Poetic Development in the U.S.: H. D. and Imagism (Modernism)

"H. D. and Imagism" is the second part of the third installment of a series that focuses on poetic development in the United States. You may want to read "Pound and Imagism," the first part of the third installment. The second installment is a superficial examination of realism; the first installment is a superficial examination of romanticism.

Hilda Doolittle was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1886 to an academic family with connections to the Moravian and Puritan faiths. Her father was an  astronomer and mathematician who taught initially at Lehigh University and later at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1901, when Doolittle was fifteen years old, she met Ezra Pound, who lived nearby and who later introduced her to William Carlos Williams when the two men were students at the University of Pennsylvania and she was at Bryn Mawr College. Doolittle's engagement to Pound in 1905 was condemned by her parents, and she withdrew from Bryn Mawr the next year, studying at home until she joined Pound in London in 1911. Doolittle actively participated in the city's literary scene--associating with, among others, W. B. Yeats, May Sinclair, D. H. Lawrence, and Richard Aldington, whom she married in 1913.

Pound sent to Harriet Monroe three poems by Doolittle for publication in the January 1913 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. Submitted under the nom de plume "H. D., Imagiste," "Hermes of the Ways," "Priapus," and "Epigram" were hailed by reviewers as revolutionary. "Hermes of the Ways" embodies Pound's concept of imagism, for it contains elements of classical poetry, Japanese haiku, and French symbolism:

     The hard sand breaks,
     And the grains of it
     Are clear as wine.

     Far off over the leagues of it,
     The wind,
     Playing on the wide shore,
     Piles little ridges,
     And the great waves
     Break over it.

     But more than the many-foamed ways
     Of the sea,
     I know him
     Of the triple path-ways,
     Hermes,
     Who awaiteth.

     Dubious,
     Facing three ways,
     Welcoming wayfarers,
     He whom the sea-orchard
     Shelters from the west,
     From the east
     Weathers sea-wind;
     Fronts the great dunes.

     Wind rushes
     Over the dunes,
     And the coarse, salt-crusted grass
     Answers.

     Heu,
     It whips round my ankles!

     II

     Small is
     This white stream,
     Flowing below ground
     From the poplar-shaded hill,
     But the water is sweet.

     Apples on the small trees
     Are hard,
     Too small,
     Too late ripened
     By a desperate sun
     That struggles through sea-mist.

     The boughs of the trees
     Are twisted
     By many bafflings;
     Twisted are
     The small-leafed boughs.

     But the shadow of them
     Is not the shadow of the mast head
     Nor of the torn sails.

     Hermes, Hermes,
     The great sea foamed,
     Gnashed its teeth about me;
     But you have waited,
     Where sea-grass tangles with
     Shore-grass.¹

Pound regarded highly the exactness of detail, the economy of language, and the organic patterns of rhythm. After the publication of the three poems, H. D. assumed a major role in the movement. She was a significant contributor to Des Imagistes (1914), an anthology edited by Pound, and she replaced Aldington, during World War I, as the literary editor of The Egoist, a forum for imagist writers. When Pound abandoned imagism to support vorticism, H. D. helped further the movement, submitting material for Amy Lowell's anthology Some Imagist Poets (1915, 1916, 1917). Her volume Sea Garden (1916) is distinctively imagistic and transcendental; she uses natural imagery--wind, sand, flowers, et cetera--to examine the subjectivities of consciousness.

By mid 1919, H. D. had experienced a stillbirth, her marriage had dissolved, she had been impregnated again, her brother Gilbert had been killed in World War I, her father had died from shock, she had been infected with a deadly strain of influenza, she had borne her daughter Perdita, and she had become romantically involved with Winifred Ellerman, an English novelist who wrote under the pseudonym Bryher. They traveled to Greece, the United States, Switzerland, Egypt, and Paris--during which H. D. published translations of Euripides, Sappho, Homer, and other Greek writers as well as the books Hymen (1921), Heliodora and Other Poems (1924), Collected Poems of H. D. (1925), Palimpsest (1926), Hedylus (1928), and Red Roses for Bronze (1931). Both Hymen and Heliodora epitomize imagism with their common speech, concrete images, concision, and variant rhythms. Indeed, when Collected Poems appeared, she seemed to many the one poet who had remained essentially an imagist. But with Palimpsest and Hedylus, H. D. began to experiment with different genres and techniques, employing increasingly complex rhymes and rhythms to recreate moods and objects.

In 1933 and 1934, she underwent psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud in Vienna, Austria. The process was pivotal in her artistic development. According to Tribute to Freud (1956), her memoir of the experience, H. D. resolved many of her feelings concerning her bisexuality and her difficulties with writer's block. Psychoanalysis also prompted H. D. to perceive her experiences as part of a universal pattern that linked her to women throughout history and to regard her poetry as the key to understanding that pattern. Throughout her life, relief from traumas derived from her ability to locate in Greek and Egyptian myths and in esoteric religions, particularly those emphasizing the strength and independence of matriarchal figures, the archetypes for her own experience and to project her life into myth: evinced in the poems of her early phase--Sea Garden, Hymen, and Heliodora--in the impressionistic fiction of her middle phase--Palimpsest, Hedylus, Nights (1935), and HERmione (published posthumously in 1981)--and in the memoirs--Tribute to Freud and End to Torment: A Memoir of Pound (published posthumously in 1979)--and the poetic sequences--Trilogy (published separately and together in 1973), Helen in Egypt (1961), and Hermetic Definition (published posthumously in 1972)--of her last phase.

The fiction of her middle period taught H. D. to cluster images in a larger narrative framework, and she expanded both form and perspective in the wartime trilogy The Walls Do Not Fall (1944), Tribute to the Angels (1945), and The Flowering of the Rod (1946). Trilogy was inspired by the realities of living in London during World War II and concerns religion and myth in a series of discursive meditations. H. D. presents the Goddess, or mother-symbol, as a means of transcending the horrors of war and of attaining spiritual wholeness and self-realization. Robert Ambelain's spiritual themes and Denis de Rougemont's L'Amour et l'Occident (Love in the Western World, 1939) convinced H. D. that an underground mystical tradition had been existing throughout history. Raised in a Moravian community in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, she perceived a connection with the syncretic tradition. The various forms of mysticism, H. D. believed, differed significantly from the orthodox religions that had oppressed them. One important area of contrast was the place of woman as symbol in the pantheon. Whereas the orthodox traditions had created a masculine imagery of God and had been using such to rationalize their belief in male superiority, the mystical traditions posited an equally masculine and feminine divine One--for example, the En-Soph of the Kabbalah. Furthermore, the gods and goddesses of myth are dualistic. It is important to note that the masculine and feminine duality governs all other dualisms such as life-death, spirit-flesh, light-dark, good-evil, active-passive, reason-emotion, et cetera.

H. D.'s engagement in myth and mysticism liberated her from the imagery of patriarchal monotheism. But she realized that if the Goddess were to function as a symbol of mystical Love, she had to revise the syncretic tradition, for the dualisms of Gnosticism and the Kabbalah tend to equate the Female Principle with death, flesh, darkness, evil and passivity. H. D. revised the dualisms, associating the Male Principle with death, with the technology and machinery of modern warfare. The Goddess, now embodying Love (life, peace and rebirth), afforded the possibility to develop a personal and mythic mother-symbol of salvation.

H. D. also realized that because women had been deemed a caste, a separate and unequal group, the possibility of individual transformation and transcendence was dependent on the authenticity of cultural identity and symbol. In other words, the emergent self of women could not occur individually; transformation and transcendence was contingent on the creation of a new group identity, a new mythology of womanhood. H. D.'s Goddess symbolizes both what had been happening to women in patriarchal tradition and the potential of women to transcend the paralytic definitions of otherness. Rather than being a supernatural force outside women, the Goddess is a symbolic incarnation of the divine spark in women. H. D. releases the Goddess from her historical enclosure, and her resurrection correlates to the transformation of women:

     but she is not shut up in a cave
     like a Sybil; she is not

     imprisoned in leaden bars
     in a coloured window;

     she is Psyche, the butterfly,
     out of the cocoon.  (15 - 20)² 

Similar to H. D.'s gradual recovery of her mother via Freudian analysis, the daughter-poet's return to the primal, matriarchal deity is the result of a complex process that begins with immersion in the patriarchal symbols of divinity. The first poem of the trilogy, The Walls Do Not Fall, is a quest for the Christ-image and the divine father who appears as "Osiris" (1).³ In the second poem, Tribute to the Angels, the daughter considers herself a modern John whose revelations transform the fire of death into the Apocryphal fire that must precede the New Jerusalem. "I John saw," H. D. writes, but her vision is a revision of Biblical tradition, a revolutionary epiphany that transforms the Whore of Babylon into the Goddess of Salvation. (1)⁴ The poet's prayer to the seven masculine angels around God's throne is interrupted by the Goddess' sudden appearance:

     I had been thinking of Gabriel,
     of the moon-cycle, of the moon shell,

     of the moon-crescent
     and the moon at full:

     I had been thinking of Gabriel,
     the moon-regent, the Angel,

     and I had intended to recall him
     in the sequence of candle and fire

     and the law of the seven;
     I had not forgotten

     his special attribute
     of annunciator; I had thought

     to address him as I had the others,
     Uriel, Annael;

     how could I imagine
     the Lady herself would come instead?⁵

But the daughter must first understand how the mother has been defiled by patriarchal traditions:

     for suddenly we saw your name
     desecrated; knaves and fools

     have done you impious wrong,
     Venus, for venery stands for impurity

     and Venus as desire
     is venereous, lascivious (3 - 8)⁶

The poet is now able to undo the reduction of Venus to carnality and to redeem the Goddess; she commands her to "return, O holiest one, / Venus whose name is kin / to venerate, / venerator" (7 - 10).⁷ The daughter's purification of the mother-symbol makes the development of mystical revelation easier, and both Freud and H. D. regarded such religious experience as necessary to psychically connect with her own mother. The personal and mythic dimensions of mother and Goddess overlap. Whereas H. D.'s mother appeared in dreams, her Goddess appears in visions. Walking through remnants of the city, the poet passes through a structure and sees a scorched, flowering May apple, an attribute to the Goddess. The tree does not symbolize the fall of man through woman's sin as it does in Genesis; instead, it symbolizes the power of the Goddess to recreate life out of the ashes of death. The source of salvation is not the Son of God but the Lady. The variable refrain of Tribute to the Angels honors the power of the Goddess: "this is the flowering of the rood, / this is the flowering of the wood" (15 - 16).⁸ She does not appear with the Child. She carries the Book of Life and embodies the mystical forces of Love and Logos in opposition to the contemporaneous Sword.

The Goddess is a revolutionary vision not only as a female savior, but also as a symbolic representation of the transformation accessible to women. Such transformation is connected to the capacity of women to write. The Goddess nearly always functions as a muse. The unconscious, H. D. learned from Freud, is the basis of all non-rational perception and is therefore the fountainhead of both religion and art. "[S]he must have been pleased / with the straggling company of the brush and quill / who did not deny their birthright," the poet says of the Lady. (4 - 6)⁹ Those born of the mother are simultaneously prophets and artists who interpret the meanings of catastrophes. Although there is no suggestion that her offshoots are all women, Trilogy is a record of H. D.'s obsessions with two men--one as lover, one as poet--and her struggle to find her own way. One can surmise that the Goddess' function as muse is to inspire females to write autonomously and without fear of male mockery.

Trilogy is narrative, philosophical, visionary and discursive, and it belongs to a line that includes Dante Alighieri's La Commedia (The Divine Comedy, translated 1802), William Blake's Milton (1804-11) and Jerusalem (1804-20), and William Wordsworth's The Prelude (1850). Trilogy contemporaneously parallels T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets (1943), Williams' Paterson (1963), and Pound's The Cantos (1972). It technically involves balance: between preparation and improvisation, between fluidity and hesitation, between openness and closure. Structurally there are three long poems, each divided into forty-three cantos. Three is an enchanting number--a referent to La Commedia and the Trinity, among other things. Formally each canto is a single sentence comprising a series of phrases in couplets, excepting the opening canto of The Walls Do Not Fall which consists of triplets. Frequent end-stops--commas, colons, semicolons, exclamation points, and question marks--retain the audience in suspension; a full stop occurs only at the conclusion of a canto. Thus, Trilogy resembles pre-twentieth-century meditative poems, all of which rely on continuous form, and differs from contemporaneous poems which are notable for their disorderly forms. It also differs from H. D.'s earlier work, in which stanzas of a single poem are typically irregular. The predictable form assures the audience from the outset that the microcosm will be coherent and there will be a resolution.

But H. D. balances such regularity with irregular meter and rhyme. The lines are rhythmic, but they are distinctly nonmetrical. Sometimes the lines of a couplet are similar in length; other times the lengths of lines fluctuate from couplet to couplet. With respect to end rhyme, there is no consistent scheme. She creates a web of recurrent sounds via repetition, anaphora, end rhyme (perfect and imperfect), and alliteration (consonance and assonance). Many of her end rhymes are feminine. What the audience encounters is a form that is neither fixed nor free. The following example is from The Flowering of the Rod.

     I am Mary, she said, of a tower-town,
     or once it must have been towered

     for Magdala is a tower;
     Magdala stands on the shore;

     I am Mary, she said, of Magdala,
     I am Mary, a great tower;

     through my will and my power,
     Mary shall be myrrh;

     I am Mary--O, there are Marys a-plenty,
     (though I am Mara, bitter) I shall be Mary-myrrh;

     I am that myrrh-tree of the gentiles,
     the heathen; there are idolaters,

     even in Phrygia and Cappadocia,
     who kneel before mutilated images

     and burn incense to the Mother of Mutilations,
     to Attis-Adonis-Tammuz and his mother who was myrrh;

     she was a stricken woman,
     having borne a son in unhallowed fashion;

     she wept bitterly till some heathen god
     changed her to a myrrh-tree;

     I am Mary, I will weep bitterly,
     bitterly ... bitterly.¹⁰

The repetition of tower corresponds to the anaphoric "I am Mary." The effects of the incantation are reclamation and transformation of self. After she gains power (Notice tower and power is a perfect rhyme.), she converts from Mary the whore to Mary the savior. The repetition of myrrh reinforces her transformation, and it establishes a connection with similar mothers, which she achieves with the imperfect, feminine end rhyme woman and fashion. The only other couplet with an end rhyme is the final one; the relatively long duration of the e-sound creates tension.

A part of the trilogy's appeal lies in H. D.'s ability to affirm radical spiritual principles without theological argumentation by creating a loose pattern of cadences and sounds that performs the work of persuasion. The sonic texture is a formal correlative of the poem's premise: order, beauty and meaning, though they may be inconspicuous, are present in our shattered world, and the way to recover them is not through rational effort but through psychic states of dream and vision which are prior to the semantic Word as the Word is prior to the Sword. Simply hearing the sounds is like knowing that a deity exists, that paradise exists. That knowledge, which she softly but firmly opposes to the world of rationalism and violence, is to where the daughter-poet leads the audience. For those who already know such, the daughter-poet is reminding them of the spiritual capacities they possess.

Another part of the trilogy's appeal is its tonal lightness, especially when we compare it to pre-twentieth-century meditative poems--John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) and Wordsworth's Prelude, for examples--which are serious, sententious, metrical. And if we compare Trilogy to Eliot's and Pound's contemporaneous poems, the tone is not authoritative but intimate. The short lines and feminine endings do not overwhelm the audience. And the deferment of closure via pauses, repetitions and qualifications corresponds with H. D.'s insistence on a poetics and politics of openness, which she conveys through images and inclusion.

H. D. presents a sequence of generative enclosures: a mollusk that begets a pearl, words that are boxes prepared to hatch butterflies, the poet's heart-shell from which a tree of faith grows, a crucible in which words melt that transforms into a Lady free from a cocoon who is also a scorched yet flowering May apple. In The Flowering of the Rod, a jar of myrrh is Mary, perhaps two Marys, and a speck of light in a headband's jewel blooms into a revelation of paradise. Trilogy is a poem about things which seem closed and finite until they open and are infinite.

Another source of openness is the way the speaker relates to the audience. "An incident here and there, / and rails gone (for guns) / from your (and my) old town square:" we are immediately among the initiates to destruction. (1 - 3)¹¹ It is similar to Eliot's gesture of inclusion: "Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table; / Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets" (1 - 4)¹² The famous opening lines of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" retain a mysterious resonance partly because the speaker never names the addressee. H. D.'s "you" in the first canto of The Walls Do Not Fall similarly may be the audience, a person in the poem, or a portion of the poet's self. But the "I" in Trilogy sometimes defensively distinguishes itself from others--that is, from skeptics and materialists. Pronouns fluctuate as to imply that the capacity each individual has to be either subject or object, ally or antagonist, singular or plural, definable or indefinable is an essential principle of any spiritual progress.

Her last major work, Helen in Egypt, is a book-length combination of poetry and prose that advances the philosophical and aesthetic themes of Trilogy. Rejecting the traditional masculine focus of such epics as the Iliad and the Odyssey, H. D. concentrates on Helen of Troy and her efforts as an exile in Egypt to confront her past and to create an independent self-identity. The premise of Helen in Egypt is that the poetic vision which resurrects the Goddess also can restore the individual woman to authenticity. Helen's quest involves transformation (purification of hatred) and transcendence (transfiguration into Love). After she is free of shame, Helen explores the three phases of the Goddess (Aphrodite, Thetis, Kore) who simultaneously embody Helen's self, H. D.'s mother, and the Grand Mer, mother of all. The Mother affords the transformation of woman's identity from otherness to authenticity.

H. D. is important both as an imagist poet and as a visionary poet. She not only created distinct images, but also a coherent spiritualism concerning women and men. Although H. D. contributed substantially to the discovery of an archetypal identity for women, she regards men and women as equals in the spiritual realm. They are not seeking the directions of established roles; rather, they are seeking reciprocal insight, reciprocal wisdom.
____________________________________________________
     ¹H. D., "Hermes of the Ways," Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, January 1913, http://http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse/1/4#!/20569688 (16 May 2014).
     ²H. D., Trilogy (New York: New Directions, 1998) 103.
     ³Ibid., 25.
     ⁴Ibid., 65.
     ⁵Ibid., 92.
     ⁶Ibid., 74.
     ⁷Ibid., 75.
     ⁸Ibid., 87.
     ⁹Ibid., 100.
     ¹⁰Ibid., 135.
     ¹¹Ibid., 3.
     ¹²T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," Selected Poems (San Diego: Harcourt, 1964) 11.

Poetic Development in the U.S.: Pound and Imagism (Modernism)

"Pound and Imagism" is the first part of the third installment of a series that focuses on poetic development in the United States.  The second installment is a superficial examination of realism; the first installment is a superficial examination of romanticism.

Preface

One aspect of history fundamental to the comprehension of Western literature is the idea that regardless how novel a cultural development may seem, it is not discontinuous from the aggregate intellectual and artistic achievements that precede it.  Even Sigmund Freud's and Albert Einstein's great imaginative leaps must be viewed as a part of the intellectual environment in which their theories were born.  Such a sense of continuity leads to two important conclusions.  First, a sympathetic understanding of the past permits a more complete appreciation of current achievements.  Second, the past, in contrast with being a repository, is the root of an organic process that continuously nourishes present and future achievements.  The continuity of Western literature is best illustrated by the way in which writers continue to draw from the past to create original works.  To demonstrate the creative continuity, we will attend to Ezra Pound, who is recognizably an imagist, his imagism rooted in and continuous with the achievements of his predecessors.

Historical Background

After 1900 American literary activity increased so that by 1912 another era of literary expression had begun.  The numbers of unfamiliar writers, the high level of creativity, the acceptance of unusual forms, and a larger audience more critical than before produced a new national literature.  By 1920 the patterns had been set for the literature which followed.  The new writers were characterized, like the generation before them, by their aesthetic rebellion and originality, by their emphasis on physical and psychological actuality, by their search for spiritual enlightenment via symbols and myths, and by their concern for human welfare and the advancement of social reforms.  The leaders of the literary revolution attacked the fundamental institutions of society to affirm the diginity and value of the individual governed by natural laws and dwarfed by the magnitude of modern events.

The first event, World War I (1914 -- 1918), disrupted the liberal, rational atmosphere in the United States and opposed the idea of progress in Euroope.  Because governments needed to mobilize resources and populations, they centralized their power over their citizens.  Civil liberties--press, speech, assembly, movement--were restricted for the reason of national security.  And governments allotted consumer goods, restricting the economic freedom of their citizens.  Although Americans had experienced the extension of governmental authority into their lives, World War I made the federal government more powerful.

The United States' entrance into the war tipped the scales in the Allies' favor.  Confronting a seemingly limitless influx of American troops, the Central Powers signed an armistice on 11 November 1918.  The peace treaties that ensued attempted to create a sense of nationalism via new borders and states, but disputes over the regions soured relations in eastern Europe for years.  Furthermore, many Germans viewed the Treaty of Versailles as unreasonable, especially the high reparations, and sought its revision.  President Woodrow Wilson (1913 -- 1921) had realized the treaties contained unwise provisions that could lead to conflicts, so he placed many of his hopes for the future in the League of Nations.  To successfully enforce the Treaty, its principal architects needed to be involved in the process of recovery and in the development of a new German state, but the failure of the Senate to ratify the Treaty meant the United States never joined the League.  The Senate also rejected Wilson's defensive alliance with Great Britain and France.  As a result, Britain withdrew from the League which forced France to deal with Germany independently.

By the end of 1919, peace already seemed precarious.  The League was not effective in maintaining harmonious relations because it could use only economic sanctions to restrain aggression.  The United States' retreat into isolationism undermined the influence of the League, and France's strong actions against its old enemy only intensified German resentment.  Germany, fettered by the Treaty, experienced depression--economic hardship and high unemployment--which led to the ascent of facist leadership in the 1930's.

While European nations tried to recover from the war, the United States experienced economic expansion.  Henry Ford's Model T became the symbol of the potential of modern industry.  Assembly-line techniques reduced the costs of production, making cars less expensive and more available.  The effect of auto production spread to other industries--steel, glass, rubber, petroleum--and state programs to build roads and highways altered the nation's landscape.  The automobile industry also pioneered ways to distribute and sell products.  Companies sold cars through networks of dealers to customers who frequently used a new type of credit, the installment plan.

Assembly-line production, mass consumption, advertising, and easy credit characterized the nation's economy in the 1920's.  As profits soared and incomes rose, business and government resumed their long-term affinity, and Americans' zeal for reform waned.  But not all Americans enjoyed the rewards of prosperity.  Industrial workers did not profit from increased productivity.  Although their wages rose, prices rose faster.  And labor unions continually clashed with company unions, which had been established by the employers.  The annual income of farmers declined after the army's purchases had ended and European agriculture had revived.  Like many other Americans, they became caught in a cycle of credit and comsumption.

For those whose incomes rose, durable goods previously considered luxuries--refrigerators, washing machines, vacuum cleaners--became necessities.  Although air travel remained the preserve of the wealthy, trains, buses and automobiles made excursions to beaches and resorts more doable.  New work patterns, such as the eight-hour day, expanded the amount of free time Americans could spend on leisure activities: reading mass-circulation magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Reader's Digest, and The Ladies' Home Journal; listening to radio programs broadcast by the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS); or watching motion pictures such as The Kid (1921), Sherlock Jr. (1924), The Gold Rush (1925), The General (1926), and The Jazz Singer (1927), which introduced sound to audiences.  Fans followed the careers of movie stars in trade magazines.  The press also tracked other celebrities, such as the pilot Charles Lindbergh, who completed the first transatlantic flight in 1927, and the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, who epitomized an icon of the 1920's, the flapper.

The flapper embodied many of the charcteristics of the Jazz Age--rebellion, independence, exhibitionism, competitiveness and consumerism.  Although a symbol of liberation, the flapper was the ultimate consumer, dependent on a variety of products.  Consumerism linked the carefree, adventurous mood of the 1920's with the dominance of corporations and their conservative values.

Many Americans endorsed conservative values in economics and politics, electing Republican Presidents who supported such values.  Under Warren G. Harding (1921 -- 1923) and Calvin Coolidge (1923 -- 1929), tariffs reached new highs, income taxes fell for wealthy citizens, and the Supreme Court upset progressive measures, specifically the minimum wage and federal child labor laws.  They shared isolationist inclinations in foreign policy, and they advocated pacifist policies.  The United States began to limit immigration via the National Origins Act, which Congress enacted in 1924.  The Volstead Act of 1919, which enforced the 18th Amendment, prohibited the manufacture and distribution of alcoholic beverages.  Crime syndicates entered the liquor business; rival gangs and networks of speakeasies induced a crime wave.  By the end of the 1920's, prohibition was discredited, and it was repealed in 1933.

The second event to discourage the individual was the Great Depression.  The collapse of the stock market on 24 October 1929 did not cause the Depression; rather, the crash and the depression sprang from the same cause: easy credit.  In the 1920's, stock prices climbed to unpresedented heights.  Easy credit allowed speculators to buy stock on margin.  If the price of the stock increased, the purchaser made money; if the price fell, the purchaser had to find the money elsewhere to pay off the loan.  Furthermore, an unequal distribution of income meant that workers and farmers lacked money to purchase outright durable goods.  Easy credit left them a debt burden they could not pay.

The effects of the Great Depression were conspicuous.  Impoverished individuals, displaying "Hoover flags" (empty pockets) and sleeping in "Hoover blankets" (newspapers), lived in shanties that had appeared suddenly in parks or on the outskirts of town.  Those who were lucky to have jobs accepted pay cuts.  In the Great Plains, overstrained soil and severe drought created a dust bowl that turned agricultural families into migrant workers.  Familial life changed drastically.  Unemployed breadwinners experienced psychological depression; housewives struggled to make ends meet; young adults relinquished career plans and sought whatever work that was available.  Marriage and birth rates fell, and divorce rates rose.

Under those circumstances Franklin Delano Roosevelt defeated Herbert Hoover in 1932.  Roosevelt was a progressive who had supported Woodrow Wilson.  Using the United States' experience during World War I as a model, Roosevelt and his advisers pursued a policy of active governmental intervention in the economy, a policy known as the New Deal.  The creation of the National Recovery Administration (NRA) was an attempt to restore proseperity by requiring leaders in government, labor and industry to develop regulations for each industry.  The Supreme Court, in 1935, ruled the NRA unconstitutional.  It was superseded by other efforts, including the establishment of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the passage of the Social Security Act (1935) and the National Labor Relations Act (1935).  Although the New Deal provided some reforms that perhaps averted social revolution, it did not solve the unemployment crisis.  Only World War II (1939 -- 1945) and the subsequent growth of armament industries brought American workers back to full employment.

The third event began when Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933.  Soon thereafter Hitler met secretly with Germany's leading generals, revealing to them his desire to create living space in the east.  Between 1933 and 1939, Europeans watched as he rebuilt Germany into a military powerhouse.  Hitler believed military power was an absolute prerequisite for the creation of a German racial empire that would dominate Europe for generations to come.

The Nazis lost the war but only after tremendous destruction, sacrifices and costs.  Much of European civilization, which had dominated the world at the start of the twentieth century, lay in ruins.  Europeans now watched at mid-century as two new superpowers created by their two world wars took control of their destinies.  Even before the last battles had been fought, the United States and the Soviet Union had arrived at different visions of postwar Europe.  Those differences led to a potentially more destructive conflict: the Cold War.

Image

Because image is among the most frequently used and poorly understood terms in poetic theory, it is necessary to recount the term's meaning and use at various points in the history of Western poetics.  Image has a minor role in classical rhetorical theory in which relative notions such as figure and trope are the dominant terms.  Under the influence of empiricism, English critics in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries deemed image important.  Thomas Hobbes and John Locke use the term in their accounts of sensation, perception, memory, imagination and language--developing a theory of consciousness as a system of receiving, storing and retrieving mental pictures.  Neoclassical poets used images to control nature by describing and decorating scenes.  Reacting to the ornamental images of eighteenth-century poetry, romantic poets regarded images as symbols and the poetic process as an expressive rather than a mimetic endeavor.  Modernist poetics combined the neoclassical and romantic concepts of the image.  According to Ezra Pound, concrete and sensuous diction creates a matrix of imagery from which meaning emerges.

Though image connotes something seen, a poetic image is a word or sequence of words that refers to any sensory experience.  The experience may be visual (sight), auditory (hearing), olfactory (smell), gustatory (taste), tactile (touch), kinesthetic (movement), or organic (physiology).  Such categories are preliminary to the comprehension of contemporary approaches to imagery, for they define the nature of the materials.

Imagery

The most prevalent figures of speech currently in currency are allegory, metaphor, metonymy, personification, simile and synecdoche.  Each is a device through which one thing is said (analogue or vehicle) while something else is meant (subject or tenor).  Either the analogue, the subject, or both may involve imagery.  The related things may each be images or emotions or concepts; the subject may be an image and the analogue an emotion or concept; the analogue may be an image and the subject an emotion or concept.

Symbolic imagery corresponds to figurative imagery, for one cannot discuss imagery at length without gliding into symbolism.  With respect to symbolic imagery, the essential question is how patterns of imagery--whether literal, figurative or both--in a work reveal facts about the poem or the poet.  The assumption is that a poet will organize images by reason of their symbolic kinships.  The recurrent images of light and dark in Romeo and Juliet, of disease in Hamlet, or of animals in King Lear, though they may not be evident, continually condition the audience's response to the play.

Patterns of imagery may appear within the work itself, among literary works (myth), or in both the work and the myth.  It is not beyond reason that a cluster of images in a particular work is in other works.  An image is the myth of the individual, and a myth is the image of humanity.  In other words, the action of which a poem is symbolic often resembles a larger ritualistic pattern--feasting, initiating, primping, protecting, purifying, returning, et cetera--though the poet may express it in a personal way.

Imagery in poetry, therefore, has the following uses.  It may serve as a device for externalizing and making clear the speaker's thoughts and emotions.  Imagery may be where the speaker confronts and interacts with an environment or where the environment confronts and interacts with the speaker.  It may serve to dispose the audience either favorably or unfavorably toward the various elements in the poem.  Imagery may arouse and guide the audience's expectations.  And it may serve to direct the audience's attention to symbolism, to the poem's inner meaning(s).

Imagism (1909 -- 1917)

Imagism was a school of poetry that formed around the Bergsonian philosopher T. E. Hulme who founded a club that began to meet regularly in London in 1909.  Hulme regarded the language of poetry as visual and concrete and the image as the essence of poetry.  The group included Richard Aldington (English), Hilda Doolittle (American), John Gould Fletcher (American), D. H. Lawrence (English), and Ezra Pound (American).  They issued manifestos, wrote essays, and created poems that embodied their theories.

Imagism became a movement through the efforts of Pound.  He coined imagiste when he suggested revisions to Doolittle's poem "Hermes of the Ways" (1912) and wrote "H. D. Imagiste" at the bottom of the page.  In Novemeber 1912 Imagiste appeared in print for the first time when Pound published Hulme's "Complete Poetical Works" (five short poems) as an appendix to his Ripostes.  In the March 1913 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, F. S. Flint, quoting an anonymous "imagiste" (Pound), lists these characteristics of the movement: "1. Direct treatment of the 'thing,' whether subjective or objective.  2. To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation.  3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome."¹  In the same issue, Pound defines the poetic image as "that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time."²  Harriet Monroe included in the April issue of Poetry perhaps the finest of the imagist poems, Pound's "In a Station of the Metro":
     The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
     Petals on a wet, black bough.³
His straightforward presentation renders the poem as an experience, and his verbal economy prevents emotional diffuseness.  By breaking the pentameter, Pound creates a rhythmic variety and precision unique to the particular aesthetic presentation.

The climax of the movement was in the spring of 1914, when Pound published an anthology of verse, Des Imagistes, which included poems by Aldington, H. D., Flint, James Joyce, Amy Lowell, and William Carlos Williams.  Thereafter Lowell assumed leadership of the movement and published the anthologies Some Imagist Poets (1915, 1916, 1917).  Pound repudiated "Amygism," declaring it violated the second imagist principle, and he aligned himself with vorticism.  By 1917 Lowell herself felt that the movement had reached its end.

Imagism was a reaction against the abstract and verbose language into which much of the poetry of the nineteenth century had declined.  As a movement it paralleled the romantic reaction a century earlier against the conventional diction of neoclassicism.  But imagism has more complex associations.  Its preoccupation with technique and with surfaces, light and color linked it with impressionism.  Another nineteenth-century influence was the French tradition of symbolisme, which the word imagiste echoed.  And Pound's concept of presentation recalls Henry James' insistence that a writer should show rather than tell.

The principles of imagism were to some extent a set of instructions to improve the craft of writing, and they influenced the formalist poetics of T. S. Eliot, John Crowe Ransom, and I. A. Richards.  Recent critics have considered imagism as an attempt to create an individual poem which, unlike a symbolic or allegoric poem, intensifies its objective reality rather than expressing the poet's subjective experience.  Regardless, the primary point about the influence of imagism is that it became the basis for modern poetic procedure.

Pound

The early twentieth century was a time of immense industrial expansion in the United States, and many poets found the conditions for creating poetry unfavorable in a culture focused on consumerism.  Ezra Pound composed much of his poetry as an expatriate in Europe, which he deemed more conducive to art.  Born in Hailey, Idaho, he attended the University of Pennsylvania for graduate study in romance languages.  He earned an M.A. in 1906, spent the summer abroad, and returned for a fellowship for another year of study.  In 1908 he again went abroad and became a permanent expatriate.

In 1909, in London, Pound joined Hulme's Poet's Club, and he became the polemicist for imagism.  By 1912 Pound was the author of seven volumes which identified him as a distinct poetic personality who combined fin-de-siecle aesthetics with astute originality.  When Monroe in 1912 issued from Chicago the prospectus for her new magazine, Poetry, Pound proposed himself as its foreign correspondent.  He was an unselfish and persistent champion of unknown and experimental artists whom he approved--H. D., Joyce and Eliot, among others.  Eliot candidly acknowledged the value of Pound's assistance in the final revision of The Waste Land.  Both poets became early leaders in restoring to poetry the use of literary reference as an imaginative instrument.  Such figures of speech assume that the poet and audience share a common cultural inheritance.  Both Pound and Eliot required of their audience a familiarity with the classics, with the productions of the Italian and English Renaissance, and with genres of continental literature.  After The Waste Land (1922), Eliot's poetry became relatively less abstruse, whereas Pound's poetry continued to be recondite.

Pound's search for new poetic techniques led him from imagism to vorticism.  Founded by the writer and artist Wyndam Lewis in 1914, the movement was a reaction to the romantic theories of futurism.  The stimulus to the formation of vorticism was the publication in The Observer (7 June 1914) of the "Vital English Art Futurist Manifesto," in which the Italian futurist leader Filippo Marinetti claims that certain English avant-garde artists, including Lewis and his colleagues, are essentially affiliates of the Italian futurist movement.  Lewis responded with the first issue of Blast: Review of the Great English Vortex (20 June 1914, issued 2 July 1914), in which he blasts and blesses various places, things and people.  The vague manifesto--signed by Aldington, Pound, Lewis and eight other artists--contains statements of belief, such as the importance of the primitive in modern art and the superiority of northern culture over southern culture.

Although presented by Lewis as a distinctive national development, vorticism combines the geometrical fragmentation of cubism with futuristic imagery to depict the dynamism of the modern world.  The strong structure of cubist paintings impressed him, but Lewis thought they lacked vigor.  And he criticized the futurists' emphasis on blurry images to suggest speed.  Vorticism attempted to combine the best elements of both movements: the angularities in cubist compositions and the energy in futurist works.  Although futurist and vorticist paintings may seem similar, there were important philosophical differences between the movements.  Whereas in futurist compositions the machine serves as a melodramatic symbol of the modern world, it is not a central part of vorticist imagery.  Lewis regarded the mechanical metropolis as a severe place that dehumanized its dwellers.  Thus vorticist works exhibit the impersonal harshness of the twentieth century.  Furthermore, because speed did not interest the vorticists, their paintings are quieter than futurist paintings.

Imagistic poems lacked energy, according to Pound, and he coined vorticism to suggest the greater energy of the vorticist image.  In the inaugural issue of Blast, he declares that a "vortex is the point of maximum energy."⁴  To move beyond static representations, vorticist painters must use colors and vorticist poets must use imagery in unique ways, as H. D. does in "Oread":
     Whirl up, sea--
     whirl your pointed pines,
     splash your great pines
     on our rocks,
     hurl your green over us,
     cover us with your pools of fir.⁵
The poem is not a picture but a dynamo.  Vorticism's ambition to create form that is still yet moving was paradoxical, and it became central to modern poetics.

Vorticism did not survive the outbreak of World War I.  The devastation caused by the war deepened Pound's disillusion with the West, specifically the United States and Great Britain.  His bitterness is apparent in the satirical collection Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: Life and Contacts (1920), which focuses on the experiences of a poet.  It would be easy to equate the speaker to Pound, but the tonal indifference in Mauberley as a whole complicates that equation.  However, the first poem--"E. P. Ode Pour L'Election de son Sepulchre" ("E. P. Ode on the Choice of His Tomb")--which frames the collection, is undoubtedly personal.

The ode is a statement of farewell to London.  The technique is both traditional (He employs rhythm, capitals, end rhyme, quatrains, and seventeenth-century wit.) and original (He incorporates allusions, bilingualism, free verse, and anaphora.).  Pound's primary concern was poetry; he was, in the strictest sense, an aesthetician.  In the ode the speaker is reflecting, in third person, on a life devoted to the cultivation of artistic fastidiousness.  He no longer is attempting to revive poetry, nor is he observing beauty in the world.  The speaker is appraising his microcosm in an effort to determine its significance.

     For three years, out of key with his time,
     He strove to resuscitate the dead art
     Of poetry; to maintain "the sublime"
     In the old sense.  Wrong from the start--

     No, hardly, but seeing he had been born
     In a half savage country, out of date;
     Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn;
     Capaneus; trout for factitious bait;

     [For we know all the things that in Troy]⁶
     Caught in the unstopped ear;
     Giving the rocks small lee-way
     The chopped seas held him, therefore, that year.

     His true Penelope was Flaubert,
     He fished by obstinate isles;
     Observed the elegance of Circe's hair
     Rather than the mottoes on sun-dials.

     Unaffected by "the march of events,"
     He passed from men's memory in [the thirty-first year
     Of his age]; the case presents
     No adjunct to the Muses' diadem.

     II

     The age demanded an image
     Of its accelerated grimace,
     Something for the modern stage,
     Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;

     Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries
     Of the inward gaze;
     Better mendacities
     Than the classics in paraphrase!

     The "age demanded" chiefly a mould in plaster,
     Made with no loss of time,
     A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster
     Or the "sculpture" of rhyme.

     II

     The tea-rose tea-grown, etc.
     Supplants the mousseline of Cos,
     The pianola "replaces"
     Sappho's barbitos.

     Christ follows Dionysus,
     Phallic and ambrosial
     Made way for macerations;
     Caliban casts out Ariel.

     All things are a flowing,
     Sage Heracleitus says;
     But a tawdry cheapness
     Shall outlast our days.

     Even the Christian beauty
     Defects--after Samothrace;
     We see [the beautiful]
     Decreed in the market place.

     Faun's flesh is not to us,
     Nor the saint's vision.
     We have the press for wafer;
     Franchise for circumcision.

     All men, in law, are equals.
     Free of Pisistratus,
     We choose a knave or an eunuch
     To rule over us.

     O bright Apollo.
     [Which man, which hero, which god,]
     What god, man, or hero
     Shall I place a tin wreath upon!

     IV

     These fought in any case,
     and some believing,
                                [for the sake of home], in any case ...
     Some quick to arm,
     some for adventure,
     some from fear of weakness,
     some from fear of censure,
     some for love of slaughter, in imagination,
     learning later ...
     some in fear, learning love of slaughter;

     Died some, [for country],
                                  non "dulce" non "et decor" ...
     walked eye-deep in hell
     believing in old men's lies, then unbelieving
     came home, home to a lie,
     home to many deceits,
     home to old lies and new infamy;
     ursury age-old and age-thick
     and liars in public places.

     Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
     Young blood and high blood,
     fair cheeks, and fine bodies;

     fortitude as never before

     frankness as never before,
     disillusions as never told in the old days,
     hysterias, trench confessions,
     laughter out of dead bellies.

     V

     There died a myriad,
     And of the best, among them,
     For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
     For a botched civilization,

     Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
     Quick eyes gone under earth's lid,

     For two gross of broken statues,
     For a few thousand battered books.⁷

The irony of the first line progressively builds: "out of key with his time" is delineated throughout the composition via precise rhythms that seem loose.  The variations reflect changes in mood and attitude.  Similar to the seventeenth-century poets, Pound is simultaneously serious and playful, savage and delicate.  For example, the speaker had attempted to civilize the United States ("a half savage country") by exposing it to scholarly poetry, but he had labored to no avail.  The reference to Homer ("For we know all the things that in Troy") suggests his romantic addiction to the classics.  But thoughout his romantic diversions, the speaker remained true to his art, true to precision as represented by Gustave Flaubert.  "He fished by obstinate isles" suggests the speaker's search of beauty in various periods and cultures: classical, Italian, Provencal, Chinese, et cetera.  What has been the effect of his devotion to aesthetic discrimination and technical perfection?  The speaker concludes that the poet's career yielded "No adjunct to the Muses' diadem."

The first canto is a representative sensibility of a poet who began his journey with Nineties' eagerness, survived the reign of Edward VII (1901 -- 1910), watched his friends disappear in the war, and realizes that the past holds more for him than the future.  The second and third cantos introduce the modern world of mass production and despondency, a world that has destroyed traditions and is oppressive.  The fourth and fifth cantos impart the impact of the war on decorum.  The war disrupts the form of the poem, which symbolizes the deterioration of Western culture.

In "Yeux Glauques" ("Grey Eyes"), the speaker transports the audience to the nineties, to the period of prosperity and peace before the war.  The audience can sense the changes in attitude that had become conspicuous in the final decade of the nineteenth century.  William Ewart Gladstone and John Ruskin represent Victorian morality; Algernon Charles Swinburne and Dante Gabriel Rossetti represent Victorial immorality.  In "Siena Mi fe'; Disfecemi Maremma" ("Siena Made Me; Maremma Undid Me"), the speaker introduces Ernest Dowson, a member of The Rhymers' Club founded by W. B. Yeats and Ernest Rhys.  Dowson also was a member of the tragic generation, poets who died prematurely from intemperance.  Arnold Bennett offers advice in "Mr. Nixon," the theme of which is success in modern letters.  "XII" begins with an allusion.  The speaker is imagining elegant patronage, a crown of laurels from a stylish dilettante, Lady Valentine.  His preoccupation with aestheticism, of discerning "the elegance of Circe's hair" instead of "the mottoes on sun-dials," gains tragic significance in the first and second cantos of "Mauberley."  The economical diction contributes to the impersonal tone, yet the cantos are poignantly personal.  The theme of the third canto, "The Age Demanded," is similar to the aforementioned cantos.  The artist absorbed in aesthetic contemplation is unfit for survival in the modern world, in Lady Valentine's world.

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is foremost a summary of an artist's life.  It also is a representation of modern culture: the absence of direction, the lack of a predominant idiom, the uncongeniality of the modern world to artists, and the poet's dubious status.  Mauberley reveals the exhaustion of the romantic tradition; emotional detachment is achieved via technical precision.

After the publication of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Pound, believing that capitalism marginalized poets, sought countries that he believed were more hospitable and departed for Paris, France, and thence to Rapallo, Italy, where he resumed his life-long epic, The Cantos.  Pound's discovery of the work of the American Orientalist Ernest Fenollosa provided the catalyst for The Cantos.  He had read Fenollosa's lecture notes on the nature of Chinese pictograms in 1914, had published translations of Chinese poems based on Fenollosa's work as Cathay in 1915, and had edited the notes into an essay which he published in 1920.

In An Essay on the Chinese Written Character, Fenollosa states that the characters of the Chinese alphabet are, in greater or lesser degreee, images or visual representations of the things they signify.  Thus the ideogram, or pictogram, for East is a synthesis of the characters, or ideograms, for sun and tree: the sun in the trees.  Whereas in Western languages graphemes denote sounds which refer to objects purely by arbitrary convention, in Chinese abstract concepts arise not out of abstract symbols but out of concrete particulars and the immediacy of experience.  Fenollosa only contrasted Chinese and Western modes of thought; it remained for Pound to formulate the pictogram as a poetic principle and to develop it into a poetic method.

Pound hoped his ideogrammic method would help modernist poets escape the traps of late-Victorian vagueness, metaphor and sentimentality and avoid the loss of immediacy created by the syntax of discursive, representational speech.  The essence of the method is juxtaposition, without conjunctions, of distinct objects or events to evoke a matrix of new meaning.  The poet carefully selects and combines separate items so that the audience can organize the elements into a coherent pattern.  The ideogrammic method thereby imitates perception itself.  And in that respect, it is a mimetic strategy, for ideograms are motivational signs.  Futhermore, poets are able to shift from static description, for symbols represent not objects but relations, motion, energy and action.  Thus poetry gains an immediacy of presentational form absent in the discursive, descriptive, rationalist nature of Wesern prose.

Pound actually misunderstood part of Fenollosa's observations, and Fenollosa himself misunderstood part of Chinese.  Only 10% of its characters are pictographic; the majority of them are phonetic.  Nevertheless, Fenollosa's essay was the impetus Pound needed to create a wholly new poetics, arguably a method which became more infuential than any other in the twentieth century.

Pound organized his modern epic not via narrative but via the ideogrammic method.  He published The Cantos in segments throughout his life, and the posthumous collection (1972) ends with Canto 120.  The ideogrammic method, historical scope, mythological references, and erudite sources of The Cantos demand much from the audience.  Despite the massive egotism of the venture, the poem is an impressive effort to resolve oppositional attributes, principles and tendencies: psychologically, reason with instinct, Apollonian control with Dionysian energy, archetypal masculine with archetypal feminine, carnality with spirituality; philosophically, Greek Neoplatonism with Confucianism; economically, governmental regulation with individual freedom; and historically, violence with peace.  In the following ideogram from the second canto, the union of the nymph Tyro with the god Poseidon presents a brief realization of the sexual and metaphysical energy inherent in natural and human activity:
     And by the beach-run, Tyro,
                  Twisted arms of the sea-god,
     Lithe sinews of water gripping her, cross-hold
     And the blue-grey glass of the wave tents them,
     Glare azure of water, cold-welter, close cover.  (23 -- 27)⁸
The underlying romantic premises become more explicit in the course of the poem.  Pound insists that the individual submit to the Tao and find his/her humble place within nature, that healthy economics extend the Tao into social organization, and that art seek to express such truths.

Final obstacles for the audience include Pound's vehement distrust of capitalism, his anti-Semitism, and his allegiance to social credit.  in 1933 he met Italy's fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, who praised his poetry.  Pound became an active supporter of fascism, promoting it on radio broadcasts to Great Britain and the United States during World War II.  When Allied troops occupied Italy near the end of the war, he was imprisoned for weeks in an open-air cage.  After Pound was transferred to a medical tent, he wrote the Pisan Cantos (1948), which describes the prison, its environment, and its inhabitants.  After the war Pound was taken to Washington, D.C., to be tried for treason.  But he was declared legally insane and was committed to St. Elizabeth's Hospital for the criminally insane, where he continued to write and to receive visitors.  In 1949 the Pisan Cantos won the first annual Library of Congress Bollingen Award for Poetry.  Stongly defended by several prominent writers--including Robert Frost, Archibald MacLeish, and Ernest Hemingway--Pound was released from the hospital in 1958.  He returned to Italy and spent his final years in self-imposed literary silence, leaving The Cantos incomplete.

Conclusion

The literary innovations at the turn of the century had been primarily the province of a small group of avant-garde artists and critics.  That group expanded in quantity and scope as more artists and critics began to connect intimately those ideas with their environments.

Prior to the United States' entance into the war in 1917, Robert Frost published his first two collections: A Boy's Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914).  Edwin Arlington Robinson ensured his reputation with The Man Against the Sky (1916) and Merlin (1917), the first of his Arthurian poems.  And Edna St. Vincent Millay published, in the same year of her college graduation, Renascence and Other Poems (1917).  Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters, and Carl Sandburg all startled the country with their Midwestern voices and images.  On the West Coast, Robinson Jeffers found a suitable subject but not his mature voice in California (1916).

With respect to fiction, its growth in popularity was more congruent with its past.  Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome (1911) is a short naturalistic masterpiece that had an immediate effect.  The successive appearance of The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914), and The "Genius" (1915) established Theodore Dreiser as the consummate naturalist of his generation.  Willa Cather found a congenial subject in the plains of Nebraska (O Pioneers!, 1913) and later in the deserts of the Southwest (Death Comes for the Archbishop, 1927).  Contemporary moralists regarded David Graham Phillips' posthumous Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise (1917) and James Branch Cabell's Jurgen (1919) as outrageous.  Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919) and Wharton's The Age of Innocence (1920) closed a decade in which realism tempered with naturalism confirmed the degradation of the individual and prepared the way for F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.

To most of the artists of the 1920's, the totality and horror of the war and the procedure of mass consumerism were conclusive demonstrations of mechanistic determinism.  Considering they were writing during a period of extreme extravagance, political corruption, and social decadence, Gertrude Stein's comment to Hemingway--"You are all a lost generation"--was appropriate.  Some of the more important literary manifestations of that mood are Fitgerald's The Beautiful and Damned (1922) and The Great Gatsby (1925) and Millay's The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems (1923), all of which serve as remembrances of the roaring twenties and the age of the flapper.  Hemingway used Stein's comment as an epigraph for The Sun Also Rises (1926), which is a depiction of a desperate expatriate society in Europe.

But the "lost generation" was not lost to literature, for they created, between 1919 and 1929, a disproportionate share of the best American literature of the twentieth century.  And they responded to their disenchantment in different ways.  The writers who had expatriated themselves and resided in the literary colonies of London, Paris or Rome absorbed European aesthetics into their works and promoted those influences at home.  Naturally the war was a vital subject.  Personal experience animates e. e. cummings' The Enormous Room (1922), in which he combines in different proportions the spiritual, physical and emotional consequences of the war.  The Waste Land (1922), a dramatic statement of postwar spiritual and moral collapse, furthered T. S. Eliot's literary status.  William Faulkner's first novel, Soldier's Pay (1926), was a false start, but he gained stature with Satoris (1929), The Sound and the Fury (1929), and As I Lay Dying (1930).  Other novelists focused on the flaws in American society.  In Main Street (1920) and Babbit (1922), Sinclair Lewis satirizes small-town mentality and bourgeois success, and in Manhattan Transfer (1925), John Dos Passos explores the somber ends of a materialistic culture.

Sigmund Freud's speculation about unconscious motives and Carl Jung's theory of universal archetypes affected some writers.  Robinson's poetic psychological exploration of personality was augmented especially by Eugene O'Neill's dramatic Freudianism.  Constantly experimenting with form, he emphasized a content of psychological analysis and symbolic representation of character.  Between 1920 and 1928, O'Neill developed his distinctive spiritual symbolism in the plays Beyond the Horizon (1920), The Emperor Jones (1920), Anna Christie (1921), The Hairy Ape (1922), Desire Under the Elms (1924), and Strange Interlude (1928).  Freudian images are in the poems of Jeffers, beginning with Tamar and Other Poems (1924) and Roan Stallion, Tamar, and Other Poems (1925), and Freudianism is in the latter novels of Faulkner, beginning with The Sound and the Fury.  In the same Year, 1929, another southerner, Thomas Wolfe, published Look Homeward, Angel, the first in a succession of novels that focus on a spiritually homeless generation's search for a sense of harmony in a world that has become too vast, too complex, and too impersonal.

The revolution in poetry, fiction and drama coincided with a general intellectual expansion that included the vigorous criticism of James G. Huneker, Paul Elmer More, Irving Babbitt, Joel E. Spingarn, H. L. Mencken, and Van Wyck Brooks.  Although Mencken had begun his crusade before 1910, he reached the pinnacle of his effectiveness as a satirist after 1924 as editor of The American Mercury.  Through the Mercury Mencken continually waged war on popular culture, eloquently attacking the self-appointed defenders of official decency and advocating such supposed immoral authors as Dreiser, Cabell and Anderson.

Economic distress and ideological unrest during the Great Depression prompted a general reappraisal of American values, and many writers discovered the depths of their loyalty to traditional American idealism.  Archibald MacLeish returned to the United States, published New Found Land (1930) and Conquistador (1932), and supported President Roosevelt's New Deal.  Sandburg, who had been a campaigner for reform with the Social Democrats, wrote affectionately about The People, Yes (1936) and devoted much of his spare time to the completion of Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (1939).  Leftist sympathies emerged in mainstream literature: Dos Passos' trilogy U.S.A. (1930 -- 1936) and Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940).

This is the only period in the United States distinguished by a stong presence of proletarian literature.  Money lost its glamour except in the escapist worlds of popular fiction and film; serious writers sermonized about the plight of the poor and the isolation of the rich.  Many writers, forced to decide between leftist and rightist extremes, chose the left in a time when Marxist propaganda was prevalent.  Edward Dahlberg's Bottom Dogs (1929) and Michael Gold's Jews Without Money (1930) served as early models for later proletarian novels about immigrant poverty.  John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is a record of the unprecedented sufferings of formerly independent farm families, and Richard Wright's Native Son (1940) is a powerful evocation of African-American frustration and anger.

American involvement in World War II was gradual before Pearl Harbor but rapid afterward.  Men and women in the armed services, like James Jones and Norman Mailer, or engaged in defense work, like Harriet Arnow, found the material for major works which they published after the end of hostilities.  Hemingway, Steinbeck, Erskine Caldwell, John Hersey, and other established writers served their country as war correspondents.  Writers on the home front scripted patriotic movies and topical plays.  Eliot's Little Gidding (1942), based on his experience as a block warden during London air raids, provided a capstone to his eminent career.  Saul Bellow, who would have an equally eminent career, published his first novel, Dangling Man, in 1944.  In it Joseph, the protagonist, who is awaiting his draft notice, asks, "How should a good man live; what might he do?"⁹  The existential thrust of that "how" is similar to the "why" posed in Little Gidding.

Between 1912 and 1945, American poetry generally became more precise with respect to imagery, more concise with respect to diction, less formal with respect to structure and rhythm, more subtle with respect to symbolism, more dependent on allusions, and more difficult to comprehend.  Ezra Pound and the imagists found inspiration in ancient Chinese and Japanese forms, the classics, the troubadour poets, the Italian Renaissance, and the French symbolists.  Eliot also found inspiration in philosophy, religion, mysticism and mythology, and he revived interest in the Elizabethan poets and dramatists and the Jacobean metaphysical poets.  The intense metaphysical images--the features of which are introspection, realism and irony--although they required the mediation of the intellect for complete comprehension, expanded the symbolic range of poetry, allowing the modernists to represent abstractly the emotional significance of their ideas.  The influence of Pound and Eliot's aesthetics was great.  Hilda Doolittle, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren to some extent adopted their aesthetics.  But not all poets followed Pound or Eliot into the more extreme recesses of their theories and practices.  Robinson Jeffers focused on bleakly naturalistic narratives, and Yvor Winters shifted from imagistic free verse to reasonable, formal poetry.  And the African-American poets Jean Toomer, Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen responded to the atmosphere of openness with their own renaissance.

In contrast to romanticism, modernism postulated a disjunction between art and life.  One did not reveal meaning; one made meaning.  Composition was itself the cognitive act.  Command of the medium disclosed the organic form of perception, which was linked not to the operations of nature but to the internal relations of its structure.  But imagism and symbolism--the two most influential and persistent strains within modernist poetry--represent different approaches to the organic form of perception.  As the romantic synthesis of subject and object through the agency of Spirit became more difficult to maintain, the focus of perception destabilized.  Symbolism--originating from Edgar Allan Poe and developing through Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarme, and Paul Verlaine--became a technique of subtly expressing emotion and mood via turning inward on subjective consciousness and absorbing impressions of the external world.  Imagism was an alternative to symbolism.  Both are modernist rather than romantic because modernism validates subject (symbolism) and object (imagism) in the authority of the artwork rather than of Spirit.  But whereas symbolism involves the evocativeness of metaphor and the imprecision of music, imagism involves a precise delineation of image and a painterly disposition of elements.
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     ¹F. S. Flint, "Imagisme," Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, March 1913, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse/1/6#!/20569729/1 (1 April 2014).
     ²Ezra Pound, "A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste," Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, March 1913, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse/1/6#!/20569729/2 (1 April 2014).
     ³Ezra Pound, "In a Station of the Metro," Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, April 1913, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse/2/1#!/20569747 (1 April 2014).
     ⁴Ezra Pound, "Vortex," Blast: Review of the Great English Vortex, 15 February 2010, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/essay/238700 (1 April 2014).
     ⁵Ibid.
     ⁶I realize my translations detract from Pound's technique, but my goal is to make the poem easier to comprehend.
     ⁷Ezra Pound, Selected Poems (New York: New Directions, 1957) 61-64.
     ⁸Ibid., 99.
     ⁹Saul Bellow, Dangling Man (New York: Meridian, 1964) 39.