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.
