Early 1900s Poetry Criticsm Flashcards
What does John Timberman Newcomb claim of the early 1900s?
The lack of poetic infrastructure (and thus lack of opportunities) in in early 1900s produced work ‘dominated by self-doubt, skepticism, and futility’ with feeling that the dominance of Fireside verse was ‘oppressive’
However, the lack of seeming predecessor to Fireside poets led to feeling that poetry would be ‘obsolete’, a ‘crisis’ for poetry
What does John Timberman Newcomb suggest ‘genteel’ poetry of the Fireside poets had inhibited?
Inhibited emergence of distinctive American literary identity - as suggested universality, rather than distinctiveness
What does John Timberman Newcomb argue that the New Verse represented?
‘‘the New Verse …was a paradigm shift in the way people saw poetry… as a central form of knowledge, discovery, and commentary on every aspect of their lives’
What did H.E. Warner’s article ‘Will Poetry Disappear’ in 1899 suggest?
Poetry ‘has lost its place’; lost ‘philosophy and religion’;
because ‘… the life of the world [now] concerns itself more and more with the practical, the material, and the definite’ rather than the ‘emotional’
No longer ‘a useful art’, and prose was taking over its ‘ornamental’ function too
What did William Dean Howells argue in his 1891 essay “Criticism and Fiction”?
Associates “the world’s progress” with the increasing regard given to novels – as opposed to poetry – as novels “made Reality its Romance”; suggests that the “truth….[is] the highest mission of romance”
“truth” as ‘democracy in literature’
Character, and What Comes of It by Josiah Gilbert Holland (1881)
“the further art is removed from ministry…the more illegitimate it does become”
anxiety about the separation of religion from poetry, the secularisation of modernity?
What ambiguity does Lawrence Buell identify in the early 1900s?
‘‘The American writer was both marginalised and pedestalised – both useless (as measured by the moralistic scale of priorities in a developing nation) and, at the same time, a national necessity (as the symptom of complete cultural emergence).’
challenge - ‘finding an American voice for a still colonised culture not disposed to recognise or value that voice’
What, in 1837, had Ralph Waldo Emerson characterised ‘The American Scholar’ as?
Although ‘the American Scholar…[has] listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe’, they are not specifically American but rather transcend to a universal focus: ‘the single man’ being able to relate to ‘the huge world’, rather than just America as a nation.
What did James Russell Lowell declare in the 1840s?
Believes that poetry would survive “not because of its nationality, but despite of it”
