Poetry Notes Flashcards

1
Q

Imagist Revolution

A
  • -Against the lyric
  • -Extreme Concision
  • -Neutrality of description

Only seen purely in poems like “In a Station at the Metro” (1913) & “The Red Wheelbarrow” (1923)

Amy Lowell: passionate love poems
HD: self-expression displaced onto nature

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2
Q

Frost

A

Tradition forms, using regular rhyme, meter, stanzas

Cultivated the public image of a New England sage

Undermined every consolation we might have been led to expect from regularity

“The Road Not Taken” (1915): only certainty is self-deception

Human cruelty as the only alternatives to emptiness

Voice is so crisp, folksy, & pithy only adds to the underlying sense of terror

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3
Q

Harlem Shadows (McKay, 1922), Max Eastman introduction

A

Sets up racial framework for reading McKay’s poetry that uses essentialist, problematic strategies (“pure blooded Negro,” “most alien race,” feminized (like a mother), & like the natural song of a bird) while arguing that his poetry shows the ridiculousness of arguing for innate white supremacy

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4
Q

Harlem Shadows (McKay 1922) Author’s Word

A

Establishing his literary heritage and influences and the limits of that influence, asserting his own genius and agency, stressing that he grew up speaking both a Jamaican dialect & an Englishman’s English.
“I own allegiance to no master”
“I have always, in the summing up, fallen back on my own ear and taste as the arbiter”

Establishes that his poetry is not modernist not because his lack of knowledge or ability, but because he refuses to be told to follow a certain pattern, whether traditional or modernist. Rebellious poetry

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5
Q

Mina Loy “Love Songs” (1915-17) style

A

Elliptical
Minimalist

Vocab:
–bodyfluids & bodyparts.
++++ “mucous-membrane”
++++ saliva in “a trickle”
++++ “spermatozoa / at the core of Nothing”
+++++”cymophanous sweat”
+++++but arms, hearts, eyes and lips, conventional to love poetry, are not beautified.

mixing of vocabularies:
the clinical
the colloquial 
the conventionally "poetic.
the abstract with the concrete
the latinate with Anglo-Saxon.
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6
Q

Mina Loy “Love Songs” Gender

A

Values embedded in masuclinity & femininity are destructive: Idealization of female purity “the principle instrument of her subjugation”

love does not bring “sexual equality,” nor even “simple satisfactions”; instead, it brings “own-self distortion.”

–force upon the reader the physical fact of sex

–direct challenge to Victorian morality

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7
Q

In a Station of the Metro (1913)

A

The apprition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

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8
Q

Portrait d’une Femme (1912)

A

The blank verse “Portrait d’une Femme,” a modern vignette, depicts the emptiness and sterility of the life of a cultured woman, surrounded by an exotic assortment of objects of art

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9
Q

Pound’s The Cantos (1915-1969)

A

Distribution of brief allusions that are designed to invoke a whole historical & emotional context for the reader

Pound: “a poem containing history”

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10
Q

Shiloh (Melville, 1866)

A

With the flight of the sparrow to the bullet, M moves from idealistic expectations & visions of pastoral beauty to technological horror of the war as a whole

Paradoxical peaceful scene of young men stretched on the field, dying after the battle has ended, “What like a bullet can undeceive!” the “climatic burst of recognition”–formally, the textual bullet (Michael Warner)

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11
Q

The Aeolian Harp (Melville 1888)

A

–positions himself explicitly against the culturally powerful definition of poetry as a ‘strain ideal’.

–aeolian harp, a central trope in Romantic poetry, shrieks & wails ‘the Real’ rather than providing the soothing music of communion with nature

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12
Q

Dickenson style

A

Hymn meter: Alternating lines of iambic tetrameter with iambic trimeter

Undermines the popular poetic style of the day with her use of the hymn meter, loading her own “hymns” with confrontational and startling imagery while employing an often jagged rhyme scheme marked by “slant rhyme,” as opposed to “perfect rhyme,” – destabilizing the form even as she perfected it.

Slant Rhyme Example:
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to & fro
Kept treading--treading--till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through--
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13
Q

“I taste a liquor never brewed” (1861)

A

–Lack of rhyme scheme goes with the disordered nature of intoxication

–Constant dashes & pauses at random places throughout each stanza also parallel the excitement & disorder

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14
Q

“A Bird, came down the Walk” (1862)

A

–man’s alienation from nature

–unsuccessfully tries to cross the barrier between man and nature as it is embodied in a less threatening creature. The first two stanzas show the bird at home in nature, aggressive towards the worm which it eats and politely indifferent to the beetle.

–primarily iambic rhythm, the poem communicates its uneasy tone partly through its subtle metrical variation, chiefly reversal of accent, and through its cacophonous sounds — all largely in the first three stanzas.

—In the last two stanzas, the rhythms become smoother and the sounds more euphonious, in imitation of the bird’s smooth merging with nature.

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15
Q

“I heard a Fly buzz- when I died,” (1863)

A

–employs all of Dickinson’s formal patterns:

–trimeter and tetrameter iambic lines

–rhythmic insertion of the long dash to interrupt the meter

–an ABCB rhyme scheme

–all the rhymes before the final stanza are half-rhymes (Room/Storm, firm/Room, be/Fly), while only the rhyme in the final stanza is a full rhyme (me/see).

–Dickinson uses this technique to build tension; a sense of true completion comes only with the speaker’s death.

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16
Q

The Song of Hiawatha (1855)

A

–Record of middle-class ideals, anxieties, norms.

–Sectional strife, hoped-for reconciliation resided in Hiawatha’s marriage to Minnehaha: “That our tribes might be united…And old wounds be healed forever”

–to sanctify the rise of Western, Christian, agricultural empire by offering a ventriloquized Indian leader who compliantly yields to manifest destiny

–From “Indian legends” collected by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft; Longfellow legitimized Schoolcraft’s ethnographic research by quoting it at length in endnotes

Sentimental masculinity:
Hiawatha new-age sensitive man of the 1850s
–Childhood friends: androgynous musician Chibiabos, strongman Kwasind, “spake with naked hearts together” vocabulary of homosociality that would soon fall under suspicion. Alternative masculinities, Hiawatha survives while both K & C die through evil deceptions

–Pau-Puk-Keewis: part trickster part Victorian dandy (warrior: “coward”, women: fawn over him & his clothes)

–Successful bourgeois marriage (Minnehaha is allowed to say “half is mine, although I follow” though)

17
Q

“The Palace-Burner” (1872)

A

–Howells: “thoroughly feminine in thought and expression, in subject and treatment”

–Focuses on mother’s reaction to the question/picture not the child’s which prompts the poem.

–Opens in medias res, with the speaker responding to a question

–Mother & son looking at a newspaper depicting the communist burning of buildings in Paris: domestic & international scene mediated by print culture; print culture first brings the explicit presence of violence into the room & the poem

–the speaker’s depiction of the Petroleuse: an ambivalence about connecting with and separating from the identity of “woman,” an identity which may bring violence into an otherwise peaceful home.

–The speaker moves from an inability to formulate her thoughts to a recognition of her own inability to identify as “woman.” The Petroleuse compels the speaker to distance herself from, by disidentifying with, the identity of “woman,” calling herself instead a “coward” while the ones burning the palace are “women.”

–“I” becomes a stutter, a jarring tick carried across the page, suggesting selfhood characterized more by mobilities of starts and stops, interruptions, and projections rather than by a static unity and consistency.

–image of the Petroleuse begins to prompt the speaker to disidentify with a notion of selfhood, to identify herself as not knowing herself.

18
Q

“Yet Do I Marvel” (Cullen)

A

–Sonnet

–full of classical references: Tantalus, Sisyphus

–relationship to Greek myth exactly like the same as Keats, and his relationship to Keats was exactly the same as the white Americans

–Asserts full cultural citizenship, belonging to the Western tradition.

–Without negating his particular position as a black man in Jim Crow United States. The paradox “To make a poet black, and bid him sing”

19
Q

Incident (Cullen)

A

–Ballad: Traditional, old folk form.

–Simple language

–Narrative (tells a story rather than a lyric…which emphasizes emotions of speaker)

–Ballad stanzas: abcb

–Associated with childhood, children’s poetry, song-like

–The myth of their friendship, present in the glee of the speaker just a few lines earlier, has been shattered by racism. growing up African-American, spending years passing from childhood naivete of race relations to ultimate resignation, happens in an instant within Cullen’s quatrains.

20
Q

“We Wear the Mask”

A

–“I’ve got to write dialect poetry; it’s the only way I can get them to listen to me”

–The poem hides its central issue: Not even once does it mention blacks or racial prejudice. In other words, the poem itself wears a mask.

–openly parades Dunbar’s feelings as a frustrated black individual across the page.

–It doffs all pretense and imposture. Gone is the mask. What we have, then, is a poem that conceals everything and reveals everything at one and the same time.

21
Q

“We Wear the Mask” opening stanza

A
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.
22
Q

1855 Leaves of Grass layout

A

No titles (not even for preface), stanza breaks, rhyme schemes

–(Paine: “the constitution…says there will be no titles”)

23
Q

Hiawatha themes (1855)

A

–Record of middle-class ideals, anxieties, norms.

–Sectional strife, the “wranglings and dissensions” that imperiled the American union; hoped-for reconciliation resided in Hiawatha’s marriage to Minnehaha:

–to sanctify the rise of Western, Christian, agricultural empire by offering a ventriloquized Indian leader who compliantly yields to manifest destiny

–Sentimental masculinity

24
Q

Hiawatha (1855) sentimental masculinity

A

–Hero knows “all manly arts and labors” governing “for profit of the people,/ For advantage of the nations”

–Childhood friends: androgynous musician Chibiabos, strongman Kwasind, “spake with naked hearts together” vocabulary of homosociality that would soon fall under suspicion.

–Alternative masculinities, Hiawatha survives while both K & C die through evil deceptions

–Pau-Puk-Keewis: part trickster part Victorian dandy (warrior: “coward”, women: fawn over him & his clothes)

–Successful bourgeois marriage (Minnehaha is allowed to say “half is mine, although I follow” though)

25
Howell's response to Sarah Piatt
"thoroughly feminine in thought and expression, in subject and treatment"
26
"The Captured Goddess" (1914)
--Artist’s quest for beauty (personified as a beautiful female goddess), follows her through the city, captured by the male marketplace. --Exotic colors coming from domestic objects (“a shiver of amethyst” coming from “chimney pots”) --fusion of sound, movement, color --Poetic/aesthetic value found in “flights of rose,” “loud pink of bursting hydrangeas”: --Aesthetic values founded on idealized femininity and unrequited/courtly desire
27
"Venus Transiens" (1919)
--replete with Renaissance awe at female grace --title and drama from Botticelli's painting depicting Venus rising from the sea, --wreathes her subject in silver and blue, colors that reflect the light of sea and sky. --The sands on which the speaker stands anchor her to the real world while the waves and sky uplift her beloved to a sublime, exalted state. --The viewer stands apart from subject, as though the human element is permanently distanced from the divine.
28
"Madonna of the Evening Flowers" (1919)
--The three-part text --moves from simple description to sensuous impressionism. --unrhymed cadence, it draws energy from visual profusion, including oak leaves feathered by the wind and late afternoon sun reflected off mundane objects — books, scissors, and a thimble. --From domestic still life, the central stanza follows the seeker into a religious vision sanctified by the pure heart of the unnamed "you." --Color and sound mount into a surreal chiming of bell-shaped garden flowers, which enrich the holy setting with connections between their common name, Canterbury bells, with the cathedral and shrine in southeastern England. --The final stanza injects a playful note of miscommunication. --The speaker, mystic thoughts, discounts the gardener's mission to assess growth, spray, and prune. --Enraptured in wonder, the speaker shuts out sounds to absorb the aura of the gardener, whom the steepled larkspur transforms into the Virgin Mary, traditionally clad in blue as a symbol of devotion. Lowell concludes the poem with a kinesthetic gesture by turning sight into sound; the color and shape of the bell-blossoms evolve into an organ swell, a traditional anthem, a Te Deum ([We praise] thee, God) of worship and adoration.
29
Hugh's Imagist Poems
“Caribbean Sunset”: God having a hemorrhage, Blood coughed across the sky, Staining the dark sea red, That is sunset in the Caribbean “Suicide’s Note”: The calm, Cool face of the river Asked me for a kiss.
30
Waterfront Streets in Weary Blues
travel poems, gypsies, sailors, long trips, port towns, sea calm, Ireland, Caribbean,
31
Dream Variation in Weary Blues
Less clearly inspired by blues, less dialect, closer to traditional lyric poetry
32
Sandburg's imagist poem
``` “Fog” The fog come on little cat feet. It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on” ```
33
Sandburg & Dialect of Modernism
“pattern of rebellion through racial ventriloquism”: “Nigger”: I am the nigger. Singer of songs, Dancer [...all the stereotypes (sex, lazy banjo, dreaming of the jungle ) then] Brooding and muttering with memories of shackles: I am the nigger. Look at me. I am the nigger
34
"Sunday Morning" (1915)
-- without existential anguish, comfortable with its doubts and uncertainties --Begins please with ordinary sensual pleasures --woman gets up late on a Sunday morning and is sitting in her peignoir in a sunny chair having coffee and oranges for breakfast--and thinking about religion and the changing beauty of the world --She speaks twice for the rest of the poem her thoughts and feelings--part meditation, part daydream,--are reported in the free indirect discourse of the poem’s narrator --Present pleasure set against ancient sacrifice is one of the several antitheses upon which the poem is built: life/death, change/stasis, actual/imaginary. --Demands an alternative to Christianity, for a system of beliefs based on her experience of the natural world.
35
Steven's & Modernist Style
--“The poem must resist the intelligence/ Almost successfully” --So many rare, archaic, exotic words --The words are strange; the names, invented and far-fetched; and the sound-play, intricate and insistent. --Surprising word combinations. Unlikeliness of vocabulary and images. Playful. Idiosyncratic, humorous strangeness --“Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan/Of tan with henna hackles, halt!” --“The hair of my blonde/ Is dazzling,/ As the spittle of cows/ Threading the wind” --“general lexicographer of mute” --Cuts the beauty with anti-poetic language; “O caliper, do you scratch your buttocks,” “the bawds of euphony”
36
Coherence Stevens
--“I have a distaste for miscellany. It is one of the reasons I do not bother about a book myself --“Harmonium”: implies order, peacefully and aesthetically pleasing concord among the parts of a unified and consistent whole, harmony --“true subject” that provides some coherence: the relation of reality and the imagination at the moment of perception --“13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” “Six Significant Landscapes,” “Anecdote of the Jar” --Still feels miscellaneous --Explicit/implicit purpose of many poems recreate and embody the presence of another person, ‘an interior paramour’: name the person addressed in his poems
37
"Corn" 1973
3 sections - -Stage-setting piece, poet “loses” himself in nature - -Song in praise of corn and its benefits to the land - -Lament for a wasted cotton plantation ==Addressed to the “corn-captain” by a lover of nature, except last verse to “gashed” hill ==Plea for diversified farming (corn vs barren hill of plantation cotton agriculture) ==Corn associated with the home, cotton with commerce
38
The Biglow Papers
--Response to the Mexican War --Dialect poetry was direct product of political turmoil --Biglow’s Yankee dialect as a “natural stronghold” --Pronunciation is inherently moral --The need for an energetic vernacular to remedy the artificial, redundant English of newspaper & classroom --Biglow’s vernacular is a higher moral language that criticizes the rhetoric of American expansionism, but the dialect has a deeper racial mission to authenticate the Anglo-Saxon roots of the nation’s culture