EARLY MODERNS AND GENTEEL POETS

After the Civil War, there was a yearning of culture. They tried to establish a set of ideas of what poetry should be, that is beautiful, elevating, refined, traditional and ideal.

Poetry should not be vulgar, realistic. The role of poetry was to maintain the spiritual side of life. If it were out of touch with American realities, it was in touch with what America needed. By 1900, the poetry of Genteel tradition was easily perceived to be formally and morally conventional and deliberative from past poetry. For this reason, it was easy to write despite its careful and published diction and versification. For subject matter, Genteel Poetry articulated generalized attitudes and its romantic spiritual elevation. It did not deal with experience. That is with the characters, actions with society and politics and with the contemporary milieu. The conventions dominating English and American poetry developed in the romantic period. They had been in touch with what thinking man and woman concede as reality. But as the sense of reality changed, this contributed to the gradual transformation of the idea of poetry. Poetry was to give release, refreshment, uplift. It was no longer expected to reflect the felt realities that outside poetry dealt with, but a higher reality instead. 

THE BEGINNING OF THE MODERN MOVEMENT

Different as they were from each other, all the avant-garde poets were responded to historical situation. They were reacting against the poetry of the Genteel Tradition. American poetry from roughly 1890 to 1912 played a large part in bringing on the modernist revolution. American poets in their revolt against the genteel mode became the center of an international modern movement.

 The representatives of this movement are Carl Sandburg, Edwin Arlington Robinson, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost and Edgar Masters.

They sought to create a new art. They reached out the concrete subject matter. Poetry would present character, events, objects and these would be realistically treated  closed, particularized and contemporary. Some poets added that they would be American. In reaction against the timeless spiritual truths of the Genteel Poetry, the new poets wrote with a militant awareness, they were so aware of time, place, history. Against the late Victorian lyric and generalization, they sought concrete instances. Instead of classical or medieval subjects, they turned to contemporary American scenes. The use of such material is forward not only a broke in the recent past but gave them relatively unexploited setting and imagery. They reacted strongly against the conventions of poeticized treatment. 

1890-1912, 1912-1922: HIGH MODERNIST MOVEMENT

The situation of avant-garde changed. Most poets lived in isolation. They were published and criticized. The American poets believed that Americans were enjoying a poetic renaissance. In the atmosphere of bold and confidential revolution, they were even more hungry of new forms and subjects. They borrowed from where ever they could: the prose fiction ,French symbolists, oriental poetry, psychological theory, painters, sculptures, jazz, movies in short they freed poetry.

In 1912, Harriet Monroe sent out "The Poetry Magazine" from Chicago. In 1914, an imagist anthology "Des Imagist" was published. Between 1912-1917 poets like T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound published their first books. And  the period ended in 1922.

"New Critic Outlook" trend becomes very popular between 1922- 1945. T. S. Eliot and his poems become very popular in this period. 

THE NEW POETRY IN AMERICA

1-Widening of the Subject Matter: Many historians have characterized the period  between the two world wars as the United States' traumatic "coming of age," despite the fact that U.S. direct involvement was relatively brief ( 1917-1918) and its casualties many fewer than those of its European allies and foes.

 One of the greatest achievements of the decade was an immense widening of the range of experience that could be presented by 1922. It was possible to treat almost any subject from any point of view. The immediate cause of these treatments lies in the reaction of poets to their late Victorian predecessors. Profound changes in the conditions of human life were occurring: industrialization, urbanization and technological innovations, etc. New facts and theories were taking position of the intellectual world. Darwin, Freud, Marx, Nietzsche and so on had tremendous influence on people's intellectual and emotional lives. The outcome of this was building up of a new specifically modern awareness. New topics and ways of thinking, new emotions and new reality that had to be expressed in poetry.

The dominant tendency of the late Victorian poets was to write lyrics of personal feelings and reflection. The subject matter of the poem would be conventionally poetic or they would be poeticized. The poem would highlight the beauty, romance, mystery strangeness, charm, magic, tenderness, etc...

New Poets of U.S. rejected all of these. Their subjects were un-anti-romantic.

2-Formal Experiment: Not only supreme feelings  but also every kind of emotions belonging to man could be the subject matter of poetry. This was an age of literally experiment. Formal expression was part of the  definition of avant-garde. The poets believed that since individual is unique, his expression requires its unique form. Many modern artists were eager to kill the past, habits, logic, grammar, language and even consciousness itself. Emily Dickinson is accepted as the pioneer of modernism due to her style in her time.

3-Spoken Language: The afford to devise a more colloquial way of speaking was "part of the general drift of poetry towards realism." The impulse came closer to the actual life. Poetry was to adopt the vocabulary syntax and rhythm of contemporary speech. It should sound almost like talk. American poets intended to imitate not just speech but American speech. To adopt, it involved on assertion that poetry could be written just as well out of the American language as the English. Also the American idiom offered itself as a relatively fresh one for poetry. One that has not yet been fully exploited, one that will sound new in the ear.

4-Discontinous Composition: It is the absence of transition for the discontinuous poem does not evolve gradually from part to part but places separate, often distinct units of meaning one after the other. This method of composition by juxtaposition is the direct opposite of English and American poetry of the 19th century where the same state of mind is maintained from the start of the poem to the end or else transition is gradual and continuous not sudden and disoriented.

The poem is not regarded as an utterance or an imitation taking place through time instead all parts of it are conceived to be present at the same moment co-existing as if in space. There is no transition from one unity of meaning to the next but between distinct unity of meaning there are multiple interrelations. Perceiving those, the reader obtains a complex  total of impressions.

5-Free Verse: Using free verse  poets could no longer give first priority to stuffing stanzaic boxes. They thought a poem should not be like any goods  jammed into a box. The form develops as the content develops. Rhythm has an expressive function that articulates emotion. They believe emotional states are particular and unique and that accordingly for every emotional state there is one particular rhythm that expresses it.

The romantic principle that poetic form should be organic rather than imposed and it should shape itself as it develops evolving its own essence was applied to justify free verse. Each rhythm created expresses a new idea. "Free Verse" conveyed the  poet's sense of split with the past and suggested that they were articulating the distinctive new consciousness of modern man. The free verse of American poets wished to feel that they had a meter consonance. "Traditional Prosody", W. C. Williams argued,   was a product of the English character. The "iamb" is not the normal measure of American speech. Free verse falls into the 20th century form two source: 1-Walt Whitman, 2- The other was French verse libré.