Modern Trends: American Poetry (1932)
Contemporary American poetry has divided itself into three trends: acceptance, despair, and hope towards something new and effective or towards death.1 These motions have their latest origins in three poets—Archibald MacLeish, T. S. Eliot, and Robinson Jeffers—and in reaction to the temperature of the century’s first fifteen years. The postwar time was a sound drowned in its own echoes. Imagism, with H. D.’s crispness and Amy Lowell’s vibrations, was soon suffocated, and Vachel Lindsay’s noisier brasses smothered, by time.2 Their names remain, and much of their workmanship; but they stay at the same radius from the focal point of strictly contemporary poetry as Edgar Lee Masters and Stephen Crane did from them: a present influence, so ingrained in poetic essay that they do not lose because of lapses as memorable individuals.3
Their definitions of subject matter and treatment were more inclusive than anything since Chaucer and Shakespeare, and this comprehension has continued to be a source of strength. Carl Sandburg, who has been classified as an important unintelligent poet, gave readers the sight of the subtle planes of brickyards, of the power of thick chimneys blackened by use, the suggestion that an arc light might be confounded with a farther traditional moon, and not too much be forfeited.4 Edwin Arlington Robinson dangled the hope that there might be an application of classicism in poetry to modern life before his audience, and cajoled them with the ease and sonority of Lancelot and Tristram.5 Robert Frost lifted many of the prejudices against commonplace subjects.6 It is all wrong to speak one sentence each of these people: their thoughts and rhythms twine to make the whole history of our poetry.
That history has passed down, out of a comfortable perspective, into our own years. It is impossible for us to judge with any sense of time—granted—but the leaders of three main floods stand.
Archibald MacLeish has become the accepted high-relief figure of one wing. Poems: The Hamlet, the lyrics of Streets in the Moon and New Found Land, and Einstein represent the final accomplishment built on an acceptance and realization of time and environment and the implications of these that contemporary poetry has reached.7 He has asked, “And by what way shall I go back?”; and he has said in “The Too-Late Born”:
We too, we too, descending once again
The hills of our own land, we too have heard
Far off—Ah, que ce cor a longue haleine—
The horn of Roland in the passages of Spain,
[. . .] and found
At Roncevaux upon the darkening plain
The dead against the dead and on the silent ground
The silent slain—8
There is no eccentricity of viewpoint, no bravado of image. His poetry is not wild with sound nor involute in fragmentary meanings. But we feel the bravery of his comprehension, the daring that allows MacLeish to face the implications of his race, and breed, and culture, implications that fall heavily and find no answer in anything but their expression in symbols of grace and personal moment—the feel of America, the large walking of night across the sky, the knowledge that a thing is contained in itself always, without comparison, without contact from surface to surface—knowledge that is likely to stagger an unbuttressed mind.
T. S. Eliot in his early work, recognized some of these things. “Pru-frock,” parts of The Waste Land, and “Gerontion,” with some of the shorter pieces, are summaries in exquisite and exact poetry of the pale inability of a frustrated season to feel adequacy in anything.9 There is a gentleness about his work that gives us the most pity for his sense of brokenness: places like “Lips that would kiss / From prayers to broken stone” demonstrate this and the sadness of the end of “Prufrock,” the shadowless rock, the tiger spring that means death, the endless sounds of brittle import, phonograph records, laughter in the next room, snatches of talk, mouthed and meaningless, and then the splendor of Leicester’s barge, smoke writhing against a wall, sunlight weaving through a girl’s hair.10 Lately T. S. Eliot has decided in favor of Royalism, classicism, and the Church of England, and has returned to the influence of Laforgue and that bright boy of English letters, Ezra Pound: but, given release from the loyalties which sterilize him, there may be more poetry of the breed of his broader and greater work.11 He has had a reaching power over the younger poets, in attitude as well as in form; and his “school of thought” will probably leave an incisive print on our poetry.12
Robinson Jeffers looks for material to stories of Greek proportions, and for locale to California, a place he uses to set scenes analogous to the country in their size, the furiousness of growth, the violence of struggle, the twin conflicting meanings of generation and death. Most of his long poems (Tamar, The Women at Point Sur, Cawdor) have as motives terrifying vehemence, passion bursting through law, marching events, with death and might remaining, swinging silences, looked-to, to be hoped for, to be loved.13 “The Tower Beyond Tragedy” is one of the most deeply carved and huge poems of the language; and will bear any sort of comparison with Mourning Becomes Electra, whose theme Jeffers has used, and will invite contrast with the Greek tragedies.14 Whether one agrees or not with the reaching to death which is one of the strongest characteristics of Jeffers’s work, one is driven from the comfort of a life where forces so blind and so direct are seldom met, drawn by the compulsion of his poetry, shaken into complete subjection to the powers of the poem.
Of lesser influences in the country, people in the long range from Conrad Aiken, John Gould Fletcher, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Elinor Wylie, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Allen Tate, Hart Crane, E. E. Cummings, there is a great deal to be said individually, and not too much as a group. The influence of the right wing of these is suffering a steady decline, while the radical members seem to be flourishing under the more or less shaky aegis of magazines like transition, Pagany, Left, and the better-settled Hound and Horn.15 Some separate poems in this group have been far superior to second-rate, but the classification here depends on the general weakness of thought and workmanship. America has been unique in producing an inordinate number of one-poem, anthology, and garden-variety versifiers: one never has to wait very long to find a neatly done piece of work in one’s pet magazine.—But this is a digression and has nothing to do with poetry.
Light verse has become a great bouncing baby in a pale-lipped and tragic-eyed family ever since Dorothy Parker got her first profits. The tradition goes back to the Elizabethans (as far as she and Samuel Hoff-stein are concerned; the versification—that said with reservations—of Ogden Nash is a different matter).16 The effectiveness of those earlier and acid Englishmen is one potentiality which modern America does not even claim to have exhausted—and the future of light verse might be something worth speaking about.
Labor poetry turns towards a different solution and represents a different class from any preceding group. At the present time, most current expression is rough artistically (this as distinguished from appropriateness of subject matter) and the clumsiness of expression seems not to be the most intelligent end possible. But this is a relatively new voice, and is almost without spokesmen. Norman MacLeod is its most genuine and promising exponent.17 We should be able to know, in our time, some of the results of this poetry’s evolution. It has already convinced many people that the scope of poetic material should be stretched as far as possible.
The foreign influences on our poetry have been mostly French and English and, with these, we have achieved an American expression which is no more nationally than it is artistically integrated. The trends point in cognate directions, and the divergences sometimes seem more disconnected than they are; but through single and united achievement of the foremost living American poets, there will be made, I think, a contribution of value to world literature.
(Vassar Miscellany News, 1932)
1. An editorial note indicates this article was to be the first in a series “on trends in modern art, culture and thought.” The series did not continue; Rukeyser withdrew from Vassar College before the next semester’s start.
2. Vachel Lindsay was not associated with Imagism, a poetic avant-garde launched by Ezra Pound in 1913 and the first to include American poets.
3. Popular turn-of-the-century poets Edgar Lee Masters and Stephen Crane are not usually counted as precursors of modernism.
4. Carl Sandburg’s populist modernism, though not erudite or obtuse, was not “unintelligent.”
5. A popular early twentieth-century poet, Edgar Arlington Robinson integrated English Arthurian mythology into his long poems Lancelot (1920), Tristram (1927), and Merlin (1917).
6. For her later extended review of New England regionalist Robert Frost, see Muriel Rukeyser, “In a Speaking Voice,” in this volume.
7. Collections by Archibald MacLeish: Streets in the Moon (1926), The Hamlet of Archibald MacLeish (1928), Einstein (1929), and New Found Land: Fourteen Poems (1930). Later, MacLeish and Rukeyser developed a professional relationship. See Muriel Rukeyser, “The Speed of the Image,” in this volume, note 13.
8. Archibald MacLeish, “L’an trentiesme de mon eage” and “The Too-Late Born,” Streets in the Moon (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1926), 14, 19. The second, much anthologized poem was later retitled “The Silent Slain.”
9. Major early poems by T. S. Eliot: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915), “Gerontion” (1920), and The Waste Land (1922).
10. Quotation from T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men,” in Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1963), 81.
11. Jules Laforgue, nineteenth-century French Symbolist poet.
12. The Southern Agrarians and Fugitive poets singled out Eliot as an influence on their aesthetic and their conservatively “Romantic” attitudes opposing industrial modernity. See Donald Davidson, “A Mirror for Artists” (1930), in Twelve Southerners (Donald Davidson et al.), I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, 75th anniversary ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 28–60.
13. Robinson Jeffers’s early long narrative poems Tamar (1924), The Women at Point Sur (1927), and Cawdor (1928) reimagine ancient myths as set in a seaside environment resembling his adopted home of Big Sur, California.
14. Jeffers’s “The Tower Beyond Tragedy,” in The Roan Stallion, Tamar, and Other Poems (New York: Horace Liveright, 1925), is based on Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy. Rukeyser compares his version to Eugene O’Neill’s popular Broadway adaptation Mourning Becomes Electra (1931).
15. Rukeyser names many modernist poets and three aesthetically oriented vanguardist little magazines edited by American-born or immigrant writers: Eugene Jolas’s transition (1927–1938); Richard Johns’s Pagany: A Native Quarterly (1930–1933); and Lincoln Kirstein and Varian Fry’s Hound and Horn (1927–1934). The Left (1931), edited by George Redfield and Jay Du Von, was a short-lived, Iowa-based socialist magazine featuring radical politics and literature.
16. Dorothy Parker, Ogden Nash, and Samuel Hoffstein wrote popular poetry featuring humor, satire, and childhood-invoking rhymes and meters.
17. Poet Norman MacLeod, critically neglected today, was a major figure in New York who connected avant-gardists like William Carlos Williams and leftists like Horace Gregory. In 1939, he helped establish the Poetry Center at Manhattan’s 92nd Street YMHA/YWHA, an important institution to Rukeyser’s career.