveyed by the precise
image, and also on intense juxtapositions that could liberate the poem from time and space limits.

Foreign influences:
·Rhythmic patterns of Romance languages
·Latin syntactic structures of classic poetry
·Syncopated rhythm of jazz
·Interest in Orientalism: haiku and ideograms.

The movement reunited a group of remarable poets, whose literary birth is declared to be
1912. A Chicago poet, Harriet Monroe, founded a little magazine exclusively devoted to poetry –
Poetry: A Magazine of Verse – which went on to publish the early work of many of the keynames
of American Modernist Poetry. In the issue of Feb-Apr 1913, this magazine publishedm in its
editorial, the most influential essay on American Modernism. Written by Ezra Pound, “A Few
Dont’s by an Imagist” is now regarded as the bible os Imagism and the keystone of American
Modernist Poetry

The poetic program of Imagism

·Preference for the use of common speech
· The avoidance of indefinition and search of clarity.
· Free verse is favored in order to better communicate the poet’s individuality, since the
newness of an original cadence implies a novelty of ideas.
·A similiar freedom was sought in the choice of subject matter.
·The use of images in order to depart from generalities and present particulars in an
accurate way.
·The belief in concentration as true essence of poetry.
Technical and thematic innovations
Poems are short in length and rapid in rhythm conveying the same feeling of fragmentary
experience. They are built around a primary metaphor and a jutaposition of images. Tropes are
not conceived as ornaments of speech but as poetic speech itself.

The visual arts played and extremely important role in the literature of the early 20th C.
Photography, painting and movies proided new approaches to life that authors hurried to adopt
and adapt. Photography in particular, captured those constituents of a scene that were left out by
regular consciousness. Human vision was regarded too limited to seize all the details, i.e. all the
layers of experience that occur in a short segment of time.
Imagists defended the use of free verse, but they compensated the absence of rhyme and
rhythm with certain patterns to create a sense of musicality: the repetition of words and the natural
cadence of oral discourse.
Regarding themes, the new poetry focused on a wide variety of interests: from the most
grotesque aspects of life to marginalized social types. They also developed a Whitmanesque
interest in urban life, trivial details or made audible the voices of minority.

Forms and moods

An exposure and openness to international art and literature, as well as to literary
philosophies. An interest in emerging theories of the human psyche. A new understanding of
experience as fluid and more comlex than it was previously assumed. A need to find fresh modes
of expression for the changing relationship of the self to the world. A re-evaluation of the role of
the artist in the modern world as seeker and provider of order.

American Modernist Poets

Modernist poets tried to fix and idea of reality through an apparent deviation from reality.
Modernist poets discarded ideas and themes per se and pursued the representation of the origins
and emotions. Thematic concerns lost their prevalence in a period that had lost faith in ontological
systems and reason. The renewed interest in the Metaphysical poetry of the 17th C. reflected the
focus on language and form over subject matter.
American Modernist poetry comprised a variety of forms and voices that attempted to
“Make it New”. Also dealt with modernity in different ways: some remained in the States and
otheres traveled abroad to participate in the more cosmopolitan European life; a number of them
celebrated the urban roots of Modernism whie others kept to natural setting.

Ezra Pound (1885 – 1972)

He was among the most distinguished figures of the American Modernist period. He spent
12 years in London where he became acquainted with memorable names of the day (Frost, Joyce).
He took up residence in Paris and four years later he left France for Italy from where he
was brought back to the US in 1945 under arrest.
He provided the first theorizing of the Imagist movement in poetry and edited in the
anthology Des Imagistes in Europe 1914. His poetry and criticism was aimed at producing social
and aesthetic change. He advocated an energetic poetry that committed to precision and economy,
in the style that he had encountered in the European prose masters and ancient sources.
Pound was deeply interested in Asian art and literture, and even translated Chinese peotry
into English. The Cantos, his complex collections of poems, manifests Pound’s fascination with
ideograms and his debt to the elliptica and concrete style of Chinese poetry.

William Carlos Williams (1883 – 1963)

He was one of the Modernist poets who remained home (New Jersey) when many of his
contemporaries searched for new exeriences and publishing opportunities in Europe. He is known
for his attention to local issues, and for his efforts to write an accessible poetry that distinguished
itself from the bookish and excessively experimental writing os his generation.
He was committed to writing about everyday events in a distinctively American speech.
He grew up listening to foreign languages other than American English such as Spanish and
French and listened closely to ordinary conversations in search of typically national rhythms and
expressions.
His poems resemble snapshots that try to capture an instant in time. He was a physician and
adapted the precision and austerity of medicine to poetry, thus making a very concise use of
language.
Williams made use of imagery and the visual organization of his poems to achieve the
emotional impressions that he detected in everyday situations. William’s phrase “no idea but in
things”, has survived as a sor of Imagist axiom. His poetry concentrates on objects themeselves
and prefers to dispense with the role and centrality of the observer.
Modernist American Women Poets
With the exception of very few women poets (Emily Dickinson) the majority of the names
that come to general reading public's mind about American literary canon are male.
Several women worked to build American Modernism alongside their male peers, but their
achievements stay in the shadows of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot or Wallace Stevens to whom the
greatest recognition of the creation of the movement goes.
The reason for the underestimation of Modernist women and their poetic work should be looked for
in the cultural background in which Modernism took place, and the changing roles of both men
and women within society at the moment.
19th century ideologies regarded men's and women's works apart from each other's and established
separated spheres, reducing the 'natural' abilities of women to the domestic/private sphere.
The 20th century meant a change to this Victorian model, and the beginning of Feminism, the 'New
Woman', and the topics of gender and sexual identity as central to Modernism, women were
encouraged to take fairer place in society.

• Marianne Moore ('Roses only') criticized traditional female expectation using the
association of female and flowers.
• Mina Loy criticized the concept of women as men possessions and wrote a Manifesto
encouraging women to 'seek within themselves to find out what they are'.
• H.D. presented the feminine in her poetry as a key psychological instrument for those
who were interested in a cultural change.
• Gertrude Stein invited women to determine their own paths of development in her
Patriarchal Poetry: 'Let her try / Never be what he said.'

The creation of the so-called 'Little Magazines' acted as point of encounter for writers to publish,
read and criticize each other's works. They helped shape the course of Modernism by establishing
trends,promoting new writers, and introducing new forms. Some of the most influential 'Little
Magazines'were founded and edited by women.
Women encouraged other women –through their literature- to stop being dependents of men. And
this affected the course of Modernist literature, creating a sphere for women in which no men took
part. What women sought with the new movement and the appearance of new ideas was to change
the expectations for their lives.
For a few decades, Modernism was studied as a literary movement by men, but from 1970s on,
critics began to recognize the importance of the female contributions to the point that today, the
period is studied as also characterized by these female innovations. Some of those women
modernist are:

Mina Loy (1882-1966)

• Futurist and Experimentalist influences
• Social wit and artifice
• Criticism of the treatment of female sexuality in society
• “Parturition” (1914). First English poem to experiment with collage.

Gertrude Stein (1824-1946)

• Influences: Cubism and Expressionism
• Words as shapes and sounds
• Tender Buttons
- Abstract poems mixing wisdom and nonsense
- Repetition of words
- Prose and verse

Djuna Barnes (1892-1982)

• Influenced by the Decadents
• Autobiographical works
• Experimental, eccentric and sexually daring
• The Book of Repulsive Women
- Grotesque representation of bodies
- Disability as an aesthetic
- Effects of patriarchal culture on women

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)

• First American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry
• Traditional forms
• Popular among mainstream readers

Marianne Moore.
Moore was one of the few female poets whose work found and achieved to maintain its
own placewithin the male-dominated Modernism, and demonstrated her independence and
determination. She was also a feminist who wrote against the domestication of women and
defended their wildness.
Her ironic tone, her challenging forms and her observations of people and animals
characterize her poetry. Her subject matter, although related to nature on a big scale, goes beyond
the commonly established for poetic subjects and seeks to be innovative.
Moore's main contribution to Modernist poetry is precise imagery created by a disciplined
use of language. Throughout her career, she also dealt with discipline as a theme, advocating a set
of values that included courage, independence, responsibility and simplicity.
Moore's precise style is one of controlled excitement. Her poetry affects the reader visually
as well as emotionally and intellectually. She achieves this by presenting concrete images of
ordinary objects. Whatever Moore's subject she gives clusters of precise, colorful images, because
she was interested in design and pattern as well as meaning.
Moore's prosody is unique:

• Use of syllabic verse. She counts the total syllables in a line and then arranges lines in
balanced patterns.
• Rhyme: weak rhyme, because the stress can be on syllables other than the rhyming ones.
She does rhyme words, but she works with internal correspondences more than end-
rhymes.

Moore's basic unit is the stanza rather than the line. She frequently parallels line length
stanza by stanza. She intents to put together lines with end rhymes. This technique results in the
stanzas themselves having a regularly controlled visual pattern on the page, one that is usually
consistent within each poem.
Moore uses normal prose syntax, and she frequently has the title as the first word in a
poem. She can also use the run-on line. Moore sometimes omits connections. She used ellipses and
juxtapositions, and incorporated allusions, quotes, and other notes into the poetry.
Because Moore's style and subject matter are so precise, some critics classify her with the
Imagists. But Moore's poetry differs from that of the Imagists in that she only describes things
and what surrounds them literally but also merges that detail with what surrounds them
imaginatively.
Imagination was fundamental to Moore, and the reality she creates by fusing the two is
where she finds her ethical principles. Moore takes Imagists one step further by adding moral
and intellectual convictions.
Moore's preoccupation with paradox was one of her major concerns. The paradoxes
inherent in life are not problems to be solved, however, they present situations to be explored for
whatever significance they have. Moore's poetry was an exploration of these situations, where
literally or imaginatively.

H.D. (Hilda Doolitle)

H.D. was a central figure in the Imagist movement. She conformed to the principles of
Imagism: poems should be at once emotionally austere and highly concentrated in its use of
language.
Doolittle used the palimpsest as an example that simultaneously represents several
different moments in time, with the past often peering into the present. In modern terms, time and
place are relative, or all alone. H.D.'s poetry is very seldom chronologically developed. Time and
place and identities overlap.
Everything in the mind may seem in disorder, as three layers of a palimpsest viewed at once,
but if one searches long enough, patterns will be revealed and a sense of order restored. H.D.
explores the possibilities of language, discovering patterns in sound and meaning.
Robert Frost (1874 – 1963)
Key facts.
He is the most popular American poet of the 20th century. Most Americans recognize his
name, the titles of and lines from his best-known poems, and even his face and the sound of his
voice. Given his immense popularity, it is a remarkable testimony to the range and depth of his
achievement that he is also considered to be one of the greatest, if not the very greatest, of modern
American poets.

His first professional poem, 'My Butterfly', was published on Nov. 8, 1894, in the New
York newspaper The Independent. From 1912 to 1915, Frost and his family moved to England
where he met the poets that most influenced his poetry: W. B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound,
who helped him promote and publish his work. He received four Pulitzer Prizes: 1924 (New
Hampshire), 1931 (Collected Poems), 1937 (A Further Range) and 1943 (A Witness Tree).
Among the honors and rewards Frost received were tributes from the U.S. Senate (1950), the
American Academy of Poets (1953), New York University (1956), the Congressional Gold Medal
(1962). In 1930 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Amherst College,
and in 1958 he was made poetry consultant for the Library of Congress.

While preferring to stay at home, he traveled more than any poet of his generation to give
lectures and readings, even though he remained terrified of public speaking to the end. He
underwent a dark period of depression after the deaths of his daughter (1934), his wife (1938) and
his son (1940). His popular image as a farmer-poet, roots in the ten years in which he worked
seriously at farming. Frost has often been referred to as a 'nature' poet because so many of his
poems are set in rural or pastoral surroundings. Frost said that he had only written one poem
without a man in it. Nature, for Frost, was an arena for action.

Like Whitman before him, Frost cultivated his image. He too longed to be America's most
popular poet. He used the media to his advantage, presenting himself as a folksy, congenial, and
modest sage who recited his poems in an avuncular voice. Frost managed his career, including his
image, carefully and strategically. Despite his image, Frost's poems are not as simple or as cheerful
as sometimes expected. His poems often express self-doubt, loneliness, and alienation.
Robert Frost holds a unique and almost isolated position in American letters. James M.
Cox writes 'Though his career fully spans the modern period and though it is impossible to speak of
him as anything other than a modern poet, it is difficult to place him in the main tradition of
modern poetry'.

In a sense, Frost stands as the crossroads of 19th -century American poetry and Modernism,
for in his verse may be found the culmination of many 19th -century tendencies and traditions as
well as parallels to the works of this 20th -century contemporaries.

Frost’s poetic style.

Robert Frost was always a regional poet, and his region was New England, particularly
New Hampshire which he considered one of two best states in the USA, the other being Vermont.
He never felt slightest desire to include all America within the scope of his poetry.
Use of simple symbolism for deep and serious human issues (e.g. 'Mending Walls' natural
and artificial boundaries; 'The Road Not Taken' important choices in life...). Although his poems are
often subtle and complex, their surface simplicity and lucidity, and serve as an excellent
introduction to the study of poetry.

Many of his poems are about the sense of isolation, the feeling of loneliness which regards
not as a peculiarly American dilemma but as a universal situation. A circumstance in Frost's
personal life too contributed to the theme of isolation or alienation in Frost's poetry.
Poetry was to Robert Frost essentially dramatic whatever his theme may be, he dramatizes
it for the readers, establishing full scenes of a situation and atmosphere realistically. The most
dramatic moment in a poem by Robert Frost is the kind of denouement when the worldly fact
achieves its full metaphysical significance.

Fact and fancy are beautifully mingled in the lyrics of Robert Frost. Nothing escapes his
observation, and nothing prevents him from speculating upon what he observes. In 'Stopping by
Woods on a Snowy Evening', he mixes up the fact and fancy, feeling of enjoying beautiful scenes
of woods, escaping from reality, engrossed in such lovely scenes but at the same time she
demands and responsibilities of real life.

Robert Frost shows a unique mastery of conversational as well as colloquial style. His
word-magic is generally of quiet, sober, bewitching sort. He employs rhythms of actual speech,
sometimes with absolute mastery. His blank verse particularly has a movement which is
characteristic of him. His diction is simple and colloquial. Using familiar tones and topics and
employing technical subtleties and symbols, he evokes a fresh contemplation of simple truths.

The essential feature of a lyric is its musicality, and a lyric achieves its musical effect by
traditional techniques of meter, rhyme, and stanzaic patterns. Much of Robert Frost's reputation
is based on such lyrics. Robert Frost's poetry includes a metaphysical bias in the tradition of
Transcendentalism (Emerson and Emily Dickinson). This means that he tries to go beyond the
seen to unseen.

Frost’s main poetical work.

North of Boston (1914). Published in 1914, this volume of poetry established Frost as a
major force in modern poetry. Influenced by both his friendship with Ezra Pound and the regional
speech and landscape of New England, the poems are marked by modern themes and concerns,
dark impressions of early 20th-century rural life, and the nature of tragedy. The poems are written
exclusively in meter, and are often rhymed. Among the most frequently read poems from North of
Boston are 'Mending Wall' -which contains the oft repeated aphorism, 'Good fences make good
neighbors' and 'After ApplePicking'.

New Hampshire (1923). Robert Frost's first Pulitzer Prize-winning volume of poems. The
collection included several of his most well-known poems, including 'Stopping by Woods on a
Snowy Evening', 'Nothing Gold Can Say' and 'Fire and Ice'. The title poem, approximately
fourteen pages long, is a 'rambling tribute' to Frost's favorite state. With this collection, Frost
emerges with a new selfconsciousness and willingness to speak of himself and his art.

West-running Brook (arroyo) (1928). Frost's fifth book of poems, is divided into six
sections, one of which is taken up entirely by the title poem. This poem refers to a brook which
perversely flows west instead of east to the Atlantic like all other brooks. A comparison is set up
between the brook and the poem's speaker who trusts himself to go by 'contraries', further
rebellious elements exemplified by the brook give expression to an eccentric individualism, Frost's
stoic theme of resistance and self-realization.

A Further Range (1936). This volume earned Frost another Pulitzer Prize and was a
Book-of-the-Month Club selection, contains two groups of poems subtitled 'Taken Doubly' and
'Taken Singly'. In the first, and more interesting, of these groups, the poems are somewhat didactic,
though there are humorous and satiric pieces as well. Included here is 'Two Tramps in Mud Time'.
William Rose Benet wrote, 'It is better worth reading than nine-tenths of the books that will come
your way this year'.

Most critics acknowledge that Frost's poetry in the 40s and 50s grew more and more
abstract, cryptic, and even sententious, so it is generally on the basis of earlier work that he is
judged. On A Witness Tree (1942), critic Wilbert Snow noted a few poems 'which have a right to
stand with the best things he has written'; 'Come in', 'The Silken Tent', and 'Carpe Diem'
especially. Yet Snow went on: 'Some of the poems here are little more than rhymed fancies; others
lack the bullet-like unity of structure to be found in North of Boston'.
The Harlem Rennaisance
Historical background
·The Great Migration
As the US geared up its war production to supply the Allied armies, industries
experienced a severe labor shortage. To compensate for the lack of new immigrats (cut off after the
war), Northern businesses turned to a large group of previously unwanted un untapped workers:
black Southerners.
To satisfy the new labor demand, Northern companies hired recruiting agents to travel
South and entice African Americans to migrate to industrial cities in the Nnortheast and Midwest.
Northern newspapers like the Chicago Defender – the most widely read black newspaper in the
South – published glowing personal accounts of the experiences of new black migrants to the North
to lure other black northward.
Soon, family members were returning to their southern homes from New York, Detroit,
Chicago, and other urban centers, telling stories of better jobs and higher salaries. Between 1916
and 1919, about half a million blacks moved to the North; roughly one million blacks made the trip
in the 20s. Between 1910 and 1920, New York City’s African – American population jumped
50%.

·Segregation and racism

The pull of economic opportunity in the North was combined with the push of widespread
racism in the South. Segregation had been a mainstay of Southern life throughout the Jim Crow
era and lynchings a frequent occurrence, but racial oppression reached new heights in the 1910s.
Much of that increase was attributed to the revival of Ku Klux Klan following the 1915 release of
D.W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation
The original KKK, which had formed in opposition to the Reconstruction and greater rights
for blacks, had been extinguished by federal forces in the 1870s. An immensely popular Civil War
epic, Griffith’s movie portrayed the Klan as heroic saviors of the South and portrayed blacks as
ungovernable troublemakers
Advocating white supremacist views that included anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism as
well as racism against blacks, the second KKK of the 20th century was a formal membership
organization with a national and state structure that funded thousand of local chapters across the
country: at its peak in the 1920s, the organization included between 4 million and 5 million
members.

When the U.S. finally entered World War I in 1918, African Americans also served in the
military. Although segregated into all-black units commanded by white officers and assigned
mostly noncombat duties, thousand of African American soldiers ended up fighting on the Western
Front. Many volunteered in the belief that their participation in the fight against the Gemans would
reflect favorably on the black community and thus advance the civil rights movement.
·The Red Summer of 1919
Many blacks returned from the war wondering why, after fighting for their country and
receiving commendations for their bravery from the French, they were still treated as second-class
citizens at home. Southerners sensed a heightened level of self-confidence among the blacks
visiting their families from their jobs in northern cities. Economic pressures hit the general
American population after the war when the government lifted price controls and unemployment
and inflation rates jumped.
During the summer and early fall of 1919, twenty-five race riots erupted across the nation
in Chicago, Charleston, Omaha or Washington. In the space of six weeks, seventy-six lynchings
were reported; a dozen of the lynchings were perpetrated on black men still wearing their service
uniforms.
Racial tensions were exacerbated by the nation’s postwar fear of the newly formed
Bolshevik, or “red” regime in Russia. Many efforts by blacks to improve their economic and
political status were met with white suspicions that they were as “radical” as Russian Bolsheviks.

·The New Negro

“New Negro” was the term white Americans had used to refer to a newly enslaved African.
However, during the first few decades of the 20th c. century, the phrase denoted an African
American who was politically astute, well educated, and proud of his cultural heritage – the
very opposite of a docile slave.
Booker T. Washington’s view of the “New Negro” was outlined in his book, A New Negro
for a New Century (1900) and encompassed education, self-improvement and self-respect. Born a
slave in 1856, Washington had become a symbol of self-help and determination after he climbed out
of poverty to become a celebrated educator and public speaker. In 1881, he helped found the
Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama, which emphasized vocational training for
blacks.

Using Booker T. Washington’s terms, in 1925, Alain Locke, a black professor and leading
promoter of Renaissance artists, published an anthology called The New Negro, An Interpretation,
He included works by writers such as Hughes, McKay, Hurston, Toomer… Locke’s volume came to
define the purpose and character of the Harlem Renaissance up to thatpoint and lauched the
careers of many black artist.

In marked contrast to Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois – the first African American to receive a
doctorate from Harvard University – emphasized college preparation in the liberal arts and the
classics. He represented an emerging class of highly educated, black urban professionals within the
U.S., a group he referred to as the “Talented Tenth” in a seminal 1903 essay of the same name.
“The Negro race, like all other races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men.”

Black American literature has existed since slavery times. It was W.E.B. Du Bois who
explored the essence of his race in his sutdy The Souls of Black Folks (1903), where he claimed
more ambitious and egalitarian aims for the African-Americans. Du Bois accounted for the Affrican
American’s position in literature and society with the expression “double-consciousness”. He
consideredthis “two-ness” of African-Americans both as an obstacle in the black people’s way
towards self-consciousness, and an instrument of awareness about their actual condition in
American society

·The Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance was a period between World War I and the Great Depression
when black artists and writers flourished in the United States. Critics and historians have
assigned varying dates to the movement’s beginning and end, but most tend to agree that by 1917
there were signs of increased cultural activity among black artists in the Harlem section of New
York City and that by the mid-1930s the movement had lost much of its original vigor.
Scholars generally divide into three phases:
·The first (1917-1923) saw black writers overshadowed by white bohemian writers infused
with political radicalism and fascinated by the struggle of African-Americans artists
·The second (1926) was led by the civil rights establishment of the NAACP by black civil
rights leaders and wealthy white patrons
·The third (1934) increasingly dominated by the black artists themselves,

The explosion of talent, vigor, and creative outburst attracted sponsors and matrons, both
black and white, who economically supported the works of the Harlem community and contributed
to the expansion of African American art and ideology. Creativity adopted a variey of artistic
forms; however all strove to make conscious use of Africanisms and celebration of the black
heritage.

Jazz became so popular during the 1920s that the decade itself is commonly referred to as
the Jazz Age. It was at the heart of the energetic nightlife of Harlem, incorporated into popular
dances from the twenties like the “Lindy Hop” and musicals like Shuffle Along. White patrons
would flock to Harlem’s jazz clubs and speakeasies where they would mingle with black locals.
In the 1920s, the blues became a major element of African American music, reaching
white audiences via classic female blues performers such as Bessie Smith. The blues evolved
from informal performances in bars to entertainment in theaters. Blues performances were
organized by the Theater Owners Bookers Association in nightclubs such as the Cotton Club. Its
rhythm and cadences were not unnoticed to the Harlem Renaissance poets’ attention.

That new period was heralded by the release of Hughes’ famous essay “The Negro Artist
and the Racial Mountain” in June 1926. A call to the other black artists to break from the party
line set by the Talented Tenth, the essay argued that the constraints put upon the artist to refrain
from certain depictions of black life was stifling and disingenuous. (Le daba igual si les parecia bien
a tantos negros como blancos que intentaran expresar su negro interior sin miedo)
The literature from the Harlem Renaissance displayed a wide variety of themes and topics
that commonly appeared in many of the writers’ works:
·Race and “passing”: the issue of skin color is of oficial importance in most of the novels
stories and poetry,
·African heritage: Some viewed Africa in a romantic light and as an ancient place of
origin and therefore a prime source of artistic insight.
·Conflicting images of blacks: many writers illustrated black society only in the most
positive fashion; others believed that white perceptions of it should not matter and that all
sides of the African-American experience should be celebrated in literature.

Main authors
·Claude McKay (1890-1948)
Born in Jamaica, started writing poetry since he was 14. He emigrated to America and in
1922 his reputation was secured with the publication of Harlem Shadows (1922), a collecttion of
passionate and vibrant poems. McKay moved to Russia and was celebrated by Bolshevik leaders
as a leftist poet. Then, he moved to France and published who novels and two collections of short
stories.

·Zora Neale Hurston (1891 -1960)

Born in Chicago, arrived in New York in 1925; she graduated and was awarded with a
fellowship to study African oral tradition. However her publications were not well received among
her fellow black writers because they were not political. His fines work was Their Eyes Wwere
Watching God (1937) featuring a black woman struggling to assert her identity (as woman and a
black person) in the souther United Sttes around 1900.

Jean Toomer (1894-1964)

Born in Washington D.C., never earned a degree. He created a series of sketches, poems,
and one-act play that he published under the title of Cane (1923). It has been regarded as one of
the most influential and important works to emerge from the Harlem Renaissance. Toomer wanted
to be consciously literary and had a deep interest in the cultural roots of African-American
experience

Nela Larsen (1891-1964)

Her mixed heritage became the foundation for her novels Quicksand and Passing, in which
the heroines struggle with the challenges of being neither black or white. Her education included
time at Fisk University in Nashville, the University of Copenhagen, as well as librarian and nursing
schools in New York. In 1939, Larsen was the first black woman to receive a Guggenheim
fellowship.

Langston Hughes (1902 – 1967)

He was raised by his grandmother until he was thirteen; she told him important stories of
the African-American oral tradition that would influence his work. When she died he moved to
Lincoln, IL, to live with his mother and her husband, before the family eventually settled in
Cleveland, OH. Then, he spent a year with his father in Mexico who wanted him to become an
engineer, so Hughes attended Columbia for a time. He left because of racial intolerance and
because he wanted to spend more time writing in Harlem.

In addition to leaving us a large body of poetic work, Hughes wrote eleven pllays and
countless works of prose. He edited the anthologies The Poetry of the Negro and The Book of
Negro Folklore; wrote an acclaimed autobiography (The Big Sea) and co-wrote his first play, Mule
Bone with Zora Neale Hurston.

His life and work were enormously important in shaping the artistic contributions of the
Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s because of his insightful, colorful portrayal of black life in
America from the 20s through the 60s and his engagement with the world of jazz and blues and
the influence it had on his writing. He wanted to tell the stories of his people in ways that reflected
their actual culture, including both their suffering and their love of music, laughter, and language
itself.
For a number of years, Hughes was attracted to some of he political philosophies of the
Communist Party, and even spent a year in the Soviet Union. Then accused of being a member
and a leftist, he never actually joined. However, with the creation of the NAACP, Hughes was
involved in political struggle against racial segregation.

Langston Hughes, often referred to as the “unofficial Poet Laureate of the race” and as “the
bard of Harlem”, remains the central figure of the Harlem Renaissance. In his essay “The Negro
Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926), he proclaimed his lifelong calling: “to explain and
illuminate the Negro condition in America”.

Langston Hughes died of complictions from prostate cancer in May 22, 1967, in New
York. His ashes are buried in Harlem under a special medallion in the Arthur Schomburg Center for
Research in Black Culture. In his memory, his residence at 20 East 127th Street in Harlem, has
been given landmark status by the NYC Preservation Commission.

Main works.
·The Weary Blues (1926). Known as one of Hughes’ most famous poems, it gave title to
his first poetry volume. Critics have claimed that “The Weary Blues is a combination of blues and
jazz with personal experiences. It embodies blues as a metaphor and form. It has also been coined
as one og the first works of blues performance in literature. Throughout the poem, music is not only
seen as a form of art and entertainment, but also as a way of life.
·Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). The title appears in the poem “Hard Luck” in the
book’s first section. It refers to a phrase popular in Harlem at the time, referring to citizens who
woudpawn fine clothes to predominately Jewish-owned pawn shops when they were short on
money. The collection was Hughes least successful in terms of both sales and critical reception
because it departed from sentimental depictions of African—American culture, especially in the
Black press.
·Not Without Laughter (1930). Hughes’ first novel, and first major work of prose. It
portrays African-American life in the 1910s, focusing on character development rather than plot.
However, the main storyline focuses on Sandy’s “awakening to the sad and the beautiful realities of
black life in a small Kansas town”. The major intent og the novel is to portray Sandy’s life as he
tries to be the best he can be, aspiring to folks like Du Bois and Booker T.

·Mulatto (1935) Subtitled A Play of the Deep South, it was Hughes’s first full-lenght
play, opened in Broadway in 1935, but not published until 1963. The play was so controversial that
it was banned in Philadelphia, because it contained a rape on stage. Like many of Hughes’s works,
Mulatto highlights the less than desirable stereotypical qualities of African-Americans of the
time, such as uneducated speech. Elements like these often provoked harsh criticism of Hughes
within the African-American community.

·Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) It is a book-length poe suite. Its jazz poetry style
focuses on descriptions of Harlem and its mostly African-American inhabitants. The original
edition comprised 91 individually titled poems, which were intended to be read as a single long
poem. The primary motif of the poem is the “dream deferred”, which represents the opposition
between Harlem of the 1950s and the rest of the world. The poem is characterized by its use of
the montage, a cinematic technique of quickly cutting from one scene to another in order to
juxtapose disparate images.

Hughes’s poetry
Hughes’ attempted to create poetic language from the rhythms of vernacular speech and
from the musical traditions of African-Americans. He borrowed the rhythmic pattern of jazz and
blues, which provided originality and released his poetry from the strict formality of the English
pentameter.

His compositions show vernacular speech and a wide range of characters that included the
working class, vagabonds and other social outcasts. Hughes celebrated the differences in the
specific values and cultures developed by African Americans and implicitly argued that these
differences represented the specific contributions that African Americans might make to the
culture as a whole.

Hughes’s work bears the mark of primitivism. In his search for newness of theme and form,
he became passionately interested in his racial identity and, therefore looked to a collective,
primitive past still present in linguistic or musical expressions.

He actually made of simplicity an aesthetic tool and a political instrument with the creation
of his fictional character Jesse B. Simple. His poetic voice tried to emulate the voice and
experience of the simple, common African American folk.
ALLEN GINSBERG & THE BEAT GENERATION

Key facts about Ginsberg

· The prophetic style of Ginsberg's free verse was a major influence on American poetry during
the 1960's and beyond.
• His mysticism, psychedelic drug use, advocacy of free love, and antiwar activities made him a
symbol of the 1960's counterculture. His openness about his homosexuality made him one of
the pioneers of the gay liberation movement.
• His schoolmates at Columbia included Jack Kerouac, and he met William Burroughs in New
York City during his first year there. With Kerouac and Burroughs, among others, Ginsberg
formulated a philosophical discourse which they called 'The New Vision', a precursor of the
Beat generation precepts he exemplified in his later work.
• The stability of his home life was shattered by his mother's periods of mental illness. Ginsberg
drew on the raw material in 'Kaddish' (1959), an elegy for his mother that many critics consider
his best work. Madness, along with visionary hallucinations, became a central image in his
poetry.
• Ginsberg felt at home with his friends Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Herbert Hunke, William
Burroughs, and other noteworthy members of an underground community of dropouts,
revolutionaries, drug addicts, jazz musicians, and serious but unconventional artists of all
sorts.
• Ginsberg felt an immediate kinship with these 'angel-headed hipsters', who accepted and
celebrated eccentricity and who regarded Ginsberg's homosexuality as an attribute, not a
blemish.
• On October 13, 1955, he gave a reading of 'Howl' at Six Gallery, an outlet for Beat visual and
literary arts in San Francisco. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a local poet, publisher, and bookshop
owner heard Ginsberg's reading, and offered to publish the poem. In 1957, the San Francisco
police entered City Lights Bookshop and arrested Ferlinghetti and one of his employees on
obscenity charges for selling Ginsberg's book.
• During the 1960's Ginsberg became a celebrity of sorts. His earlier involvement with pacifism
and Eastern mysticism, and sustained cultural movements as diverse as that of the 'hippies',
the radical activism with the political left,
and the antiwar movement during the Vietnam
conflict.
• In 1965 he was invited to Cuba and Czechoslovakia by Communist officials, who mistakenly
assumed that his criticism of American society would make him sympathetic to their regimes,
but Ginsberg's outspoken criticism of all forms of tyranny and suppression led to his expulsion
from both countries.
• He recorded a handful of albums, including music he had written to accompany William
Blake's Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience and two separate recordings known as
First Blues. He was close friend of Bob Dylan. Over the years, he appeared on stage with a
diverse group of musicians, including, The Beatles, The Fugs, Phil Ochs, The Clash and Patti
Smith.
• In the 1960's, Ginsberg was becoming recognized more widely as an important figure in
American literature. In 1969, he was awarded a National Institute of Arts and Letters grant for
poetry. In 1986, he was appointed distinguished professor at Brooklyn College, and then
Professor at the Graduate Center of City University of New York. In 1993, he was awarded the
medal of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Letters by the French minister of culture.

Historical background

World War II brought the US out of the Depression, and after the war Americans resumed
the material abundance of the 1920s. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had coordinated the
Allied forces during the conflict, ran for the presidency of the country with the support of the
Republican party. Although after the conflict the States emerged as a world power, Americans felt
disturbed by the use of the atomic bomb in the name of progress and democracy. The end of
World War II inaugurated the Cold War era, a political phenomenon as well as a state of mind.

The US and the Soviet Union engaged in a race of warfare technology that also energized
the development of transports and communications. The US assumed the role of the international
defender of democratic values, according to which communism was to be suppress in Cuba, Asia
and elsewhere.

In an attempt to improve relations, President Eisenhower and Khrushchev were to meet at

a summit in Paris in 1959, but two weeks prior to the event, a US spy plane was shot down over
Russia. The summit still took place, but the Soviet leader stormed out before it was over.
Meanwhile, closer to home, Fidel Castro led a Communist revolution in Cuba and became that
country's ruler in 1959.

In this line, the anticommunist fever reached its climax with Senator Joseph McCarthy,
who extended his witch-hunt of communist activities to any subversive practice or thought
between 1950 and 1954. Numerous American Citizens were blacklisted and tried for their political
affiliations, and many were subsequently ostracized.

After winning the elections of 1953, Eisenhower assumed the role of restorer of the
backbone of American civilization, capitalism, and the individualism it entails, adopting the form of
competitive but homogeneous consumerism.

Fashion stressed standard notions of femininity and masculinity. Advertising, radio and
television shows focused on domesticity and familiar bonds. Any idea or product that suggested
opposition to the image of the average American –white, male, heterosexual, Christian, married,
with a family and a profession- became immediately suspicious.

Some Americans still lived and many tried to emulate the 'Ozzie and Harriet' life they
viewed on the television. Along with a fascination with TV came the new rage in dining-frozen TV
dinners, often enjoyed directly in front of the box for which they were named. Americans who
preferred even faster food began to experience a new chain of hamburgers called McDonald's.

Rock & Roll was born with Elvis Presley's first recording, on July 5, 1954. It soon became
associated with a rebellion against conformity. Rock music and rockers incarnated the self-
realization and independence as the Beat ideology.

The 1950s was a 'baby boom' period that would produce a very profitable youth market
influenced by the movie myths of the era (embodied in actors such as Marlon Brando and James
Dean), fashion, music and specifically-targeted advertising.

The 1950s saw the beginnings of the Civil Rights movement sparked by the Congress
decision in 1954, which made racial segregation in schools illegal. Blacks began openly defying
previous 'separatist' rules.

Including such historical acts as Rosa Park's refusal to give up her seat to a white man and
move to the back of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. This act initiated a yearlong bus
boycott in Montgomery, organized by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Beat Generation

They functioned as transition writers between Modernists and Postmodernists,
prolonging, on the one hand, the paths opened by the former and inaugurating, on the other, motifs
and ideas that would prevail in later years.

The Beat movement chose the margins of the establishment, and rejected mainstream
America; asserted themselves as independent in very area of life; embraced and worshipped the
social outcasts of their day, and declared nonconformism as a way of being.

The Beats lived unorthodox lives disregarding social and artistic establishment: rejected
white-collar work, the family system, religion, and pop culture. Their lifestyle was regarded as
dangerous by mainstream media. They saw themselves as visionaries who could bring light and
knowledge to a stagnant culture.

The term Beat derived into 'beatnik' which came to mix the original word 'Sputnik,' the
Soviet satellite launched in 1957. They borrowed the figured of the hipster from the African-
American jazz tradition, someone in search of new jazz patterns through the use of stimulants.

The Beats were inheritors of the American Transcendentalists. H.D. Thoreau's claim for
civil disobedience is present in most of their compositions. Emerson's concern for oriental
philosophies is in their quest for expanded awareness and communion with the totality of the
universe and Thoreau's concern with pre-industrialized primitive folk is associated to the Beats love
for lower-class AfricanAmericans.
The Beats were not an exclusively literary movement. There were painters, filmmakers,
musicians and photographers, all of whom tried intersections with other artistic fields. They
employed visual and musical strategies to reproduce altered states of perception.

The Beats tried to recover the essence of the frontier era: independence, intensity, mobility,
and closeness to nature. The frontier demanded a masculinist worldview in which women had an
awkward position. They exalted youth and its implications: disengagement, adventure and
discovery, language of their own, bizarre alignments, etc.

The Beats sought a method to reach beyond the real world of anodyne surfaces. They
pursued altered states of consciousness and explored the possibilities of drugs, music, and driving
alike, in a quest for the necessary ecstasies to that could illuminate them.

Main authors
·Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)
He had begun writing a novel, and his new friends praised his work. With Ginsberg's help,
his first book, The Town and the City, was published in 1950. It was Kerouac who had coined the
term 'beat' to reflect both the downtrodden, world-eary attitudes of the post-World War II
generation and, at the same time, the optimistic, 'beatific' will to live unconstrained by social
conventions.

One book that resulted first Kerouac's car travels but the most –if not the most- significant
writer of the Beat Movement: On the Road, published in 1957, was an immediate success. Its two
central players are Sal Paradise, based on Kerouac himself and Dean Moriarty, based on his free-
spirited, rabbled-rousing companion Neal Cassady. On the Road chronicles the cross-country road
trips of Paradise and Moriarty, symbolizing their fervent search for values greater than those they
consider typically American

·William Burroughs (1914-1997)

Burroughs moved to New York in 1943 to become involved in the city's underworld, which
led to his experimentation with heroin and several run-ins with the law. He did not start writing
until 1950 with a semi-auto biographical story, Junkie. Without finishing it, he began another,
Queer, in 1951, also somewhat autobiographical. By this time, he had moved his family to Mexico
to escape drug charges. It was there that he accidentally killed his wife.

Burroughs' most widely known novel, Naked Lunch, was not published in the United States
until 1962 when it was finally declared not obscene following three years of legal trials. A
publisher in Paris had accepted it in 1959.
It has no consistent story, no running narrative, no uniform point of view, and no readily
recognizable theme. Loosely, it tells the tale of junkie William Lee and a hodgepodge of
grotesque characters who flail about in a bleak, sadistic world of drug addiction, sexual depravity,
and madness.

·Gregory Corso (1930-2001)

Of the writers who became famous among the Beats, Corso had one of the most natural
poetic talents: he was capable of producing powerful lyric verse in a expressive, yet genuine
voice, as well as bawdy, poetic ramblings, typically uninhibited and sexually explicit-hallmarks of
Beat writing.
Corso's most famous poem, 'BOMB', was originally published as a 'broadside', a single
large sheet of paper printed on one side in 1958. Arranged in the shape of a mushroom cloud, the
poem is an ironic attempt to mitigate the destruction of an atomic war by portraying the bomb-drop
as a Christlike second coming. The explosion marks the end of human history and the beginning
of heavenly eternity.

Although the theme is dark and chilling, it is written in typical Beat style –a rush of
fragmented images,raw language, and a wry sense of humor.

·Neal Cassady (1926-1968)

He grew up in a poor section of Denver with an alcoholic father. Cassady learned quickly
how to fight and steal, and how to charm people while he was doing it. After years in and out of
reform schools and juvenile prisons, Cassady developed the instincts of a con artist and the
rebellion of a freespirited, fun-loving bum who wanted only to travel, ramble on in stream-of-
consciousness conversations, and have sex with whomever seemed the most beneficial partner at
the moment.

In 1946 in New York, he met Ginsberg, who was promptly captivated by his western
ruggedness and cowboy nature, and became lovers. But it was his relationship with Kerouac that
made Cassady one of the most influential instigators of the Beat Generation. In On the Road,
Kerouac captured Cassady's 'voice', essentially writing it the way Cassady talked: fast, off the cuff,
without any hesitation or selfconsciousness.

Diane di Prima (1934)

Born in Brooklyn, she developed friendships with poets Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsberg,
and Jack Kerouac. She moved to San Francisco in 1968. Di Prima has published more than 40
books. Her poetry collections include This Kind of Bird Flies Backward (1958), the long poem
Loba (1978, expanded 1998) and Pieces of a Song: Selected Poems (2001). She mixes stream-of-
consciousness with attention to form and joins politics to spiritual practice.

Diane di Prima searched for an alternative to creative repression for women in 1950s
America, and succeeded in spite of the multiple barriers of her way. It seems that the men of the
Beat Generation were only liberal in a way that would benefit them – Rejecting the role of
passive partner, she has always remained independent in her relationships with men.

Major works.
·Kaddish (1961)
The poem is both an elegy and a kind of dual biography. In it Ginsberg recalls his mother.
The juxtaposition of images ranging over many years reminds him of his own mortality,
compelling him to probe his subconscious mind in order to face some of the fears that he has
suppressed about his mother's madness. In the second section of the poem he is moved to prayer,
asking divine intervention to ease his mother's suffering. Here he introduces the actual Hebrew
words of the Kaddish.

·'Kral Majal' (1965)

In the poem he juxtaposes Communist and capitalist societies and their most dreary and
destructive to the life-enhancing properties of the symbolic 'May King' -a figure of life, love, art,
and enlightenment. The first part of the poem is marked by discouragement, anger, and sorrow
mixed with comic resignation to show the dead end reached by governments run by a small clique
of rulers.
Yet the heart of the poem is an exuberant explosion of joy, mirth, and confidence in the
rising generation of the mid-1960s.

·The Fall of America: Poems of These States, (1965-1971)

He returns toward the personal. In poems such as 'Wales Visitation' (1967), a nature ode
written in the spirit of the English Romantics, and 'Bixby Canyon' (1968), which is an American
West Coast parallel, Ginsberg explores the possibilities of a personal pantheism, attempting to
achieve a degree of cosmic transcendence to compensate for the disagreeable situation of earth.
His loving remembrance for Neal Cassady, 'On Neal's Ashes' (1968), is another expression of this
elegiac inclination, which reaches a culmination in 'Mind Breaths'.

·'Plutonian Ode' (1978)

Ginsberg offers another persuasive poetic argument to strengthen the 'Mind-guard spirit'
against the death wish that leads some to embrace 'Radioactive Nemesis'. Recalling, once again,
'Howl', in which Moloch stands for the death-driven impulses of humankind gone mad with
greed, Ginsberg surveys the history of nuclear experimentation. The poem is written to restore the
power of mind to a civilization addicted to 'horrific arm'd, Satanic industries' -an echo of William
Blake's request at the dawn of an era in which machinery has threatened human well-being.

·White Shroud (1986)

The appearance of the collection revived Ginsberg's political orations, identifying the
demons of contemporary American life. There is a discernible sense of time's passage in this poem,
which is a kind of postscript to 'Kaddish'. Once again, Ginsberg recollects the pain of his family
relationships –his difficulties in dealing with aging, irascible relatives merging with his
responsibility to care for those who have loved him, his feeling for modern America fusing with his
memories of the Old Left past of his immigrant family.

·Cosmopolitan Greetings (1994)

The collection includes many poems not meant to be either especially serious or particularly
profound. Ginsberg's forays into popular culture are further indications of his playful side,
including poems written to a musical notation, poetic lines cast in speech bubbles, and three pages
of what is called 'American sentences'.

The poems in the volume show Ginsberg at his most effective in two modes. A lyric mode
as a means of conveying his deeply romantic vision of an idealized existence set in opposition to the
social disasters he has resisted; and a familiar mode with which he emphasizes physical sensation
and the extremes of understanding artistic consciousness, a mind-body linkage.
Anne Sexton and Confessional Poetry
The history beneath the Confessional Movement
A key link between the end of the war and the Cold War regime that followed lies in the
US’s development and use of the atomic bomb. More relevant still is the Soviet Union’s acquisition
of the technology necessary to build its own atomic weapons. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were
charged with betraying the USA’s atomic secrets to the Soviet Union.

The perceived threat from within was matched as the Cold War preceeded, by a perceived
threat from outside in the shape of potential nuclear attack from communist enemies. This thret
came close to home in 1959 with the rise to power of Fidel Castro in Cuba. Cuba became an ally
of the Soviet Union, which, by 1962, had begun to install some of its nuclear weapons there.

The communist threat emerges again and again throughout this period. In 1950 communist
North Korea waged war on South Korea, which was generally sympathetic to the liberal West. The
United Nations became involved, largely under American direction, in order to prevent the fall of
South Korea to the communists, and thereby the spread of communist ideas to Western
democracies.

The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), lead by senator Joseph

McCarthy, carried out systematic purges of all areas of American life. Everyone was potentially
under suspicion; people were urged to be on their guard and to report friends, neighbors and
colleagues for anything which might be though of as anti-American,

The emergence of a culture of self-help, self-improvement and popular psychology,

manifested in manuals such as Dr Benjamin Spock’s 1946 Baby and Child Care and studies of the
family and masculinity in crisis such as William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956) and
Philip Wylie’s The Generation of Vipers (1942) – a vitriolic indictment of overpowerful mothers.

Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique provided an insteresting background. Friedan

quotes Life magazine’s 16 October 1956 view that “the American woman is winning the battle of
the sexes […]” She gracefully concedes the top jobs to men. This wondrous creature also marries
younger than ever, bears more babies and looks and acts far more feminine than the “emancipated”
girl of the 20s and 30s.

· A girl’s virginity was to be guarded vigilantly and premarital sex was frowned upon.
·It was not easy for women to obtain contraception, even though the manufacture of the
pill began in 1952
·Abortion was illegal and dangerous
·The US divorce rate rose from 264000 to 385000
·By 1956 the average age for women for first marriage dropped to 20.
·Half of the females who hadstarted at universitywere abandoning their studies in order to
marry.
At the same time, the most celebrated female icon of the age – Marilyn Monroe – was
clearly a sexual being, whose string of failed and childless marriages seemed the antithesis of the
message peddled by Dr. Spock and Adlai Stevenson who addressed young women at their
graduation that they should prepare for to immerse themselves in the “very pressing and
particular problems of domestic”.

Confessional Poetry
The label confessional was first applied by critic M.L. Rosenthal to Robert Lowell’s Life
Studies, a collection of autobiographical prose and poetry published in 1959. Once the label gained
currency, the term was more properly applied to a handful of books that appeared between 1959 and
1966: William DeWitt Snodgrass’s Hearts Needle (1960), Anne Sexton’s To Bedlam and Part
Way Back (1960) and All My Pretty Ones (1962)

In common they had:

-Robert Lowell was Snodgrass, Plath and Sexton’s teacher and mentor.
-They all had been through psychological breakdowns.
-They understood the dynamics of the family life in terms of Freudian psychoanalysis

Compared to other poetic movements of the period, no confessional poet imagined her or
himself to be part of a movement, and never congregated as such. To the extent that it would be
considered a movement, confessional poetry ends in the mid-70s, but it deeply influenced creative
writing schools across the US and produced later generations of confessional writers such as Marie
Howe or Sharon Olds.

Confessional poetry main themes are divorce, sexual infidelity, childhood neglect, mental
disorders…
The directness of their speech provoked the relaxation of iambic pentameter and the
loosening of the rhyme scheme to create an impression of casual intimate conversation.

Confessional poetry reacted to Modernism since it reflected emotionally intense

revelations of mostly shameful and personal conflicts and familiar dramas. They were caught up in
the wave that made their revelations part of a larger aesthetic and political impulse against the
privatization and masculinization of American life in the early 1960’s. Confessional is a counter-
discourse of privacy attending to home and family deprivations.

Confessional poets wrote about the instability of the family from the inside, and in
analytical language partially supplied by psychoanalysis. The structure of the confessional poem
juxtaposes moments drawn from common life in a manner that invites readers approach as the
psychoanalyst to dream, or a priest to guilt.

Robert Lowell (1917-1977)

Life Studies draws its theme from his personal experiences. It allows a prose-like flow
reminiscence with movement in and out of meter and rhyme. He wanted nothing to ruin the
honesty of sentiment.
The poet speaks from immediate experience, and it becomes clear that the external
circumstances reflect the poet’s vision of himself. In Lowell, there is a sense of life examined, over
and oover, in search of salvation. He allows readers to act as priests, hearing the confession.

In Life Studies, Lowell’s poems demonstrate the fusion of a personal and historical past.
Time blurs, yet the stasis achieved only emphasizes loss and a sense of an irrecoverable past.

William DeWitt Snodgrass (1926 – 2009)

William D. Snodgrass, returning veteran of World War II, had been Lowell’s student at the
University of Iowa. These years had a disastrous effect on his marriage, which ended in a divorce
and a separation from his young daughter in 1953.

Snodgrass tried to adjust to this experience through his writing and through psychoanalysis;
the result was the long poem “Heart’s Needle”, a two-and-a-half-year chronicle written while the
events were taking place.

In a sequence of ten poems, the father speaks to his daughter. The title comes from an old
Irish tale about the death of an only daughter. Snodgrass suggests that the daughter’s presence
and absence is a needle in the heart, since both intensify his sense of loss,

In Heart’s Needle, the context of the Cold War functions to illuminate the plight of loveless
men doomed to banishment and violence,. War is an evidence for the failure of masculine ethos.

The images of masculinity in crisis in the poem are metaphorized on the soldier and the
father both intertwined and questioned. It represents one of Snodgrass’s favorite devices –the
leitmotif, an image that reappears and complicates in its associations and meanings.

Sylvia Plath (1932 -1963)

In 1953, when she was only 21, she had her first psychological breakdown followed by her
first suicidal attempt.
Plath joined Anne Sexton in Robert Lowell’s seminar at Boston University in 1959. The
women became friends since then.
When she was starting to write good poetry, her husband Ted Hughes hurried her to go back
to England where they lived.
Plath’s most original contribution to confessional poetry are “Morning Song” and “Ariel”
Both published posthumously in Ariel in 1965
Sylvia Plath had recently given birth to her daughter Frieda when she wrote “Morning
Song” in February 1961. The poem recreates the psychological resistances through which a
postpartum woman moves forward as she establishes an emotional and moral bond with her child
.
“Ariel” describes in fragmentary, passionate and almost hallucinogenic vividness and event
in Plath’s life that occurred when she lost control of her horse, Ariel, and, losing the stirrups,
clung ot its neck while it ran for two miles at full gallop. The first stanzas are the cause and the
last four the effect. Much of Syvia Plath’s poetry seems chaotic and there is a sense of negativity.
“Ariel”, however, shoes clearly the sense of control, order and choice that characterizes her most
mature lyrics.

Anne Sexton
Has been described as the High Priestess” and the “Mother” of confessional poetry, and as
“the most persistent and daring of the confessionalists”. It has also said that “no poet was more
consistently and uniformly confessional than Anne Sexton”.

Sexton began composing poetry at the age of 28, in 1956, when after a debilitating bout of
depression that culminated in an overdose and a spell in a psychiatric hospital, she entered into
therapy and was encouraged to write.

Sexton’s works is defined, in part, by its self-conscious preoccupation with the theories that
characterize the psychoanalytic enconter, in which the confession is the product of an emotionally
charged exchange between speaker and listener.

On the other hand, Sexton’s poetic landscape is marked by the hazards and frustrations that
preoccupied feminists in the 60s and 70s. Her poetry responded powerfully to the model of
postwar femiity, the “happy housewife heroin”,

In her poems, Sexton addresses women’s individual experiences of oppression; the

politicizes the personal, since issues that once seemed private, became the subject matter for a
collective identification and political action.

In her poem “Self in 1958”, Sexton imagines herself as a “plaster doll”, “planted in “the all-
electric kitchen” of her claustrophobic, miniature home. In this and other poems, the wife stands
for a stultifying alienated feminity often understood as being at odds with the creative work of the
poet. If the home is positioned as a key site of women’s oppression in second wave feminism and
confessional poetry alike, so too is the female body

In Sexton’s poems such as “The Abortion”, “Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward”, The
Operation” , the female body is offered up for reader’s scrutiny. Sexton’s approach to the
feminine body mirrors the debates about sexuality, reproduction, violence and objectification that
dominated feminist thought in the latter half of the 20th century. Her speakers are forever
exposing themselves, only for it to become apparent that this exposure is designed to disguise as
much as it reveals.

These poems illustrate the many features that typify confessional poetry- the identification
of the speaker’s body with the body of the confessional text.
Sexton’s works
Alongside plays and other juvenilia volumes, Sexton published 10 collections of poems.
Some of the most celebrated as confessional were:
-To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), her first volume, in which scenes from an asylum
are set against those of life before and after the speaker’s hospitalization. The perspective of
these early poems is a daring interior one.

-The strongest poems of the second volume All My Pretty Ones (1962) arise from Sexton’s
own experience of death of beloved relatives, motherhood and the consequences of being a
woman poet

-Live or Die (1966) marks a high point in her career for handling intimate or despairing
material with sure control and an element of self-irony. Poems of the third collection that deal with
survival include those concerned with children and birth

-In Love Poems (1969), Sexton’s fourth collection, examines the cycle of roles women play
in life and love. Poems of separation and return between lovers are interspersed with individual
body parts which achieve significance beyond their function in the physical realm.

The theme of self-destruction is hidden in Transformations (1971), Sexton’s collection of

rewritten fairy tales narrated by a “middle-aged witch”, the poet’s name for her persona in the
tales. For some crtics, this collection provides a more objective scheme for Sexton’s mythic quest