Poetry Part II: Modernism & Post-Modernism

Poetry Part II: Modernism & Post-Modernism 20th Century Anglo-Americans 20th century Women Writers 20th century African American Writers 20th century Latin American Writers 20th century Asian-American Writers 20th century Native American Writers

Modern Charles Darwin Origin of the Species 1859 Karl Marx Communist Manifesto 1848 Friedrich Nietzsche Sigmund Freud Interpretation of Dreams 1899 Carl G. Jung Max Planck quantum theory 1900 Albert Einstein theory of relativity 1905 Heidegger & Sartre

WW I Great Depression WWII-Holocaust & Hiroshima Cold War Dizzying rapid change Industrial revolution Global Village Artist goes within: Literature is subjective Pre-occupation with self, nature of consciousness, perception, fragmentation of experience and thought, stream-of-consciousness Questions: Existence of God Human race as ‘Lord of the Jungle’ Reason over emotion Life is worth living Reality

Modernism • Trends in literature in the early 20th century: Symbolism (French poets: Charles Baudelaire), Futurism (Italian Filippo Marinetti), Expressionism (Kafka, or German playwrights Georg Buchner & Bertolt Brecht), Imagism (US & Brit., Ezra Pound), Vorticism (London also Pound & Wyndham Lewis), Ultraismo (Spanish poets Guillermo de Torre), Dada (Paris Andre Breton), Surrealism (Fr/Sp Andre Breton, automatic writing & free association • ( A rejection of 19th c. traditions such as: a rejection of realism, or rejection of traditional metre for free verse • Used different, complex forms and styles including: breaking from chronological storytelling, stream of conscious writing style, fragmentation of images, more abstraction, • A rejection of historical continuity—places value and consciousness in the individual • Objective reasoning was the way to understand the world. • Urban (dissociation) but separate from conventional, middle class, or capitalist values • Multiple points of view, awareness of psychological theories.

Alfred Edward Housman 1859-1936 Educated at St. John’s College, Oxford A clerk in the Patent Office London Poet and classical scholar 1911 Professor of Latin at Cambridge Mother’s early death and father’s distance from family and financial failures led him to a grim out look on life Self-critical Works: Propertius, Ovid, Juvenal, Manilius , Shropshire Lad (collection of verse), Last Poems (collection), Prefanda, “The Name and Nature of Poetry” Interest/inspiration: astronomy, Shakespeare, Hardy, M. Arnold Grim comedy, ballad or hymns, brief, bleak themes of human existence, motion/travel, inevitability of death, tumultuous love and sexuality

William Butler Yeats 1865-1939 Irish—1916 Irish uprising Lyric poet, political, manager of Abbey Theatre, 1923 Nobel Prize for Poetry 1922-8 senator in 1st Irish govt Inspirations/Influences: Edmund Spenser, English Romantics, rejection of Victorian conventions, Irish nationalist, Occult & national interests, Swedenborg, Irish mythology & folk tales, Japanese art

Robert Frost 1874-1963 b. San Francisco, father newspaper editor died when 8 years old Mother moved to Massachusettes teacher Edu. Dartmouth College & Harvard then worked in mills & farm-Sympathy for working poor England 1912-15—then a professional writer “the old-fashioned way to be new” Regionalist, national & international politics, ambiguity 4 Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry and numerous other honors, incld. positions at Amherst College & degrees at Oxford & Cambridge, 1961 John F. Kennedy’s inaguration Use of vernacular-‘the sound of sense,’ contrast of seriousness & humor, lightness & gravity Influences: William James

Ezra Pound 1885-1972 B. Idaho edu. Pennsylvania 1908 Europe friends w/ Yeats, later promoted Joyce & Eliot: saw London as New Renaissance capital Influe: Provencal & early Italian poetry, Pre-Raphaelites, Cubism, classic Chinese poems Imagist movement-concrete, economy, free verse (lyrics) Post WWI disappointment: critical of unchecked capitalism, defended fascists WWII tried for treason- imprisoned, suffered breakdown and incarcerated at St. Elizabeths Hospital in DC 1946-58 New writing emerged; once released returned to Italy

T.S. Eliot 1888-1965 B. St. Louis, edu. Harvard, the Sorbonne, Oxford 1914 met Pound 1917 worked Lloyds Bank, then editor and director of publishing house 1927 British citizen & member of Anglican Church Poetry: satiric, allusive, cosmopolitan Voice of disillusioned generation Classical, Royalist, Catholic Literary critic & influential writings 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature and Order of Merit

William Carlos Williams Medical student U.Penn-medical career Rutherford, NJ Met Pound-avant-garde mvmt NYC, American poetic sensibility-rhythms of American speech, thought, experience, & working-class U.S. multiracial, immigrant, urban violence, fragmentation Influences: Joyce, Pound, Gertrude Stein, Kenneth Burke, & painters: Matisse, Stieglitz, Brueghel Influenced: Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, Paul Blackburn

Edna St. Vincent Millay 1892-1950 B. Maine parents separated, edu. Barnard C. & Vassar Moved to Greenwich Village Bohemian rebel & free woman Actor, playwright, prose writer, Lyrics 1923 Pulitzer Prize Nervous breakdowns-farm, bad health, retreated Lyrics: musical, economical lines Sonnets: compared to Shakespeare & Donne

Dorothy Parker 1893-1967 B. NJ, father-manufacturer, Jewish, mother-Scottish, died at 5 years old Edu. Classics, French, politics, social issues Supported herself after father’s death: Vogue, Vanity Fair, Life, Saturday Evening Post, M. Edwin Parker, Wall Street broker & military—after return 1919 problems & drinking Algonquin (restaurant) Round Table: Robert Benchley, Robert Sherwood, Alexander Woolcott, Franklin Adams, Harold Ross Later depression, affair, abortion, suicide The New Yorker M. Alan Campbell, L.A., screenwriters Sarcastic wit, outrageous behavior, heavy drinking Short-story, poet, critic, screenwriter, playwright

W. H. Auden 1907-1973 Educated Oxford, teacher Travelled to Germany often poet Marxist sympathizer 1935 married Erika Mann for British passport to escape Nazi Germany 1946 U.S.A.met Chester Kallman lifelong friend and companion Change to Christian tone in poetry after mother’s death 1956 prof at Oxford His work early: engaged, didactic, satiric poems Later work complex—the urbane, the pastoral, the lyrical, the erudite, the public, and the introspective Used traditional patterns with contemporary language.

Theodore Roethke 1908-1963 Saginaw, MI, father owner greenhouse Grad. UMich. Taught Literature & creative writing finally settling in UWash Seattle Mental illness Influenced by Auden, Emerson romanticism, Eng. Ren. Lyricist, Transcendentalists Autobiographical work, children’s nursery rhymes & Freud Poems: short, rhyming

Dylan Thomas 1914-1953 Swansea, Wales father schoolmaster Report in South Wales, then to London Later worked for BBC Strong literary legacy Famous for public readings, Strict in form and rhyme Nature imagery, idealized childhood in county Influenced by Romantics Extensively revised own work 1934 Eighteen Poems, 99 poems in all Alcoholic

Wislawa Szymborska 1923- Polish poet Lived in Poland during Nazi occupation, Stalinist Russia, and Communist Soviet occupation University of Krakow 1953 literary journal 6 collections of poetry Nobel Prize 1996 for “for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality,” The value, fragility, and temporality of life; no absolutes, nothing in life is guaranteed

X. J. Kennedy 1929- American poet & children’s writer Seton Hall, Columbia, UMich., Tufts, etc. Literary awards: NEA, Guggenheim, etc. Wrote children’s literature first for his own children, numerous accolades Poetry: humorous or playful, play with language, alliteration, metaphor, wordplay

John Updike fiction, poetry, essays, criticism, a play, children's books, memoirs, and other prose Marriage, adultery, family life, and faith, egocentric, existentialism Small town, middle class, southeastern PA, individual freedom and social constraints 1932–1950 Shillington PA (Reading) small town to farm 1950–1957 Harvard, Harvard Lampoon, Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford, The New Yorker Early Work, 1958–1965 Ipswich, MA publishing poetry, short stories The Rabbit Saga, 1960–1990 same character different stages of life 1957–1990 happy town life, travelling, left U.S. during Vietnam, divorced and remarried small town Mass. 1968–1990 autobiographical work, self-consciousness, finding place Since 1990 numerous accolades American Award for Fiction, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters

Seamus Heaney 1939- Derry Nothern Ireland, father- Catholic farmer & cattle dealer, 9 children 1951 St. Columb’s College 1957 Queen’s U. in Belfast-lectured in 1965 Death of a Naturalist 1965 1972 full time writer, moved to C. Wicklow, then 1976 to Dublin 1984 appt. Boylston Prof of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard 1989 Prof. of Poetry at Oxford 1995 Nobel Prize Descriptions of rural life, rustic childhood—Romantics Coming of age & keeping ancestral values 1970s turbulence in Northern Ireland Catholics & Protestants 1972 Wintering Out, 1975 North, 1979 Field Work 1980s allegorical, return to ancient times & medieval 1990s Seeing Things—parents’ death 1999 Beowulf & translations

Mid to Late 20th century Post-Modernism: what comes after modernism-no point in answering the world, further cynicism, random Women Writers: Feminist Issues African American: Civil Rights Issues Latin American Writers: Civil Rights Issues Native American: identity issues Jewish American: Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud Metafiction: representations of fiction, storytelling, or art in general. Magical Fiction—use of metaphysical devices: John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and Robert Coover

Postmodern 1960s+ A reaction to and continuation of modernism a Rejection of any rational order Abandons traditional literary forms, often combining different genres & styles; an explosion of movements Nihilism: no reason for values or morality, or rejection of values: believes in nothing, cynical, randomness of existence Playfulness, parody, & irony

Post-Modernism: what comes after moderism-no point in answering the world, further cynicism, random Women: Susan Glaspell, Charlotte Gilman Perkins African American:James Baldwin, Toni Cade Bambara, James McPherson, Ralph Ellison Native American: Zitkala-Sa, Mourning Dove John Cheever, Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike Jewish American: Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud Metafiction: representations of fiction, storytelling, or art in general. Magical Fiction—use of metaphysical devices: John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and Robert Coover

Anne Sexton 1928- Born Massachusettes wealthy family Father wool business owner alcoholic, mother well-educated, socialite Educated New England, eloped at 19 with Alfred Muller Sexton II (divorced 1973) 2 daughter-housewife, followed him from college to naval reserves duty Returned to Boston, husband worked for her father’s business Lifelong bouts with depression-institutionalized-couldn’t care for her children for 3 years Therapist encouraged her to write & attended poetry workshop at Tufts University New England housewife turned poet, icon, taboo-breaking Great Imagery & insight Mid-century Technical strength in poetry – reminiscent of Poe & French symbolists Person and direct poetry, “confessional” poetry, Student of Robert Lowell, mixes personal subject matter with traditional verse forms Struggles with depression, suicide, marriage, sex, feminism Upper-middle class woman frustrated with sole role of wife, mother, homemaker Won Pulitzer Prize 1967 1970 teaching at Boston U. Committed suicide 1974

Adrienne Rich 1929- Born Baltimore, MD: Father doctor, mother pianist-home schooled Great reader from a young age: Shakespeare, Keats, Ibsen B.A. Radcliffe College 1951: same year won Yale Younger Poets Award, published first book of poetry Early work: conventional forms, meter & rhyme Imitated Auden, Yeats, Frost, using male voice Married Alfred H. Conrad, had 3 sons traveled to Europe & kept writing publishing 1960s-70s: changes more unconventional poetry, more feminist: abandons form in stanzas and rhyme schemes, more free verse She and her husband politically involved. NYC: Women’s liberation movement, writing about women’s history and Husband committed suicide & she came out as a lesbian Numersous awards 1980s moved to California with her partner Won awards and positions including Prof at Stanford U. and more prolific

Sylvia Plath 1932-1963 • Her life and early, tragic death resulted in great controversy about the quality of her writing • Otto Plath, father dominant head of family immigrated from Prussia in 1901, Darwinian. Studied language, biology, zoology, entomology, PhD Harvard 1928. Died 1940 during an amputation of his leg due to diabetes. • Aurelia Schober, mother 21 years younger and 2nd wife of Otto, was a high school teacher of languages. • Excelled in school, scholarship to Smith College where she began publishing her work, first at the Smith Review and then in literary magazines. • Left Smith and edited Mademoiselle magazine in NYC. After this year, she began her life struggles with depression. • She was given electroconvulsive therapy which was painful and terrified her. Thereafter she made her first attempt at suicide. • Treated in patient at Massachusetts General Hospital & then McLean Hospital and treated by a Freudian analyst. Returned to Smith in 1954. • Graduated from Smith in 1955. Started M.A. degree at Cambridge; completed in 1957. • 1956 met Ted Hughes, poet, and married later than year. They returned to the U.S. • She taught at Smith and Hughes taught and wrote. After a frustrating year, they gave up teaching to write full time. • Moved to Boston where the wrote and met with other writers: Frost, Robert Lowell, Marianne Moore, Adrienne Rich, and Anne Sexton. • 1959 travelled across U.S. and then returned to England. A daughter was born in 1961. They separated the next year b/c Hughes was having an affair. Alone, Plath wrote. • A single, working mother and depressed she struggled with her depression and the English dark, long winters exacerbated her condition. She committed suicide though first she made sure her children were taken care. • Sylvia-idealist, driven to self-improvement • First book of poetry The Colossus, novel The Bell Jar • And left behind additional poetry and manuscript

Diana Ackerman 1948- • b. Illinois, PhD Cornell U. • D. Lit Kenyon College, Guggenheim Grant • Taught Cornell • The New Yorker, Smithsonian, National Geographic • Poetry, influenced by Hollywood and John Donne, NASA • Combination of opposites, abstract concepts and vivid images • Scientific • Poet, essayist, naturalist • 2 dozen works • A Natural History of the Senses, A Natural History of Love, One Hundred Names for Love, The Zookeeper’s Wife

African American Literature The Harlem Renaissance: 1920s a convergence of black writers and artists in NYC W.E. DuBois’ “The Souls of Black Folks” and Booker T. Washington’s “Up from Slavery” “A spiritual coming of age of the black race” Poetry, short stories, plays, research, visual arts, 1925 The New Negro a collection by Alain Locke prof at Howard U. 1926 Nation manifesto by Langston Hughes “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” the need for racial pride and artistic independence Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston Themes of African American experience, using folk literature Crisis, Opportunity, and the Messenger literary magazines The Great Depression 1929 lack of resources The WPA Worker’s Progress A… and members worked for the NY Federal Writers’ Project

Langston Hughes 1902-1967 B. Joplin, Missouri, lived in midwest and Mexico, NYC, France, Wash.D.C. Credited as the first African American to make a living as a writer: poet, drama, fiction, autobiography, opera, musicals, even children’s books Grandmother’s 1st husband died at Harper’s Ferry with John Brown, her 2nd husband was an abolitionist: family history of working for African American rights; lonely childhood Attended Columbia U. NYC, left in 1922 worked and travelled: Africa & Paris; back to U.S. 1924, already a well-known poet. Influenced by Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg, Paul Laurence Dunbar Dedication to black music—uses blues and jazz in his poetry Decided to write about the African American experience especially lower-class Harlem Renaissance Attended historically black Lincoln U. in PA grad. 1929. There met “Godmother” Mrs. Charlotte Mason a patron 1932 in Soviet Union & was very leftist in politics; moves centrist in WWII 1937 Europe, Madrid during Spanish Civil War 1938 Harlem Suitcase Theater 1953 Senator Joseph McCarthy’s hearing Infused Afro-American music traditions into his writing: jazz poetry Racial pride and racial feeling: a radical democrat, love of humanity and sense of the ideal

Latin American Literature Literature from the colonial period mirrored the styles and conventions of the countries of Spain and Portugal (largely outside of the European mainstream). 17th century poet So Juana Ines de la Cruz, a Catholic nun who was silenced by the Monsignor is representative of the limitations on writers of the colonial period. 19th century-wars of independence: literature reflected issues of national identity, threat of anarcy and social dissolution. Jose Joaquin Fernandez de Lizardi of Mexico, Andres Bello of Venezuela & Chile, Jose Hernandez of Argentina, Joaquim Maria Macado de Assis of Brazil Cuban Revolution 1959 A term for the many countries and cultures Emergence in the 1970s 1980s with stronger immigration—8.9 million immigrants Immigration and Nationality Act (equal immigration) 38.8 million (identified) Latinos Not published b/c belief that Latinos are illiterate. Neo-colonial issues, follows history of wars of independence in early 19th century

Jimmy Santiago Baca B. 1952, mix of Chicano and Apache Mother murdered by 2nd husband, father died of alcoholism. Left an orphanage in New Mexico for street life. Teen years filled with violence and drugs. San Quentin prison and Arizon Writing in Prison “bridged my divided life of prisoner and free man.” Published in Mother Jones, editor Denise Levertov was a big supporter Writing led to self-discovery and connection with his heritage-healing. Poetry of witness and clarity of images .

Martin Espada B. 1957 Brooklyn, parents Puerto Rican Lawyer Boston Socially aware, urban poetry Identity as a Spanish-speaking immigrant in America Influenced by Pablo Nerudo Writing classes at U Maryland, U Wisconsin BA History, J.D. Northeastern U., U Mass-Amherst English prof

Asian American Literature • 1960s • Americans of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Indo-Pakistani, and Vietnamese and other Asian origins lumped together • Individual country, language, culture, history • Dealing with being a hyphenate (-) • National boundaries • Immigration, discrimination, and international relation—war • Exclusion Laws of 1882, 1888, 1892 refused Chinese laborers; unequal gender ratios, prohibited citizenship or ownership • Philippine-American War (1899-1902), World War II, and the Japanese occupation of Asian countries, and the internment of Japanese Americans, Korean War, Vietnam War • Immigration and Nationality Act 1965—allowed quotas of Asian immigrants =European immigrants • Racism, alienation, culture, history, identity, family, gender relations, loss of homeland, class, hope/anger with America, longing, neo-colonialism

Li-Young Lee 1957- • Parents Chinese, born in Jakarta, Indonesia • Father was personal physician to Mao Tse-tung; spent a year as a political prisoner • Travelled throughout Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan, before arriving in America in 1964. • Studied at the U Pittsburgh, the U Arizona, and SUNY Brockport. • Married two children in Chicago • Two collections of poetry Rose (Brockport, NY, 1986) and The City in Which I Love You (Brockport, 1990) award winners • Critics find fault with his work for its looseness, both emotionally and linguistically • Fans like his modesty and unsentimental intimacy with which he handles his often sensational subject-matter.

Native American Literature • Between 20 and 100 million people who spoke 300+ different languages 300 distinct cultural groups lived on the North American continent—and developed its own oral literature containing ritual drama, song, narrative, and oratory • Shared belief in community and close coexistence of physical and spiritual reality • Europeans and Euro-Americans began writing and preserving the oral traditions of Native Americans since the early Spanish and French missionaries—and making them “literate” • Late 18th and early 19th century Native Americans seek space and power—survival with the new United States • Native Americans begin writing down their own languages and recording their stories • Europeans and Euro-Americans begin ethnographic collections in the 19th century • 19th c. the first Native American autobiographies and novels • Blackhawk (1833), Black Elk Speaks (1932), The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta (1854) • Mid-late 19th c. cultural preservation and instruction • U.S. policy of assimilation-General Allotment Act of 1887—boarding schools for N.A. children • 20th century “salvage anthropology Franx Boas • Early 20th c. explosion of Native American writers in many genres—saving their culture • 1934 Wheeler-Howard Indian Reorganization Act—reestablished authority of tribal governments (pre-loss 60%) • House Concurrent Resolution 108 (1953)—termination government relationships with tribes—sent N.A. off the res. • Native American Renaissance late 20th century • Vine Deloria Jr.'s (Standing Rock Sioux) Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969), philosophical, religious, political, legal critiques of American society • N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa) House Made of Dawn (1968), 1969 Pulitzer Prize in fiction.

Sherman Alexie • B. 1966 Spokane Indian reservation • Attended Gonzaga U. & Washington State U. 1995 B.A. • poet, writer, filmaker • Reservation Blues (1996), The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian, Films: The Business of Fancydancing (1992),and The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993) became Smoke Signals. Indian Killer (1996). • http://www.fallsapart.com/index/

Poetry Part II: Modernism & Post-Modernism