Poetry Notes Flashcards
Imagist Revolution
- -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
Frost
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
Harlem Shadows (McKay, 1922), Max Eastman introduction
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
Harlem Shadows (McKay 1922) Author’s Word
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
Mina Loy “Love Songs” (1915-17) style
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.
Mina Loy “Love Songs” Gender
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
In a Station of the Metro (1913)
The apprition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Portrait d’une Femme (1912)
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
Pound’s The Cantos (1915-1969)
Distribution of brief allusions that are designed to invoke a whole historical & emotional context for the reader
Pound: “a poem containing history”
Shiloh (Melville, 1866)
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)
The Aeolian Harp (Melville 1888)
–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
Dickenson style
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--
“I taste a liquor never brewed” (1861)
–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
“A Bird, came down the Walk” (1862)
–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.
“I heard a Fly buzz- when I died,” (1863)
–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.
The Song of Hiawatha (1855)
–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)
“The Palace-Burner” (1872)
–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.
“Yet Do I Marvel” (Cullen)
–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”
Incident (Cullen)
–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.
“We Wear the Mask”
–“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.
“We Wear the Mask” opening stanza
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.
1855 Leaves of Grass layout
No titles (not even for preface), stanza breaks, rhyme schemes
–(Paine: “the constitution…says there will be no titles”)
Hiawatha themes (1855)
–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
Hiawatha (1855) sentimental masculinity
–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)
