Modernism in American Poetry II 3301-LA2230

Close readings of selected poems by Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, HD and Gertrude Stein, with Frost taking up a third of the course. We will focus on his shorter lyrics and his use of allegory and anthropomorphism. When Frost describes nature, does he also describe human nature? Is his vision of the world, and of human history, essentially tragic? Or nihilistic? How should his commitment to traditional poetic forms be assessed in the context of the radical experiments of other Modernist poets, for instance Ezra Pound or Gertrude Stein? Or Wallace Stevens, another New England poet, whose work differs so radically from Frost's, and indeed from that of all of his contemporaries? Discussing Stevens' poems, we will focus on his privileging of the imagination and of the perceptive faculties of the mind over all other concerns. The possibility of poetry becoming a new faith in an age of fading religious belief was attractive to Stevens, just as it was to Pound. His celebration of the surfaces of things becomes especially intriguing in this context, as does his skilful play with words. Stevens' work shows that poetry is often at its best when it concerns itself with itself, and not with the putative world that might exist outside of or beyond a given poem. Analyzing Stevens' poems is the greatest intellectual challenge of this course. The question: "What is poetry?" will return with Marianne Moore's ars poetica poem, in which "imaginary gardens" are inhabited by "real toads" - this paradox will lead to a discussion of the imagination as an organizing principle in representations of the outside world. This in turn will lead to an attempt at reading Gertrude Stein's "Stanzas in Meditation" and the possible methods that can be used to make sense of parts of this poem. The poems by Mina Loy and HD raise issues familiar from feminist writing, and that is the approach we will take in analyzing them.