15
Probably the easiest truism to make about the poetry of the early twentieth century, a time known by the name Modernism, is that it was boldly experimental. It was more experimental with regard to form and subject than poetry had been in any period in its English-language history. (The only time to rival it occurred in the late middle ages, when syllabic, alliterative verse gave way to meter and rhyme.) In the Modernist period, long-standing conventions of meter and rhyme were swept away, with nothing as definite as syllable or meter to determine the length of a line, and no definite pattern of sound. One of the most prominent and influential poets of the era, the American Ezra Pound, stated at one point that it was his task to “break the back of the iamb”—which, as you learned several weeks to, had been the most prominent feature of poetry since the time of Chaucer.
Pound and the Modernists had great success in freeing poetry from the straitjacket of meter. Although traditional forms and meters did not disappear, they no longer dominated poetry. It was a time when it seemed that almost anything was possible. Poems varied from the astonishingly simple verse written by William Carlos Williams, H.D., and Amy Lowell, to the highly allusive, imbricated verse of Pound and T.S. Eliot. Consider the following two examples, the first by Amy Lowell:
Autumn
All day I have watched the purple vine leaves
Fall into the water.
And now in the moonlight they still fall,
But each leaf is fringed with silver.
You’ve read several poems like this one. It may remind you of “The Red Wheelbarrow.”
This next one is by T.S. Eliot .
A Cooking Egg
En l’an trentiesme de mon aage
Que toutes mes hontes j’ay beues …
Pipit sate upright in her chair
Some distance from where I was sitting;
Views of the Oxford Colleges
Lay on the table, with the knitting.
Daguerreotypes and silhouettes,
Her grandfather and great great aunts,
Supported on the mantelpiece
An Invitation to the Dance.
. . . . .
I shall not want Honour in Heaven
For I shall meet Sir Philip Sidney
And have talk with Coriolanus
And other heroes of that kidney.
I shall not want Capital in Heaven
For I shall meet Sir Alfred Mond:
We two shall lie together, lapt
In a five per cent Exchequer Bond.
I shall not want Society in Heaven,
Lucretia Borgia shall be my Bride;
Her anecdotes will be more amusing
Than Pipit’s experience could provide.
I shall not want Pipit in Heaven:
Madame Blavatsky will instruct me
In the Seven Sacred Trances;
Piccarda de Donati will conduct me.
. . . . .
But where is the penny world I bought
To eat with Pipit behind the screen?
The red-eyed scavengers are creeping
From Kentish Town and Golder’s Green;
Where are the eagles and the trumpets?
Buried beneath some snow-deep Alps.
Over buttered scones and crumpets
Weeping, weeping multitudes
Droop in a hundred A.B.C.’s
We haven’t read much poetry like this. Could you follow it ? Did you give up before you got to the end ? We wouldn’t blame you.
“Autumn”