outline_us_lit

falling tree, and every lick makes a of New England: Mary Wilkins

gap in the crowd that lets in an acre Freeman (1852-1930), Harriet

of sunshine.” Beecher Stowe (1811-1896), and

especially Sarah Orne Jewett

LOCAL COLORISTS (1849-1909). Jewett’s originality,

Like frontier humor, local color exact observation of her Maine
writing has old roots but pro- characters and setting, and sensi-
duced its best works long tive style are best seen in her fine

after the Civil War. Obviously, many story “The White Heron” in Country

pre-war writers, from Henry David of the Pointed Firs (1896). Harriet

Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne Beecher Stowe’s local color works,

to James Greenleaf Whittier and especially The Pearl of Orr’s Island

James Russell Lowell, paint strik- (1862), depicting humble Maine

ing portraits of specific American fishing communities, greatly influ-

regions. What sets the colorists enced Jewett. Nineteenth-century

apart is their self-conscious and women writers formed their own

exclusive interest in rendering a networks of moral support and

given location, and their scrupu- influence, as their letters show.

lously factual, realistic technique. Women made up the major audi-

Bret Harte (1836-1902) is remem- ence for fiction, and many women

bered as the author of adventurous wrote popular novels, poems, and

stories such as “The Luck of humorous pieces.

Roaring Camp” and “The Outcasts All regions of the country cele-

of Poker Flat,” set along the west- brated themselves in writing influ-

ern mining frontier. As the first enced by local color. Some of it

great success in the local colorist included social protest, especially

school, Harte for a brief time was toward the end of the century,

perhaps the best-known writer in when social inequality and econom-

America — such was the appeal of ic hardship were particularly press-

his romantic version of the gun- ing issues. Racial injustice and

slinging West. Outwardly realistic, inequality between the sexes ap-

he was one of the first to introduce SARAH ORNE JEWETT pear in the works of southern writ-

low-life characters — cunning ers such as George Washington

gamblers, gaudy prostitutes, and Cable (1844-1925) and Kate Chopin

uncouth robbers — into serious (1851-1904), whose powerful nov-

literary works. He got away with this els set in Cajun/French Louisiana

(as had Charles Dickens in England, transcend the local color label.

who greatly admired Harte’s work) Cable’s The Grandissimes (1880)

by showing in the end that these treats racial injustice with great

seeming derelicts really had hearts artistry; like Kate Chopin’s daring

of gold. novel The Awakening (1899), about

Several women writers are re- a woman’s doomed attempt to find

membered for their fine depictions Photo © The Bettmann Archive her own identity through passion,

50

it was ahead of its time. In Love, ambition, idealism, and

The Awakening, a young married temptation motivate his characters;

woman with attractive children and Howells was acutely aware of the

an indulgent and successful hus- moral corruption of business ty-

band gives up family, money, coons during the Gilded Age of the

respectability, and eventually her 1870s. Howells’s The Rise of Silas

life in search of self-realization. Lapham uses an ironic title to make

Poetic evocations of ocean, birds this point. Silas Lapham became

(caged and freed), and music rich by cheating an old business

endow this short novel with unusu- partner; and his immoral act deeply

al intensity and complexity. disturbed his family, though for

Often paired with The Awakening years Lapham could not see that

is the fine story “The Yellow Wall- he had acted improperly. In the

paper” (1892) by Charlotte Perkins end, Lapham is morally redeemed,

Gilman (1860-1935). Both works choosing bankruptcy rather than

were forgotten for a time, but unethical success. Silas Lapham is,

rediscovered by feminist literary like Huckleberry Finn, an unsuc-

critics late in the 20th century. In cess story: Lapham’s business fall

Gilman’s story, a condescending is his moral rise. Toward the end

doctor drives his wife mad by con- of his life, Howells, like Twain,

fining her in a room to “cure” her became increasingly active in polit-

of nervous exhaustion. The impris- ical causes, defending the rights of

oned wife projects her entrapment labor union organizers and deplor-

onto the wallpaper, in the design of ing American colonialism in the

which she sees imprisoned women Philippines.

creeping behind bars.

COSMOPOLITAN NOVELISTS

MIDWESTERN REALISM Henry James (1843-1916)

For many years, the editor of Henry James once wrote that art,
the important Atlantic Monthly especially literary art, “makes life,
magazine, William Dean Howells makes interest, makes impor-

(1837-1920) published realistic WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS tance.” James’s fiction and criti-

local color writing by Bret Harte, cism is the most highly conscious,

Mark Twain, George Washington sophisticated, and difficult of its

Cable, and others. He was the era. With Twain, James is generally

champion of realism, and his nov- ranked as the greatest American

els, such as A Modern Instance novelist of the second half of the

(1882), The Rise of Silas Lapham 19th century.

(1885), and A Hazard of New James is noted for his “interna-

Fortunes (1890), carefully inter- tional theme” — that is, the com-

weave social circumstances with plex relationships between naïve

the emotions of ordinary middle- Americans and cosmopolitan Euro-

class Americans. Photo © The Bettmann Archive peans. What his biographer Leon

51

Edel calls James’s first, or “interna- HENRY JAMES love. As James develops, his novels
tional,” phase encompassed such become more psychological and
works as Transatlantic Sketches Photogravure courtesy less concerned with external
(travel pieces, 1875), The American National Portrait Gallery, events. In James’s later works, the
(1877), Daisy Miller (1879), and a Smithsonian Institution most important events are all psy-
masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady chological — usually moments of
(1881). In The American, for exam- intense illumination that show
ple, Christopher Newman, a naïve characters their previous blind-
but intelligent and idealistic self- ness. For example, in The Ambassa-
made millionaire industrialist, goes dors, the idealistic, aging Lambert
to Europe seeking a bride. When Strether uncovers a secret love
her family rejects him because he affair and, in doing so, discovers a
lacks an aristocratic background, he new complexity to his inner life.
has a chance to revenge himself; in His rigid, upright, morality is hu-
deciding not to, he demonstrates manized and enlarged as he discov-
his moral superiority. ers a capacity to accept those who
have sinned.
James’s second period was
experimental. He exploited Edith Wharton (1862-1937)
new subject matters — femi-
nism and social reform in The Like James, Edith Wharton grew
Bostonians (1886) and political up partly in Europe and eventually
intrigue in The Princess Casa- made her home there. She was
massima (1885). He also attempted descended from a wealthy, estab-
to write for the theater, but failed lished family in New York society
embarrassingly when his play Guy and saw firsthand the decline of
Domville (1895) was booed on the this cultivated group and, in her
first night. view, the rise of boorish, nouveau-
riche business families. This social
In his third, or “major,” phase transformation is the background
James returned to international of many of her novels.
subjects, but treated them with
increasing sophistication and psy- Like James, Wharton contrasts
chological penetration. The com- Americans and Europeans. The
plex and almost mythical The Wings core of her concern is the gulf sep-
of the Dove (1902), The Ambassa- arating social reality and the inner
dors (1903) (which James felt was self. Often a sensitive character
his best novel), and The Golden feels trapped by unfeeling char-
Bowl (1904) date from this major acters or social forces. Edith
period. If the main theme of Twain’s Wharton had personally experi-
work is appearance and reality, enced such entrapment, as a young
James’s constant concern is per- writer suffering a long nervous
ception. In James, only self-aware- breakdown partly due to the con-
ness and clear perception of others flict in roles between writer and
yields wisdom and self-sacrificing wife.

52

Wharton’s best novels include STEPHEN CRANE The 19th-century American histo-
The House of Mirth (1905), The rian Henry Adams constructed an
Custom of the Country (1913), Photo courtesy elaborate theory of history involv-
Summer (1917), The Age of In- Library of Congress ing the idea of the dynamo, or
nocence (1920), and the beautifully machine force, and entropy, or
crafted novella Ethan Frome (1911). 53 decay of force. Instead of progress,
Adams sees inevitable decline in
NATURALISM AND human society.
MUCKRAKING
Stephen Crane, the son of a cler-
Wharton’s and James’s dis- gyman, put the loss of God most
sections of hidden sexual succinctly:
and financial motivations at
work in society link them with writ- A man said to the universe:
ers who seem superficially quite “Sir, I exist!”
different: Stephen Crane, Jack “However,” replied the universe,
London, Frank Norris, Theodore “The fact has not created in me
Dreiser, and Upton Sinclair. Like the A sense of obligation.”
cosmopolitan novelists, but much
more explicitly, these naturalists Like Romanticism, naturalism
used realism to relate the individual first appeared in Europe. It is usu-
to society. Often they exposed ally traced to the works of Honoré
social problems and were influ- de Balzac in the 1840s and seen as a
enced by Darwinian thought and the French literary movement associat-
related philosophical doctrine of ed with Gustave Flaubert, Edmond
determinism, which views individu- and Jules Goncourt, Émile Zola, and
als as the helpless pawns of eco- Guy de Maupassant. It daringly
nomic and social forces beyond opened up the seamy underside of
their control. society and such topics as divorce,
sex, adultery, poverty, and crime.
Naturalism is essentially a literary
expression of determinism. Asso- Naturalism flourished as Ameri-
ciated with bleak, realistic depic- cans became urbanized and aware
tions of lower-class life, determin- of the importance of large econom-
ism denies religion as a motivating ic and social forces. By 1890, the
force in the world and instead per- frontier was declared officially
ceives the universe as a machine. closed. Most Americans resided in
Eighteenth-century Enlightenment towns, and business dominated
thinkers had also imagined the even remote farmsteads.
world as a machine, but as a perfect
one, invented by God and tending Stephen Crane (1871-1900)
toward progress and human better-
ment. Naturalists imagined society, Stephen Crane, born in New
instead, as a blind machine, godless Jersey, had roots going back to
and out of control. Revolutionary War soldiers, clergy-
men, sheriffs, judges, and farmers

who had lived a century earlier. Primarily a jour- dream as London experienced them during his
nalist who also wrote fiction, essays, poetry, and meteoric rise from obscure poverty to wealth
plays, Crane saw life at its rawest, in slums and and fame. Eden, an impoverished but intelligent
on battlefields. His short stories — in particu- and hardworking sailor and laborer, is deter-
lar, “The Open Boat,” “The Blue Hotel,” and “The mined to become a writer. Eventually, his writing
Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” — exemplified that makes him rich and well-known, but Eden real-
literary form. His haunting Civil War novel, The izes that the woman he loves cares only for his
Red Badge of Courage, was published to great money and fame. His despair over her inability
acclaim in 1895, but he barely had time to bask in to love causes him to lose faith in human nature.
the attention before he died, at 29, having He also suffers from class alienation, for he no
neglected his health. He was virtually forgotten longer belongs to the working class, while he
during the first two decades of the 20th century, rejects the materialistic values of the wealthy
but was resurrected through a laudatory biogra- whom he worked so hard to join. He sails for the
phy by Thomas Beer in 1923. He has enjoyed con- South Pacific and commits suicide by jumping
tinued success ever since — as a champion of into the sea. Like many of the best novels of
the common man, a realist, and a symbolist. its time, Martin Eden is an unsuccess story. It
looks ahead to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great
Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) Gatsby in its revelation of despair amid great
is one of the best, if not the earliest, nat- wealth.
uralistic American novels. It is the har-
rowing story of a poor, sensitive young girl whose Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945)
uneducated, alcoholic parents utterly fail her. In
love and eager to escape her violent home life, The 1925 work An American Tragedy by
she allows herself to be seduced into living with Theodore Dreiser, like London’s Martin Eden,
a young man, who soon deserts her. When her explores the dangers of the American dream. The
self-righteous mother rejects her, Maggie be- novel relates, in great detail, the life of Clyde
comes a prostitute to survive, but soon commits Griffiths, a boy of weak will and little self-aware-
suicide out of despair. Crane’s earthy subject ness. He grows up in great poverty in a family of
matter and his objective, scientific style, devoid wandering evangelists, but dreams of wealth and
of moralizing, earmark Maggie as a naturalist the love of beautiful women. A rich uncle employs
work. him in his factory. When his girlfriend Roberta
becomes pregnant, she demands that he marry
Jack London (1876-1916) her. Meanwhile, Clyde has fallen in love with a
wealthy society girl who represents success,
A poor, self-taught worker from California, the money, and social acceptance. Clyde carefully
naturalist Jack London was catapulted from plans to drown Roberta on a boat trip, but at the
poverty to fame by his first collection of stories, last minute he begins to change his mind; howev-
The Son of the Wolf (1900), set largely in the er, she accidentally falls out of the boat. Clyde,
Klondike region of Alaska and the Canadian a good swimmer, does not save her, and she
Yukon. Other of his best-sellers, including The drowns. As Clyde is brought to justice, Dreiser
Call of the Wild (1903) and The Sea-Wolf (1904), replays his story in reverse, masterfully using the
made him the highest paid writer in the United vantage points of prosecuting and defense attor-
States of his time. neys to analyze each step and motive that led the
mild-mannered Clyde, with a highly religious
The autobiographical novel Martin Eden (1909)
depicts the inner stresses of the American

54

background and good family con- ting exposés. Muckraking novels

nections, to commit murder. used eye-catching journalistic tech-

Despite his awkward style, niques to depict harsh working con-
Dreiser, in An American ditions and oppression. Populist
Tragedy, displays crushing Frank Norris’s The Octopus (1901)

authority. Its precise details build exposed big railroad companies,

up an overwhelming sense of tragic while socialist Upton Sinclair’s The

inevitability. The novel is a scathing Jungle (1906) painted the squalor

portrait of the American success of the Chicago meat-packing hous-

myth gone sour, but it is also a uni- es. Jack London’s dystopia The Iron

versal story about the stresses of Heel (1908) anticipates George

urbanization, modernization, and Orwell’s 1984 in predicting a class

alienation. Within it roam the ro- war and the takeover of the

mantic and dangerous fantasies of government.

the dispossessed. Another more artistic response

An American Tragedy is a reflec- was the realistic portrait, or group

tion of the dissatisfaction, envy, and of portraits, of ordinary characters

despair that afflicted many poor and their frustrated inner lives. The

and working people in America’s collection of stories Main-

competitive, success-driven soci- Travelled Roads (1891), by William

ety. As American industrial power Dean Howells’s protégé, Hamlin

soared, the glittering lives of the Garland (1860-1940), is a portrait

wealthy in newspapers and pho- gallery of ordinary people. It shock-

tographs sharply contrasted with ingly depicted the poverty of mid-

the drab lives of ordinary farmers western farmers who were de-

and city workers. The media fanned manding agricultural reforms. The

rising expectations and unreason- title suggests the many trails west-

able desires. Such problems, com- ward that the hardy pioneers fol-

mon to modernizing nations, gave lowed and the dusty main streets of

rise to muckraking journalism — the villages they settled.

penetrating investigative reporting Close to Garland’s Main-

that documented social problems THEODORE DREISER Travelled Roads is Winesburg, Ohio,

and provided an important impetus by Sherwood Anderson (1876-

to social reform. 1941), begun in 1916. This is a loose

The great tradition of American collection of stories about resi-

investigative journalism had its dents of the fictitious town of

beginning in this period, during Winesburg seen through the eyes

which national magazines such as of a naïve young newspaper re-

McClures and Collier’s published porter, George Willard, who eventu-

Ida M. Tarbell’s History of the ally leaves to seek his fortune in the

Standard Oil Company (1904), city. Like Main-Travelled Roads and

Lincoln Steffens’s The Shame of the other naturalistic works of the peri-

Cities (1904), and other hard-hit- Photo © The Bettmann Archive od, Winesburg, Ohio emphasizes

55

the quiet poverty, loneliness, and despair in Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)
small-town America.
A friend once said, “Trying to write briefly
THE “CHICAGO SCHOOL” OF POETRY about Carl Sandburg is like trying to picture the
Grand Canyon in one black-and-white snapshot.”
Three Midwestern poets who grew up in Poet, historian, biographer, novelist, musician,
Illinois and shared the midwestern concern essayist — Sandburg, son of a railroad black-
with ordinary people are Carl Sandburg, smith, was all of these and more. A journalist by
Vachel Lindsay, and Edgar Lee Masters. Their profession, he wrote a massive biography of
poetry often concerns obscure individuals; they Abraham Lincoln that is one of the classic works
developed techniques — realism, dramatic ren- of the 20th century.
derings — that reached out to a larger reader-
ship. They are part of the Midwestern, or Chicago To many, Sandburg was a latter-day Walt
School, that arose before World War I to chal- Whitman, writing expansive, evocative urban and
lenge the East Coast literary establishment. The patriotic poems and simple, childlike rhymes and
“Chicago Renaissance” was a watershed in ballads. He traveled about reciting and recording
American culture: It demonstrated that Amer- his poetry, in a lilting, mellifluously toned voice
ica’s interior had matured. that was a kind of singing. At heart he was totally
unassuming, notwithstanding his national fame.
Edgar Lee Masters (1868-1950) What he wanted from life, he once said, was “to
be out of jail...to eat regular..to get what I write
By the turn of the century, Chicago had become printed,...a little love at home and a little nice
a great city, home of innovative architecture and affection hither and yon over the American land-
cosmopolitan art collections. Chicago was also scape,...(and) to sing every day.”
the home of Harriet Monroe’s Poetry, the most
important literary magazine of the day. A fine example of his themes and his
Whitmanesque style is the poem “Chicago”
Among the intriguing contemporary poets the (1914):
journal printed was Edgar Lee Masters, author
of the daring Spoon River Anthology (1915), Hog Butcher for the World,
with its new “unpoetic” colloquial style, frank Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
presentation of sex, critical view of village life, Player with Railroads and the
and intensely imagined inner lives of ordinary Nation’s Freight Handler;
people. Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders...
Spoon River Anthology is a collection of por-
traits presented as colloquial epitaphs (words Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931)
found inscribed on gravestones) summing up the
lives of individual villagers as if in their own Vachel Lindsay was a celebrant of small-town
words. It presents a panorama of a country vil- midwestern populism and creator of strong,
lage through its cemetery: 250 people buried rhythmic poetry designed to be declaimed aloud.
there speak, revealing their deepest secrets. His work forms a curious link between the popu-
Many of the people are related; members of lar, or folk, forms of poetry, such as Christian
about 20 families speak of their failures and gospel songs and vaudeville (popular theater) on
dreams in free-verse monologues that are sur- the one hand, and advanced modernist poetics
prisingly modern. on the other. An extremely popular public reader
in his day, Lindsay’s readings prefigure “Beat”

56

poetry readings of the post-World WILLA CATHER Whenever Richard Cory went
War II era that were accompanied down town,
by jazz. Photo courtesy OWI
57 We people on the pavement
To popularize poetry, Lindsay de- looked at him:
veloped what he called a “higher
vaudeville,” using music and strong He was a gentleman from sole to
rhythm. Racist by today’s standards, crown,
his famous poem “The Congo”
(1914) celebrates the history of Clean favored, and imperially slim,
Africans by mingling jazz, poetry,
music, and chanting. At the same And he was always quietly
time, he immortalized such figures arrayed,
on the American landscape as
Abraham Lincoln (“Abraham Lin- And he was always human when
coln Walks at Midnight”) and John he talked;
Chapman (“Johnny Appleseed”),
often blending facts with myth. But still he fluttered pulses
when he said,
Edwin Arlington Robinson
(1869-1935) “Good-morning,” and he glit-
tered when he walked.
Edwin Arlington Robinson is the
best U.S. poet of the late 19th cen- And he was rich — yes, richer
tury. Like Edgar Lee Masters, he is than a king —
known for short, ironic character
studies of ordinary individuals. Un- And admirably schooled in every
like Masters, Robinson uses tradi- grace:
tional metrics. Robinson’s imagi-
nary Tilbury Town, like Masters’s In fine, we thought that he was
Spoon River, contains lives of quiet everything
desperation.
To make us wish that we were in
Some of the best known of his place.
Robinson’s dramatic mono-
logues are “Luke Havergal” So on we worked, and waited for
(1896), about a forsaken lover; the light,
“Miniver Cheevy” (1910), a portrait
of a romantic dreamer; and “Rich- And went without the meat, and
ard Cory” (1896), a somber portrait cursed the bread;
of a wealthy man who commits
suicide: And Richard Cory, one calm sum-
mer night,

Went home and put a bullet
through his head.

“Richard Cory” takes its place
alongside Martin Eden, An Amer-
ican Tragedy, and The Great Gatsby
as a powerful warning against the
overblown success myth that had
come to plague Americans in the
era of the millionaire.

TWO WOMEN past. Death Comes for the

REGIONAL NOVELISTS Archbishop (1927) evokes the ide-

Novelists Ellen Glasgow alism of two 16th-century priests
(1873-1945) and Willa establishing the Catholic Church in
Cather (1873-1947) explored the New Mexican desert. Cather’s

women’s lives, placed in brilliantly works commemorate important as-

evoked regional settings. Neither pects of the American experience

novelist set out to address specifi- outside the literary mainstream —

cally female issues; their early pioneering, the establishment of

works usually treat male protago- religion, and women’s independent

nists, and only as they gained artis- lives.

tic confidence and maturity did they

turn to depictions of women’s lives. THE RISE OF BLACK

Glasgow and Cather can only be AMERICAN LITERATURE

regarded as “women writers” in a The literary achievement of
descriptive sense, for their works African-Americans was one of
resist categorization. the most striking literary de-

Glasgow was from Richmond, velopments of the post-Civil War

Virginia, the old capital of the era. In the writings of Booker T.

Southern Confederacy. Her realis- Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, James

tic novels examine the transforma- Weldon Johnson, Charles Waddell

tion of the South from a rural to an Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar,

industrial economy. Mature works and others, the roots of black

such as Virginia (1912) focus on American writing took hold, nota-

the southern experience, while bly in the forms of autobiography,

later novels like Barren Ground protest literature, sermons, poetry,

(1925) — acknowledged as her and song.

best — dramatize gifted women

attempting to surmount the claus- Booker T. Washington

trophobic, traditional southern (1856-1915)

code of domesticity, piety, and BOOKER Booker T. Washington, educator
dependence for women. T. WASHINGTON and the most prominent black
leader of his day, grew up as a slave
Cather, another Virginian, grew

up on the Nebraska prairie among in Franklin County, Virginia, born to

pioneering immigrants — later a white slave-holding father and a

immortalized in O Pioneers! (1913), slave mother. His fine, simple auto-

My Antonia (1918), and her well- biography, Up From Slavery (1901),

known story “Neighbour Rosicky” recounts his successful struggle to

(1928). During her lifetime she better himself. He became re-

became increasingly alienated from nowned for his efforts to improve

the materialism of modern life and the lives of African-Americans;

wrote of alternative visions in the his policy of accommodation with

American Southwest and in the Photo courtesy Brown Brothers whites — an attempt to involve the

58

recently freed black American in the mainstream His poem “O Black and Unknown Bards” (1917)
of American society — was outlined in his asks:
famous Atlanta Exposition Address (1895).
Heart of what slave poured out such melody
W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) As “Steal Away to Jesus?” On its strains
His spirit must have nightly floated free,
Born in New England and educated at Harvard Though still about his hands he felt his chains.
University and the University of Berlin (Ger-
many), W.E.B. Du Bois authored “Of Mr. Booker T. Of mixed white and black ancestry, Johnson
Washington and Others,” an essay later collected explored the complex issue of race in his fiction-
in his landmark book The Souls of Black Folk al Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912),
(1903). Du Bois carefully demonstrates that about a mixed-race man who “passes” (is ac-
despite his many accomplishments, Washington cepted) for white. The book effectively conveys
had, in effect, accepted segregation — that is, the black American’s concern with issues of iden-
the unequal and separate treatment of black tity in America.
Americans — and that segregation would in-
evitably lead to inferiority, particularly in edu- Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858-1932)
cation. Du Bois, a founder of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored Charles Waddell Chesnutt, author of two col-
People (NAACP), also wrote sensitive apprecia-
tions of the African-American traditions and cul- lections of stories, The Conjure Woman (1899)
ture; his work helped black intellectuals redis-
cover their rich folk literature and music. and The Wife of His Youth (1899), several novels,

James Weldon Johnson including The Marrow of Tradition (1901), and a
(1871-1938)
biography of Frederick Douglass, was ahead of
Like Du Bois, the poet James Weldon Johnson
found inspiration in African-American spirituals. his time. His stories dwell on racial themes, but

avoid predictable endings and generalized senti-

ment; his characters are distinct individuals with

complex attitudes about many things, including

race. Chesnutt often shows the strength of the

black community and affirms ethical values and

racial solidarity. ■

59

CHAPTER their wildest dreams. For the first time, many
Americans enrolled in higher education — in the
6 1920s college enrollment doubled. The middle-
class prospered; Americans began to enjoy the
MODERNISM AND world’s highest national average income in this
era, and many people purchased the ultimate
EXPERIMENTATION: status symbol — an automobile. The typical
1914-1945 urban American home glowed with electric lights
and boasted a radio that connected the house
Many historians have characterized the with the outside world, and perhaps a telephone,
period between the two world wars as a camera, a typewriter, or a sewing machine. Like
the United States’ traumatic “coming the businessman protagonist of Sinclair Lewis’s
of age,” despite the fact that U.S. direct involve- novel Babbitt (1922), the average American
ment was relatively brief (1917-1918) and its approved of these machines because they were
casualties many fewer than those of its European modern and because most were American inven-
allies and foes. John Dos Passos expressed tions and American-made.
America’s postwar disillusionment in the novel
Three Soldiers (1921), when he noted that civi- Americans of the “Roaring Twenties” fell in
lization was a “vast edifice of sham, and the war, love with other modern entertainments. Most
instead of its crumbling, was its fullest and most people went to the movies once a week. Although
ultimate expression.” Shocked and permanently Prohibition — a nationwide ban on the produc-
changed, Americans returned to their homeland tion, transport, and sale of alcohol instituted
but could never regain their innocence. through the 18th Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution — began in 1919, underground
Nor could soldiers from rural America easily “speak-easies” and nightclubs proliferated, fea-
return to their roots. After experiencing the turing jazz music, cocktails, and daring modes of
world, many now yearned for a modern, urban dress and dance. Dancing, moviegoing, automo-
life. New farm machines such as planters, har- bile touring, and radio were national crazes.
vesters, and binders had drastically reduced the American women, in particular, felt liberated.
demand for farm jobs; yet despite their in- Many had left farms and villages for homefront
creased productivity, farmers were poor. Crop duty in American cities during World War I, and
prices, like urban workers’ wages, depended on had become resolutely modern. They cut their
unrestrained market forces heavily influenced by hair short (“bobbed”), wore short “flapper”
business interests: Government subsidies for dresses, and gloried in the right to vote assured
farmers and effective workers’ unions had not by the 19th Amendment to the Constitution,
yet become established. “The chief business of passed in 1920. They boldly spoke their mind and
the American people is business,” President took public roles in society.
Calvin Coolidge proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed. Western youths were rebelling, angry and dis-
illusioned with the savage war, the older genera-
In the postwar “Big Boom,” business flour- tion they held responsible, and difficult postwar
ished, and the successful prospered beyond economic conditions that, ironically, allowed
Americans with dollars — like writers F. Scott
Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein,
and Ezra Pound — to live abroad handsomely on

60

very little money. Intellectual currents, particu- described in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of
larly Freudian psychology and to a lesser extent Wrath (1939). At the peak of the Depression,
Marxism (like the earlier Darwinian theory of one-third of all Americans were out of work.
evolution), implied a “godless” world view and Soup kitchens, shanty towns, and armies of
contributed to the breakdown of traditional val- hobos — unemployed men illegally riding freight
ues. Americans abroad absorbed these views and trains — became part of national life. Many saw
brought them back to the United States where the Depression as a punishment for sins of
they took root, firing the imagination of young excessive materialism and loose living. The dust
writers and artists. William Faulkner, for exam- storms that blackened the midwestern sky, they
ple, a 20th-century American novelist, employed believed, constituted an Old Testament judg-
Freudian elements in all his works, as did virtual- ment: the “whirlwind by day and the darkness at
ly all serious American fiction writers after World noon.”
War I.
The Depression turned the world upside
Despite outward gaiety, modernity, and un- down. The United States had preached a gospel
paralleled material prosperity, young Americans of business in the 1920s; now, many Americans
of the 1920s were “the lost generation” — so supported a more active role for government in
named by literary portraitist Gertrude Stein. the New Deal programs of President Franklin D.
Without a stable, traditional structure of values, Roosevelt. Federal money created jobs in public
the individual lost a sense of identity. The secure, works, conservation, and rural electrification.
supportive family life; the familiar, settled com- Artists and intellectuals were paid to create
munity; the natural and eternal rhythms of nature murals and state handbooks. These remedies
that guide the planting and harvesting on a farm; helped, but only the industrial build-up of World
the sustaining sense of patriotism; moral values War II renewed prosperity. After Japan attacked
inculcated by religious beliefs and observations the United States at Pearl Harbor on December
— all seemed undermined by World War I and its 7, 1941, disused shipyards and factories came to
aftermath. bustling life mass-producing ships, airplanes,
jeeps, and supplies. War production and experi-
Numerous novels, notably Hemingway’s The mentation led to new technologies, including the
Sun Also Rises (1926) and Fitzgerald’s This Side nuclear bomb. Witnessing the first experimental
of Paradise (1920), evoke the extravagance and nuclear blast, Robert Oppenheimer, leader of
disillusionment of the lost generation. In T.S. an international team of nuclear scientists,
Eliot’s influential long poem The Waste Land prophetically quoted a Hindu poem: “I am
(1922), Western civilization is symbolized by a become Death, the shatterer of worlds.”
bleak desert in desperate need of rain (spiritual
renewal). MODERNISM

The world depression of the 1930s affected The large cultural wave of Modernism,
most of the population of the United States. which gradually emerged in Europe and the
Workers lost their jobs, and factories shut down; United States in the early years of the 20th
businesses and banks failed; farmers, unable to century, expressed a sense of modern life
harvest, transport, or sell their crops, could not through art as a sharp break from the past, as
pay their debts and lost their farms. Midwestern well as from Western civilization’s classical tradi-
droughts turned the “breadbasket” of America tions. Modern life seemed radically different
into a dust bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest from traditional life — more scientific, faster,
for California in search of jobs, as vividly

61

more technological, and more mechanized. towers to illumine a forbidding outer darkness
Modernism embraced these changes. suggesting ignorance and old-fashioned tradition.

In literature, Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) de- Photography began to assume the status of a
veloped an analogue to modern art. A resident of fine art allied with the latest scientific develop-
Paris and an art collector (she and her brother ments. The photographer Alfred Stieglitz opened
Leo purchased works of the artists Paul Cézanne, a salon in New York City, and by 1908 he was
Paul Gauguin, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Pablo Pi- showing the latest European works, including
casso, and many others), Stein once explained pieces by Picasso and other European friends of
that she and Picasso were doing the same thing, Gertrude Stein. Stieglitz’s salon influenced nu-
he in art and she in writing. Using simple, con- merous writers and artists, including William
crete words as counters, she developed an Carlos Williams, who was one of the most influ-
abstract, experimental prose poetry. The child- ential American poets of the 20th century.
like quality of Stein’s simple vocabulary recalls Williams cultivated a photographic clarity of
the bright, primary colors of modern art, while image; his aesthetic dictum was “no ideas but in
her repetitions echo the repeated shapes of things.”
abstract visual compositions. By dislocating
grammar and punctuation, she achieved new Vision and viewpoint became an essential
“abstract” meanings as in her influential collec- aspect of the modernist novel as well. No
tion Tender Buttons (1914), which views objects longer was it sufficient to write a straight-
from different angles, as in a cubist painting: forward third-person narrative or (worse yet)
use a pointlessly intrusive narrator. The way the
A Table A Table means does it not my story was told became as important as the story
dear it means a whole steadiness. itself.
Is it likely that a change. A table
means more than a glass Henry James, William Faulkner, and many
even a looking glass is tall. other American writers experimented with fic-
tional points of view (some are still doing so).
Meaning, in Stein’s work, was often subordi- James often restricted the information in the
nated to technique, just as subject was less novel to what a single character would have
important than shape in abstract visual art. known. Faulkner’s novel The Sound and The Fury
Subject and technique became inseparable in (1929) breaks up the narrative into four sections,
both the visual and literary art of the period. The each giving the viewpoint of a different character
idea of form as the equivalent of content, a cor- (including a mentally retarded boy).
nerstone of post-World War II art and literature,
crystallized in this period. To analyze such modernist novels and poetry, a
school of “New Criticism” arose in the United
Technological innovation in the world of facto- States, with a new critical vocabulary. New Critics
ries and machines inspired new attentiveness to hunted the “epiphany” (moment in which a char-
technique in the arts. To take one example: Light, acter suddenly sees the transcendent truth of a
particularly electrical light, fascinated modern situation, a term derived from a holy saint’s
artists and writers. Posters and advertisements appearance to mortals); they “examined” and
of the period are full of images of floodlit “clarified” a work, hoping to “shed light” upon it
skyscrapers and light rays shooting out from through their “insights.”
automobile headlights, moviehouses, and watch-

62

POETRY 1914-1945: T.S. ELIOT translations introduced new liter-
EXPERIMENTS IN FORM ary possibilities from many cultures
Ezra Pound (1885-1972) Photo courtesy Acme Photos to modern writers. His life-work
was The Cantos, which he wrote and
Ezra Pound was one of the most published until his death. They con-
influential American poets of this tain brilliant passages, but their
century. From 1908 to 1920, he allusions to works of literature and
resided in London where he asso- art from many eras and cultures
ciated with many writers, including make them difficult. Pound’s poetry
William Butler Yeats, for whom he is best known for its clear, visual
worked as a secretary, and T.S. images, fresh rhythms, and muscu-
Eliot, whose Waste Land he drasti- lar, intelligent, unusual lines, such
cally edited and improved. He was a as, in Canto LXXXI, “The ant’s a cen-
link between the United States and taur in his dragon world,” or in
Britain, acting as contributing edi- poems inspired by Japanese haiku,
tor to Harriet Monroe’s important such as “In a Station of the Metro”
Chicago magazine Poetry and (1916):
spearheading the new school of
poetry known as Imagism, which The apparition of these faces in
advocated a clear, highly visual pre- the crowd;
sentation. After Imagism, he cham-
pioned various poetic approaches. Petals on a wet, black bough.
He eventually moved to Italy, where
he became caught up in Italian T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)
Fascism.
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in
Pound furthered Imagism in St. Louis, Missouri, to a well-to-
letters, essays, and an an- do family with roots in the north-
thology. In a letter to Monroe eastern United States. He received
in 1915, he argues for a modern- the best education of any major
sounding, visual poetry that avoids American writer of his generation
“clichés and set phrases.” In “A at Harvard College, the Sorbonne,
Few Don’ts of an Imagiste” (1913), and Merton College of Oxford Uni-
he defined “image” as something versity. He studied Sanskrit and
that “presents an intellectual and Oriental philosophy, which influ-
emotional complex in an instant of enced his poetry. Like his friend
time.” Pound’s 1914 anthology of 10 Pound, he went to England early
poets, Des Imagistes, offered and became a towering figure in the
examples of Imagist poetry by out- literary world there. One of the
standing poets, including William most respected poets of his day, his
Carlos Williams, H.D. (Hilda modernist, seemingly illogical or ab-
Doolittle), and Amy Lowell. stract iconoclastic poetry had re-
volutionary impact. He also wrote
Pound’s interests and reading influential essays and dramas, and
were universal. His adaptations and championed the importance of lit-
brilliant, if sometimes flawed,

63

erary and social traditions for the ROBERT FROST Let us go and make
modern poet. our visit.
Photo © Kosti Ruohamaa,
As a critic, Eliot is best remem- Black Star Similar imagery pervades The
bered for his formulation of the Waste Land (1922), which echoes
“objective correlative,” which he Dante’s Inferno to evoke London’s
described, in The Sacred Wood, as a thronged streets around the time of
means of expressing emotion World War I:
through “a set of objects, a situa-
tion, a chain of events” that would Unreal City,
be the “formula” of that particular Under the brown fog of a winter
emotion. Poems such as “The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915) dawn,
embody this approach, when the A crowd flowed over London
ineffectual, elderly Prufrock thinks
to himself that he has “measured Bridge, so many
out his life in coffee spoons,” I had not thought death had
using coffee spoons to reflect a
humdrum existence and a wasted undone so many... (I, 60-63)
lifetime.
The Waste Land’s vision is ulti-
The famous beginning of Eliot’s mately apocalyptic and worldwide:
“Prufrock” invites the reader into
tawdry alleys that, like modern life, Cracks and reforms and bursts
offer no answers to the questions in the violet air
life poses:
Falling towers
Let us go then, you and I, Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria
When the evening is spread Vienna London
Unreal (V, 373-377)
out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon Eliot’s other major poems
include “Gerontion” (1920),
a table; which uses an elderly man
Let us go, through certain half- to symbolize the decrepitude of
Western society; “The Hollow Men”
deserted streets, (1925), a moving dirge for the death
The muttering retreats of the spirit of contemporary hu-
Of restless nights in one-night manity; Ash-Wednesday (1930), in
which he turns explicitly toward the
cheap hotels Church of England for meaning in
And sawdust restaurants with human life; and Four Quartets
(1943), a complex, highly subjec-
oyster-shells: tive, experimental meditation on
Streets that follow like a transcendent subjects such as
time, the nature of self, and spiritu-
tedious argument al awareness. His poetry, especially
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelm-

ing question...
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”

64

his daring, innovative early work, snow.

has influenced generations.

My little horse must think it

Robert Frost (1874-1963) queer

Robert Lee Frost was born in To stop without a farmhouse

California but raised on a farm in near

the northeastern United States Between the woods and frozen

until the age of 10. Like Eliot and lake

Pound, he went to England, attract- The darkest evening of the year.

ed by new movements in poetry

there. A charismatic public reader, He gives his harness bells a

he was renowned for his tours. He shake

read an original work at the inaugu- To ask if there is some mistake.

ration of President John F. Kennedy The only other sound’s the

in 1961 that helped spark a national sweep

interest in poetry. His popularity is Of easy wind and downy flake.

easy to explain: He wrote of tradi-

tional farm life, appealing to a nos- The woods are lovely, dark and

talgia for the old ways. His subjects deep,

are universal — apple picking, But I have promises to keep,

stone walls, fences, country roads. And miles to go before I sleep,

Frost’s approach was lucid and And miles to go before I sleep.

accessible: He rarely employed pe-

dantic allusions or ellipses. His fre- Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)

quent use of rhyme also appealed Born in Pennsylvania, Wallace

to the general audience. Stevens was educated at Harvard

Frost’s work is often deceptively College and New York University

simple. Many poems suggest a Law School. He practiced law in

deeper meaning. For example, a New York City from 1904 to 1916,

quiet snowy evening by an almost a time of great artistic and poetic

hypnotic rhyme scheme may sug- activity there. On moving to Hart-

gest the not entirely unwelcome ford, Connecticut, to become an

approach of death. From: “Stopping insurance executive in 1916, he

by Woods on a Snowy Evening” continued writing poetry. His life is

(1923): remarkable for its compartmental-
WALLACE STEVENS ization: His associates in the insur-

Whose woods these are I think I ance company did not know that he

know. was a major poet. In private he con-

His house is in the village, tinued to develop extremely com-

though; plex ideas of aesthetic order

He will not see me stopping throughout his life in aptly named

here books such as Harmonium (en-

To watch his woods fill up with Photo © The Bettmann Archive larged edition 1931), Ideas of Order

65

(1935), and Parts of a World (1942). Some of his or sailor — will always find a creative outlet.
best known poems are “Sunday Morning,” “Peter
Quince at the Clavier,” “The Emperor of Ice- William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)
Cream,” “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a
Blackbird,” and “The Idea of Order at Key West.” William Carlos Williams was a practicing pedi-
atrician throughout his life; he delivered over
Stevens’s poetry dwells upon themes of the 2,000 babies and wrote poems on his prescrip-
imagination, the necessity for aesthetic form and tion pads. Williams was a classmate of poets Ezra
the belief that the order of art corresponds with Pound and Hilda Doolittle, and his early poetry
an order in nature. His vocabulary is rich and var- reveals the influence of Imagism. He later went
ious: He paints lush tropical scenes but also on to champion the use of colloquial speech; his
manages dry, humorous, and ironic vignettes. ear for the natural rhythms of American English
helped free American poetry from the iambic
Some of his poems draw upon popular culture, meter that had dominated English verse since
while others poke fun at sophisticated society or the Renaissance. His sympathy for ordinary
soar into an intellectual heaven. He is known for working people, children, and everyday events in
his exuberant word play: “Soon, with a noise like modern urban settings make his poetry attractive
tambourines / Came her attendant Byzantines.” and accessible. “The Red Wheelbarrow” (1923),
like a Dutch still life, finds interest and beauty in
Stevens’s work is full of surprising insights. everyday objects:
Sometimes he plays tricks on the reader, as in
“Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock” (1931):

The houses are haunted So much depends
By white night-gowns. upon
None are green,
Or purple with green rings, a red wheel
Or green with yellow rings, barrow
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange, glazed with rain
With socks of lace water
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going beside the white
To dream of baboons and periwinkles. chickens.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots, Williams cultivated a relaxed, natural poetry. In
Catches tigers his hands, the poem was not to become a perfect
In red weather. object of art as in Stevens, or the carefully re-
created Wordsworthian incident as in Frost.
This poem seems to complain about Instead, the poem was to capture an instant of
unimaginative lives (plain white night- time like an unposed snapshot — a concept he
gowns), but actually conjures up vivid derived from photographers and artists he met
images in the reader’s mind. At the end a drunk- at galleries like Stieglitz’s in New York City. Like
en sailor, oblivious to the proprieties, does photographs, his poems often hint at hidden pos-
“catch tigers” — at least in his dream. The poem sibilities or attractions, as in “The Young
shows that the human imagination — of reader Housewife” (1917):

66

At ten a.m. the young housewife ROBINSON JEFFERS accounts, and historical facts. The
moves about in negligee behind layout’s ample white space sug-
the wooden walls of her Photo © UPI/The Bettmann gests the open road theme of
Archive American literature and gives a
huband’s house. sense of new vistas even open to
I pass solitary in my car. the poor people who picnic in the
public park on Sundays. Like
Then again she comes to the Whitman’s persona in Leaves of
curb, Grass, Dr. Paterson moves freely
among the working people:
to call the ice-man, fish-man,
and stands -late spring,
a Sunday afternoon!
shy, uncorseted, tucking in
stray ends of hair, and I - and goes by the footpath to the
cliff (counting: the proof)
compare her
To a fallen leaf. himself among others
- treads there the same stones
The noiseless wheels of my car on which their feet slip as they
rush with a crackling sound over
dried leaves as I bow and pass climb,
paced by their dogs!
smiling.
laughing, calling to each other -
He termed his work “objectivist”
to suggest the importance of con- Wait for me!
crete, visual objects. His work often (II, i, 14-23)
captured the spontaneous, emotive
pattern of experience, and influ- BETWEEN THE WARS
enced the “Beat” writing of the Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962)
early 1950s.
Numerous American poets of
Like Eliot and Pound, Williams stature and genuine vision
tried his hand at the epic form, but arose in the years between
while their epics employ literary the world wars, among them poets
allusions directed to a small num- from the West Coast, women, and
ber of highly educated readers, African-Americans. Like the nov-
Williams instead writes for a more elist John Steinbeck, Robinson
general audience. Though he stud- Jeffers lived in California and wrote
ied abroad, he elected to live in the of the Spanish rancheros and In-
United States. His epic, Paterson dians and their mixed traditions,
(five vols., 1946-1958), celebrates and of the haunting beauty of the
his hometown of Paterson, New land. Trained in the classics and
Jersey, as seen by an autobiograph- well-read in Freud, he re-created
ical “Dr. Paterson.” In it, Williams
juxtaposed lyric passages, prose,
letters, autobiography, newspaper

67

themes of Greek tragedy set in the LANGSTON HUGHES whistles far and wee
rugged coastal seascape. He is best
known for his tragic narratives such and eddieandbill come
as Tamar (1924), Roan Stallion running from marbles and
(1925), The Tower Beyond Tragedy piracies and it’s
(1924) — a recreation of Aeschy- spring...
lus’s Agamemnon — and Medea
(1946), a re-creation of the tragedy Hart Crane (1899-1932)
by Euripides.
Hart Crane was a tormented
Edward Estlin Cummings young poet who committed suicide
(1894-1962) at age 33 by leaping into the sea. He
left striking poems, including an
Edward Estlin Cummings, com- epic, The Bridge (1930), which was
monly known as e.e. cummings, inspired by the Brooklyn Bridge, in
wrote attractive, innovative verse which he ambitiously attempted to
distinguished for its humor, grace, review the American cultural expe-
celebration of love and eroticism, rience and recast it in affirmative
and experimentation with punctua- terms. His luscious, overheated
tion and visual format on the page. style works best in short poems
A painter, he was the first American such as “Voyages” (1923, 1926) and
poet to recognize that poetry had “At Melville’s Tomb” (1926), whose
become primarily a visual, not an ending is a suitable epitaph for
oral, art; his poems used much Crane:
unusual spacing and indentation, as
well as dropping all use of capital monody shall not wake the
letters. mariner.

Like Williams, Cummings also This fabulous shadow only the
used colloquial language, sea keeps.
sharp imagery, and words
from popular culture. Like Wil- Marianne Moore (1887-1972)
liams, he took creative liberties
with layout. His poem “in Just —” Marianne Moore once wrote that
(1920) invites the reader to fill in poems were “imaginary gardens
the missing ideas: with real toads in them.” Her po-
ems are conversational, yet elabo-
in Just — rate and subtle in their syllabic ver-
sification, drawing upon extremely
Spring when the world is mud - precise description and historical
luscious the little and scientific fact. A “poet’s poet,”
lame balloonman she influenced such later poets as
her young friend Elizabeth Bishop.

Photo courtesy Knopf, Inc.
68

Langston Hughes F. SCOTT FITZGERALD dawns were young.
(1902-1967) I built my hut near the Congo

One of many talented poets of and it lulled me to sleep.
the Harlem Renaissance of the I looked upon the Nile and
1920s — in the company of James
Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, raised the pyramids above it.
Countee Cullen, and others — was I heard the singing of the
Langston Hughes. He embraced Af-
rican-American jazz rhythms and Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
was one of the first black writers went down to New Orleans,
to attempt to make a profitable ca- and I’ve seen its muddy
reer out of his writing. Hughes
incorporated blues, spirituals, col- bosom turn all golden in the
loquial speech, and folkways in his sunset
poetry.
I’ve known rivers
An influential cultural organizer, Ancient, dusky rivers.
Hughes published numerous black
anthologies and began black the- My soul has grown deep like
ater groups in Los Angeles and the rivers.
Chicago, as well as New York City.
He also wrote effective journalism, PROSE WRITING, 1914-1945:
creating the character Jesse B. AMERICAN REALISM
Semple (“simple”) to express
social commentary. One of his Although American prose be-
most beloved poems, “The Negro tween the wars experimented
Speaks of Rivers” (1921, 1925), with viewpoint and form,
embraces his African — and uni- Americans wrote more realistically,
versal — heritage in a grand epic on the whole, than did Europeans.
catalogue. The poem suggests that, Novelist Ernest Hemingway wrote
like the great rivers of the world, of war, hunting, and other masculine
African culture will endure and pursuits in a stripped, plain style;
deepen: William Faulkner set his powerful
southern novels spanning genera-
I’ve known rivers: tions and cultures firmly in Mis-
I’ve known rivers ancient as the sissippi heat and dust; and Sinclair
Lewis delineated bourgeois lives
world and older than the with ironic clarity.
flow of human blood in
human veins. The importance of facing reality
became a dominant theme in the
My soul has grown deep like the 1920s and 1930s: Writers such as F.
rivers. Scott Fitzgerald and the playwright
Eugene O’Neill repeatedly por-
trayed the tragedy awaiting those
who live in flimsy dreams.

I bathed in the Euphrates when Photo courtesy
Culver Pictures, Inc.

69

F. Scott Fitzgerald ERNEST HEMINGWAY in the collections Flappers and
(1896-1940) Philosophers (1920), Tales of the
Photo courtesy Jazz Age (1922), and All the Sad
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald’s life Pix Publishing, Inc. Young Men (1926). More than any
resembles a fairy tale. During other writer, Fitzgerald captured
World War I, Fitzgerald enlisted in the glittering, desperate life of the
the U.S. Army and fell in love with a 1920s; This Side of Paradise was
rich and beautiful girl, Zelda Sayre, heralded as the voice of modern
who lived near Montgomery, Ala- American youth. His second novel,
bama, where he was stationed. The Beautiful and the Damned
Zelda broke off their engagement (1922), continued his exploration of
because he was relatively poor. the self-destructive extravagance of
After he was discharged at war’s his times.
end, he went to seek his literary
fortune in New York City in order to Fitzgerald’s special qualities in-
marry her. clude a dazzling style perfectly suit-
ed to his theme of seductive glam-
His first novel, This Side of our. A famous section from The
Paradise (1920), became a best- Great Gatsby masterfully summa-
seller, and at 24 they married. rizes a long passage of time: “There
Neither of them was able to with- was music from my neighbor’s
stand the stresses of success and house through the summer nights.
fame, and they squandered their In his blue gardens men and girls
money. They moved to France to came and went like moths among
economize in 1924 and returned the whisperings and the champagne
seven years later. Zelda became and the stars.”
mentally unstable and had to be
institutionalized; Fitzgerald himself Ernest Hemingway
became an alcoholic and died young (1899-1961)
as a movie screenwriter.
Few writers have lived as color-
Fitzgerald’s secure place in fully as Ernest Hemingway, whose
American literature rests pri- career could have come out of one
marily on his novel The Great of his adventurous novels. Like Fitz-
Gatsby (1925), a brilliantly writ- gerald, Dreiser, and many other fine
ten, economically structured story novelists of the 20th century,
about the American dream of the Hemingway came from the U.S.
self-made man. The protagonist, Midwest. Born in Illinois, Heming-
the mysterious Jay Gatsby, discov- way spent childhood vacations in
ers the devastating cost of success Michigan on hunting and fishing
in terms of personal fulfillment and trips. He volunteered for an ambu-
love. Other fine works include lance unit in France during World
Tender Is the Night (1934), about a War I, but was wounded and hospi-
young psychiatrist whose life is talized for six months. After the war,
doomed by his marriage to an as a war correspondent based in
unstable woman, and some stories

70

Paris, he met expatriate American WILLIAM FAULKNER came a spokesperson for his gener-
writers Sherwood Anderson, Ezra ation. But instead of painting its
Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Photo © UPI/The Bettmann fatal glamour as did Fitzgerald, who
Gertrude Stein. Stein, in particular, Archive never fought in World War I,
influenced his spare style. Hemingway wrote of war, death, and
the “lost generation” of cynical sur-
After his novel The Sun Also Rises vivors. His characters are not
(1926) brought him fame, he cov- dreamers but tough bullfighters,
ered the Spanish Civil War, World soldiers, and athletes. If intellectu-
War II, and the fighting in China in al, they are deeply scarred and dis-
the 1940s. On a safari in Africa, he illusioned.
was badly injured when his small
plane crashed; still, he continued His hallmark is a clean style
to enjoy hunting and sport fishing, devoid of unnecessary words. Of-
activities that inspired some of his ten he uses understatement: In A
best work. The Old Man and the Sea Farewell to Arms (1929) the heroine
(1952), a short poetic novel about dies in childbirth saying “I’m not a
a poor, old fisherman who heroical- bit afraid. It’s just a dirty trick.” He
ly catches a huge fish devoured by once compared his writing to ice-
sharks, won him the Pulitzer Prize bergs: “There is seven-eighths of
in 1953; the next year he received it under water for every part that
the Nobel Prize. Discouraged by shows.”
a troubled family background,
illness, and the belief that he Hemingway’s fine ear for dia-
was losing his gift for writing, logue and exact description shows
Hemingway shot himself to death in his excellent short stories, such
in 1961. as “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and
“The Short Happy Life of Francis
Hemingway is arguably the Macomber.” Critical opinion, in fact,
most popular American generally holds his short stories
novelist of this century. equal or superior to his novels. His
His sympathies are basically apolit- best novels include The Sun Also
ical and humanistic, and in this Rises, about the demoralized life of
sense he is universal. His simple expatriates after World War I; A
style makes his novels easy to com- Farewell to Arms, about the tragic
prehend, and they are often set in love affair of an American soldier
exotic surroundings. A believer in and an English nurse during the
the “cult of experience,” Heming- war; For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940),
way often involved his characters in set during the Spanish Civil War;
dangerous situations in order to and The Old Man and the Sea.
reveal their inner natures; in his
later works, the danger sometimes William Faulkner (1897-1962)
becomes an occasion for mascu-
line assertion. Born to an old southern family,
William Harrison Faulkner was
Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway be- raised in Oxford, Mississippi,

71

where he lived most of his life. SINCLAIR LEWIS as much as in the subject at hand.
Faulkner created an entire imagi- The use of various viewpoints
native landscape, Yoknapatawpha Photo courtesy makes Faulkner more self-referen-
County, mentioned in numerous Pix Publishing, Inc. tial, or “reflexive,” than Hemingway
novels, along with several families or Fitzgerald; each novel reflects
with interconnections extending 72 upon itself, while it simultaneously
back for generations. Yoknapat- unfolds a story of universal inter-
awpha County, with its capital, est. Faulkner’s themes are south-
“Jefferson,” is closely modeled on ern tradition, family, community, the
Oxford, Mississippi, and its sur- land, history and the past, race, and
roundings. Faulkner re-creates the the passions of ambition and love.
history of the land and the various He also created three novels focus-
races — Indian, African-American, ing on the rise of a degenerate fam-
Euro-American, and various mix- ily, the Snopes clan: The Hamlet
tures — who have lived on it. An (1940), The Town (1957), and The
innovative writer, Faulkner experi- Mansion (1959).
mented brilliantly with narrative
chronology, different points of view NOVELS OF SOCIAL
and voices (including those of out- AWARENESS
casts, children, and illiterates), and
a rich and demanding baroque style Since the 1890s, an undercur-
built of extremely long sentences rent of social protest had
full of complicated subordinate coursed through American
parts. literature, welling up in the nat-
uralism of Stephen Crane and
The best of Faulkner’s novels Theodore Dreiser and in the clear
include The Sound and the Fury messages of the muckraking novel-
(1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930), ists. Later socially engaged authors
two modernist works experiment- included Sinclair Lewis, John
ing with viewpoint and voice to Steinbeck, John Dos Passos,
probe southern families under the Richard Wright, and the dramatist
stress of losing a family member; Clifford Odets. They were linked to
Light in August (1932), about com- the 1930s in their concern for the
plex and violent relations between welfare of the common citizen and
a white woman and a black man; their focus on groups of people —
and Absalom, Absalom! (1936), per- the professions, as in Sinclair
haps his finest, about the rise of a Lewis’s archetypal Arrowsmith (a
self-made plantation owner and his physician) or Babbitt (a local busi-
tragic fall through racial prejudice nessman); families, as in Stein-
and a failure to love. beck’s The Grapes of Wrath; or
urban masses, as Dos Passos ac-
Most of these novels use differ- complishes through his 11 major
ent characters to tell parts of the characters in his U.S.A. trilogy.
story and demonstrate how mean-
ing resides in the manner of telling,

Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) JOHN STEINBECK stresses that develop within the
marriage of an older judge and his
Harry Sinclair Lewis was born in Photo courtesy young wife.
Sauk Centre, Minnesota, and grad- Pinney & Beecher
uated from Yale University. He took John Dos Passos (1896-1970)
time off from school to work at a 73
socialist community, Helicon Home Like Sinclair Lewis, John Dos
Colony, financed by muckraking Passos began as a left-wing radical
novelist Upton Sinclair. Lewis’s but moved to the right as he aged.
Main Street (1920) satirized Dos Passos wrote realistically, in
monotonous, hypocritical small- line with the doctrine of socialist
town life in Gopher Prairie, realism. His best work achieves a
Minnesota. His incisive presenta- scientific objectivism and almost
tion of American life and his criti- documentary effect. Dos Passos
cism of American materialism, nar- developed an experimental collage
rowness, and hypocrisy brought technique for his masterwork
him national and international U.S.A., consisting of The 42nd
recognition. In 1926, he was Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and
offered and declined a Pulizer The Big Money (1936). This sprawl-
Prize for Arrowsmith (1925), a ing collection covers the social his-
novel tracing a doctor’s efforts to tory of the United States from 1900
maintain his medical ethics amid to 1930 and exposes the moral cor-
greed and corruption. In 1930, he ruption of materialistic American
became the first American to win society through the lives of its
the Nobel Prize for Literature. characters.

Lewis’s other major novels in- Dos Passos’s new techniques in-
clude Babbitt (1922). George cluded “newsreel” sections taken
Babbitt is an ordinary busi- from contemporary headlines, pop-
nessman living and working in ular songs, and advertisements, as
Zenith, an ordinary American town. well as “biographies” briefly set-
Babbitt is moral and enterprising, ting forth the lives of important
and a believer in business as the Americans of the period, such as
new scientific approach to modern inventor Thomas Edison, labor
life. Becoming restless, he seeks organizer Eugene Debs, film star
fulfilment but is disillusioned by an Rudolph Valentino, financier J.P.
affair with a bohemian woman, re- Morgan, and sociologist Thorstein
turns to his wife, and accepts his Veblen. Both the newsreels and
lot. The novel added a new word to biographies lend Dos Passos’s nov-
the American language — “babbit- els a documentary value; a third
try,” meaning narrow-minded, com- technique, the “camera eye,” con-
placent, bourgeois ways. Elmer sists of stream of consciousness
Gantry (1927) exposes revivalist prose poems that offer a subjective
religion in the United States, while response to the events described in
Cass Timberlane (1945) studies the the books.

John Steinbeck (1902-1968) JEAN TOOMER American jazz swept the United
States by storm, and jazz musicians
Like Sinclair Lewis, John Photo © UPI/The Bettmann and composers like Duke Ellington
Steinbeck is held in higher critical Archive became stars beloved across the
esteem outside the United States United States and overseas. Bessie
than in it today, largely because he Smith and other blues singers pre-
received the Nobel Prize for sented frank, sensual, wry lyrics
Literature in 1963 and the interna- raw with emotion. Black spirituals
tional fame it confers. In both became widely appreciated as
cases, the Nobel Committee select- uniquely beautiful religious music.
ed liberal American writers noted Ethel Waters, the black actress, tri-
for their social criticism. umphed on the stage, and black
American dance and art flourished
Steinbeck, a Californian, set with music and drama.
much of his writing in the Salinas
Valley near San Francisco. His best Among the rich variety of talent
known work is the Pulitzer Prize- in Harlem, many visions coexisted.
winning novel The Grapes of Wrath Carl Van Vechten’s sympathetic
(1939), which follows the travails of 1926 novel of Harlem gives some
a poor Oklahoma family that loses idea of the complex and bitter-
its farm during the Depression and sweet life of black America in the
travels to California to seek work. face of economic and social
Family members suffer conditions inequality.
of feudal oppression by rich
landowners. Other works set in The poet Countee Cullen (1903-
California include Tortilla Flat 1946), a native of Harlem who was
(1935), Of Mice and Men (1937), briefly married to W.E.B. Du Bois’s
Cannery Row (1945), and East of daughter, wrote accomplished
Eden (1952). rhymed poetry, in accepted forms,
which was much admired by whites.
Steinbeck combines realism with He believed that a poet should not
a primitivist romanticism that finds allow race to dictate the subject
virtue in poor farmers who live matter and style of a poem. On the
close to the land. His fiction other end of the spectrum were
demonstrates the vulnerability of African-Americans who rejected
such people, who can be uprooted the United States in favor of
by droughts and are the first to suf- Marcus Garvey’s “Back to Africa”
fer in periods of political unrest movement. Somewhere in between
and economic depression. lies the work of Jean Toomer.

THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE Jean Toomer (1894-1967)

During the exuberant 1920s, Like Cullen, African-American
Harlem, the black commu- fiction writer and poet Jean
nity situated uptown in New Toomer envisioned an American
York City, sparkled with passion and identity that would transcend race.
creativity. The sounds of its black

74

Perhaps for this reason, he bril- RICHARD WRIGHT when the boy was five. Wright was
liantly employed poetic traditions the first African-American novelist
of rhyme and meter and did not to reach a general audience, even
seek out new “black” forms for his though he had barely a ninth grade
poetry. His major work, Cane education. His harsh childhood is
(1923), is ambitious and innovative, depicted in one of his best books,
however. Like Williams’s Paterson, his autobiography, Black Boy
Cane incorporates poems, prose (1945). He later said that his sense
vignettes, stories, and autobio- of deprivation, due to racism, was
graphical notes. In it, an African- so great that only reading kept him
American struggles to discover his alive.
selfhood within and beyond the
black communities in rural Georgia, The social criticism and realism
Washington, D.C., and Chicago, of Sherwood Anderson, Theodore
Illinois, and as a black teacher in Dreiser, and Sinclair Lewis espe-
the South. In Cane, Toomer’s cially inspired Wright. During the
Georgia rural black folk are natural- 1930s, he joined the Communist
ly artistic: party; in the 1940s, he moved to
France, where he knew Gertrude
Their voices rise...the pine trees Stein and Jean-Paul Sartre and
are guitars, became an anti-Communist. His
outspoken writing blazed a path
Strumming, pine-needles fall for subsequent African-American
like sheets of rain... novelists.

Their voices rise...the chorus of His work includes Uncle Tom’s
the cane Children (1938), a book of
short stories, and the pow-
Is caroling a vesper to the erful and relentless novel Native
stars...(I, 21-24) Son (1940), in which Bigger
Thomas, an uneducated black
Cane contrasts the fast pace of youth, mistakenly kills his white
African-American life in the city of employer’s daughter, gruesomely
Washington: burns the body, and murders his
black girlfriend — fearing she will
Money burns the pocket, pocket betray him. Although some African-
hurts, Americans have criticized Wright
for portraying a black character as
Bootleggers in silken shirts, a murderer, Wright’s novel was a
Ballooned, zooming Cadillacs, necessary and overdue expression
Whizzing, whizzing down the of the racial inequality that has
been the subject of so much debate
street-car tracks. (II, 1-4) in the United States.

Richard Wright (1908-1960) Photo courtesy
Howard University
Richard Wright was born into
a poor Mississippi sharecropping
family that his father deserted

75

Zora Neale Hurston binger of the women’s movement,
(1903-1960) Hurston inspired and influenced
such contemporary writers as Alice
Born in the small town of Walker and Toni Morrison through
Eatonville, Florida, Zora Neale books such as her autobiography,
Hurston is known as one of the Dust Tracks on a Road (1942).
lights of the Harlem Renaissance.
She first came to New York City at LITERARY CURRENTS: THE
the age of 16 — having arrived as FUGITIVES
part of a traveling theatrical troupe. AND NEW CRITICISM
A strikingly gifted storyteller who
captivated her listeners, she at- From the Civil War into the
tended Barnard College, where she 20th century, the southern
studied with anthropologist Franz United States had remained a
Boaz and came to grasp ethnicity political and economic backwater
from a scientific perspective. Boaz ridden with racism and supersti-
urged her to collect folklore from tion, but, at the same time, blessed
her native Florida environment, with rich folkways and a strong
which she did. The distinguished sense of pride and tradition. It had
folklorist Alan Lomax called her a somewhat unfair reputation for
Mules and Men (1935) “the most being a cultural desert of provin-
engaging, genuine, and skillful- cialism and ignorance.
ly written book in the field of
folklore.” Ironically, the most significant
20th-century regional literary
Hurston also spent time in Haiti, movement was that of the Fugitives
studying voodoo and collecting Ca- — led by poet-critic-theoretician
ribbean folklore that was antholo- John Crowe Ransom, poet Allen
gized in Tell My Horse (1938). Her Tate, and novelist-poet-essayist
natural command of colloquial En- Robert Penn Warren. This southern
glish puts her in the great tradition literary school rejected “northern”
of Mark Twain. Her writing sparkles urban, commercial values, which
with colorful language and comic they felt had taken over America.
— or tragic — stories from the The Fugitives called for a return to
African-American oral tradition. the land and to American traditions
that could be found in the South.
Hurston was an impressive nov- ZORA NEALE HURSTON The movement took its name from
elist. Her most important work, a literary magazine, The Fugitive,
Their Eyes Were Watching God published from 1922 to 1925 at
(1937), is a moving, fresh depiction Vanderbilt University in Nashville,
of a beautiful mulatto woman’s Tennessee, and with which Ran-
maturation and renewed happiness som, Tate, and Warren were all
as she moves through three mar- associated.
riages. The novel vividly evokes the
lives of African-Americans working These three major Fugitive writ-
the land in the rural South. A har-
Photo © Carl Van Vechten,

courtesy Yale University ers were also associated with New

76

Criticism, an approach to under- wine, enjoyed higher status than
standing literature through close indigenous productions.
readings and attentiveness to for-
mal patterns (of imagery, meta- During the 19th century, melo-
phors, metrics, sounds, and sym- dramas with exemplary democratic
bols) and their suggested mean- figures and clear contrasts be-
ings. Ransom, leading theorist of tween good and evil had been pop-
the southern renaissance between ular. Plays about social problems
the wars, published a book, The such as slavery also drew large
New Criticism (1941), on this audiences; sometimes these plays
method, which offered an alterna- were adaptations of novels like
tive to previous extra-literary meth- Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Not until the
ods of criticism based on histo- 20th century would serious plays
ry and biography. New Criticism attempt aesthetic innovation. Pop-
became the dominant American ular culture showed vital devel-
critical approach in the 1940s and opments, however, especially in
1950s because it proved to be well- vaudeville (popular variety theater
suited to modernist writers such as involving skits, clowning, music, and
Eliot and could absorb Freudian the like). Minstrel shows, based on
theory (especially its structural African-American music and folk-
categories such as id, ego, and ways, performed by white charac-
superego) and approaches drawing ters using “blackface” makeup,
on mythic patterns. also developed original forms and
expressions.

20TH-CENTURY AMERICAN Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953)

DRAMA Eugene O’Neill is the great figure

American drama imitated of American theater. His numerous
English and European the- plays combine enormous technical
ater until well into the 20th originality with freshness of vision

century. Often, plays from England and emotional depth. O’Neill’s ear-

or translated from European lan- liest dramas concern the working

guages dominated theater seasons. class and poor; later works explore

An inadequate copyright law that subjective realms, such as obses-

failed to protect and promote EUGENE O’NEILL sions and sex, and underscore his
American dramatists worked reading in Freud and his anguished

against genuinely original drama. attempt to come to terms with his

So did the “star system,” in which dead mother, father, and brother.

actors and actresses, rather than His play Desire Under the Elms

the actual plays, were given most (1924) recreates the passions hid-

acclaim. Americans flocked to see den within one family; The Great

European actors who toured the- God Brown (1926) uncovers the

aters in the United States. In addi- unconsciousness of a wealthy busi-

tion, imported drama, like imported Photo © The Bettmann Archive nessman; and Strange Interlude

77

(1928), a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, traces the Thornton Wilder (1897-1975)
tangled loves of one woman. These powerful
plays reveal different personalities reverting to Thornton Wilder is known for his plays Our
primitive emotions or confusion under intense Town (1938) and The Skin of Our Teeth (1942),
stress. and for his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey
(1927).
O’Neill continued to explore the Freudian
pressures of love and dominance within families Our Town conveys positive American values. It
in a trilogy of plays collectively entitled Mourning has all the elements of sentimentality and nostal-
Becomes Electra (1931), based on the classical gia — the archetypal traditional small country
Oedipus trilogy by Sophocles. His later plays town, the kindly parents and mischievous chil-
include the acknowledged masterpieces The dren, the young lovers. Still, the innovative ele-
Iceman Cometh (1946), a stark work on the ments such as ghosts, voices from the audience,
theme of death, and Long Day’s Journey Into and daring time shifts keep the play engaging. It
Night (1956) — a powerful, extended autobiog- is, in effect, a play about life and death in which
raphy in dramatic form focusing on his own fami- the dead are reborn, at least for the moment.
ly and their physical and psychological deteriora-
tion, as witnessed in the course of one night. This Clifford Odets (1906-1963)
work was part of a cycle of plays O’Neill was
working on at the time of his death. Clifford Odets, a master of social drama, came

O’Neill redefined the theater by abandoning from an Eastern European, Jewish immigrant
traditional divisions into acts and scenes
(Strange Interlude has nine acts, and Mourning background. Raised in New York City, he became
Becomes Electra takes nine hours to perform);
using masks such as those found in Asian and one of the original acting members of the Group
ancient Greek theater; introducing Shake-
spearean monologues and Greek choruses; and Theater directed by Harold Clurman, Lee
producing special effects through lighting and
sound. He is generally acknowledged to have Strasberg, and Cheryl Crawford, which was com-
been America’s foremost dramatist. In 1936 he
received the Nobel Prize for Literature — the mitted to producing only native American dramas.
first American playwright to be so honored.
Odets’s best-known play was Waiting for Lefty

(1935), an experimental one-act drama that fer-

vently advocated labor unionism. His Awake and

Sing!, a nostalgic family drama, became another

popular success, followed by Golden Boy, the

story of an Italian immigrant youth who ruins his

musical talent (he is a violinist) when he is

seduced by the lure of money to become a boxer

and injures his hands. Like Fitzgerald’s The Great

Gatsby and Drieser’s An American Tragedy, the

play warns against excessive ambition and

materialism. ■

78

CHAPTER the catalog of shocks to American culture is long
and varied. The change that most transformed
7 American society, however, was the rise of the
mass media and mass culture. First radio, then
AMERICAN POETRY, movies, and later an all-powerful, ubiquitous tele-
1945-1990: vision presence changed American life at its
roots. From a private, literate, elite culture based
THE ANTI-TRADITION on the book and reading, the United States
became a media culture attuned to the voice on
Traditional forms and ideas no longer the radio, the music of compact discs and cas-
seemed to provide meaning to many settes, film, and the images on the television
American poets in the second half of the screen.
20th century. Events after World War II produced
for many writers a sense of history as discontinu- American poetry was directly influenced by the
ous: Each act, emotion, and moment was seen as mass media and electronic technology. Films,
unique. Style and form now seemed provisional, videotapes, and tape recordings of poetry read-
makeshift, reflexive of the process of composi- ings and interviews with poets became available,
tion and the writer’s self-awareness. Familiar cat- and new inexpensive photographic methods of
egories of expression were suspect; originality printing encouraged young poets to self-publish
was becoming a new tradition. and young editors to begin literary magazines —
of which there were more than 2,000 by 1990.
The break from tradition gathered momentum
during the 1957 obscenity trial of Allen Ginsberg’s At the same time, Americans became uncom-
poem Howl. When the San Francisco customs fortably aware that technology, so useful as a tool,
office seized the book, its publisher, Lawrence could be used to manipulate the culture. To
Ferlinghetti’s City Lights, brought a lawsuit. Americans seeking alternatives, poetry seemed
During that notorious court case, famous critics more relevant than before: It offered people a way
defended Howl’s passionate social criticism on to express subjective life and articulate the
the basis of the poem’s redeeming literary merit. impact of technology and mass society on the
Howl’s triumph over the censors helped propel individual.
the rebellious Beat poets — especially Ginsberg
and his friends Jack Kerouac and William A host of styles, some regional, some associat-
Burroughs — to fame. ed with famous schools or poets, vied for atten-
tion; post-World War II American poetry was
It is not hard to find historical causes for this decentralized, richly varied, and difficult to sum-
dissociated sensibility in the United States. World marize. For the sake of discussion, however, it can
War II itself, the rise of anonymity and con- be arranged along a spectrum, producing three
sumerism in a mass urban society, the protest overlapping camps — the traditional on one end,
movements of the 1960s, the decade-long Vietnam the idiosyncratic in the middle, and the experi-
conflict, the Cold War, environmental threats — mental on the other end. Traditional poets have
maintained or revitalized poetic traditions.
Idiosyncratic poets have used both traditional and
innovative techniques in creating unique voices.
Experimental poets have courted new cultural
styles.

79

TRADITIONALISM poem: “Sentinel of the grave who counts us all!”
Traditional poets also at times used a somewhat
T raditional writers include acknowledged rhetorical diction of obsolete or odd words, using
masters of established forms and diction many adjectives (for example, “sepulchral owl”)
who wrote with a readily recognizable craft, and inversions, in which the natural, spoken word
often using rhyme or a set metrical pattern. Often order of English is altered unnaturally. Sometimes
they were from the U.S. eastern seaboard or the the effect is noble, as in the line by Warren; other
southern part of the country, and taught in col- times, the poetry seems stilted and out of touch
leges and universities. Richard Eberhart and with real emotions, as in Tate’s line: “Fatuously
Richard Wilbur; the older Fugitive poets John touched the hems of the hierophants.”
Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn
Warren; such accomplished younger poets as Occasionally, as in Hollander, Howard, and
John Hollander and Richard Howard; and the early James Merrill (1926-1995), self-conscious diction
Robert Lowell are examples. In the years after combines with wit, puns, and literary allusions.
World War II, they became established and were Merrill, who was innovative in his urban themes,
frequently anthologized. unrhymed lines, personal subjects, and light con-
versational tone, shares a witty habit with the tra-
The previous chapter discussed the refine- ditionalists in “The Broken Heart” (1966), writing
ment, respect for nature, and profoundly conser- about a marriage as if it were a cocktail:
vative values of the Fugitives. These qualities
grace much poetry oriented to traditional modes. Always that same old story —
Traditionalist poets were generally precise, real- Father Time and Mother Earth,
istic, and witty; many, like Richard Wilbur (1921- ), A marriage on the rocks.
were influenced by British metaphysical poets
brought to favor by T.S. Eliot. Wilbur’s most Obvious fluency and verbal pyrotechnics by
famous poem, “A World Without Objects Is a some poets, including Merrill and John
Sensible Emptiness” (1950), takes its title from Ashbery, made them successful in tradi-
Thomas Traherne, a 17th-century English meta- tional terms, although they redefined poetry in
physical poet. Its vivid opening illustrates the clar- radically innovative ways. Stylistic gracefulness
ity some poets found within rhyme and formal made some poets seem more traditional than
regularity: they were, as in the case of Randall Jarrell (1914-
1965) and A.R. Ammons (1926-2001). Ammons cre-
The tall camels of the spirit ated intense dialogues between humanity and
Steer for their deserts, passing the last nature; Jarrell stepped into the trapped con-
groves loud sciousness of the dispossessed — women, chil-
With the sawmill shrill of the locust, to the dren, doomed soldiers, as in “The Death of the
whole honey of the arid Ball Turret Gunner” (1945):

Sun. They are slow, proud...

Traditional poets, unlike many experimentalists From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
who distrusted “too poetic” diction, welcomed And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
resounding poetic lines. Robert Penn Warren Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream
(1905-1989) ended one poem with the words: “To
love so well the world that we may believe, in the of life,
end, in God.” Allen Tate (1899-1979) ended a I woke to black flak and the nightmare

fighters.

80

When I died they washed me out ROBERT LOWELL with the political and social estab-
of the turret with a hose. lishment. He was a descendant of
Photo © Nancy Crampton the respected Boston Brahmin fam-
Although many traditional poets ily that included the famous 19th-
used rhyme, not all rhymed poetry century poet James Russell Lowell
was traditional in subject or tone. and a 20th-century president of
Poet Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) Harvard University.
wrote of the difficulties of living —
let alone writing — in urban slums. Robert Lowell found an identity
Her “Kitchenette Building” (1945) outside his elite background, how-
asks how ever. He left Harvard to attend
Kenyon College in Ohio, where he
could a dream send up through rejected his Puritan ancestry and
onion fumes converted to Catholicism. Jailed for
a year as a conscientious objector in
Its white and violet, fight with World War II, he later publicly
fried potatoes protested the Vietnam conflict.

And yesterday’s garbage ripening Lowell’s early books, Land of
in the hall… Unlikeness (1944) and Lord Weary’s
Castle (1946), which won a Pulitzer
Many poets, including Brooks, Prize, revealed great control of tra-
Adrienne Rich, Richard Wilbur, ditional forms and styles, strong
Robert Lowell, and Robert Penn feeling, and an intensely personal
Warren, began writing traditionally, yet historical vision. The violence
using rhyme and meters, but they and specificity of the early work is
abandoned these in the 1960s under overpowering in poems like
the pressure of public events and a “Children of Light” (1946), a harsh
gradual trend toward open forms. condemnation of the Puritans who
killed Indians and whose descen-
Robert Lowell (1917-1977) dants burned surplus grain instead
of shipping it to hungry people.
The most influential poet of the Lowell writes: “Our fathers wrung
period, Robert Lowell, began tradi- their bread from stocks and stones /
tionally but was influenced by exper- And fenced their gardens with the
imental currents. Because his life Redman’s bones.”
and work spanned the period
between the older modernist mas- Lowell’s next book, The Mills of
ters like T.S. Eliot and the recent the Kavanaughs (1951), contains
antitraditional writers, his career moving dramatic monologues in
places the later experimentalism in which members of his family reveal
a larger context. their tenderness and failings. As
always, his style mixes the human
Lowell fits the mold of the acade- with the majestic. Often he uses tra-
mic writer: white, male, Protestant ditional rhyme, but his colloquialism
by birth, well educated, and linked disguises it until it seems like back-

81

ground melody. It was experimental SYLVIA PLATH he initiated confessional poetry, a
poetry, however, that gave Lowell his new mode in which he bared his
breakthrough into a creative individ- Photo © UPI / The Bettmann most tormenting personal prob-
ual idiom. Archive lems with great honesty and inten-
sity. In essence, he not only discov-
On a reading tour in the mid- ered his individuality but celebrat-
1950s, Lowell heard some of the new ed it in its most difficult and private
experimental poetry for the first manifestations. He transformed
time. Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Gary himself into a contemporary, at
Snyder’s Myths and Texts, still home with the self, the fragmen-
unpublished, were being read and tary, and the form as process.
chanted, sometimes to jazz accom-
paniment, in coffee houses in North Lowell’s transformation, a water-
Beach, a section of San Francisco. shed for poetry after the war,
Lowell felt that next to these, his opened the way for many younger
own accomplished poems were too writers. In For the Union Dead
stilted, rhetorical, and encased in (1964), Notebook 1967-68 (1969),
convention; when reading them and later books, he continued his
aloud, he made spontaneous revi- autobiographical explorations and
sions toward a more colloquial dic- technical innovations, drawing upon
tion. “My own poems seemed like his experience of psychoanalysis.
prehistoric monsters dragged down Lowell’s confessional poetry has
into a bog and death by their ponder- been particularly influential. Works
ous armor,” he wrote later. “I was by John Berryman, Anne Sexton,
reciting what I no longer felt.” and Sylvia Plath (the last two his
students), to mention only a few,
At this point Lowell, like many are impossible to imagine without
poets after him, accepted the chal- Lowell.
lenge of learning from the rival tradi-
tion in America — the school of IDIOSYNCRATIC POETS
William Carlos Williams. “It's as if no
poet except Williams had really seen Poets who developed unique
America or heard its language,” styles drawing on tradition
Lowell wrote in 1962. Henceforth, but extending it into new
Lowell changed his writing drastical- realms with a distinctively contem-
ly, using the “quick changes of tone, porary flavor, in addition to Plath
atmosphere, and speed” that Lowell and Sexton, include John Berryman,
most appreciated in Williams. Theodore Roethke, Richard Hugo,
Philip Levine, James Dickey,
Lowell dropped many of his Elizabeth Bishop, and Adrienne
obscure allusions; his rhymes Rich.
became integral to the experience
within the poem instead of superim- Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)
posed on it. The stanzaic structure,
too, collapsed; new improvisational Sylvia Plath lived an outwardly
forms arose. In Life Studies (1959), exemplary life, attending Smith

82

College on scholarship, graduating first in her You have an eye, it’s an image.
class, and winning a Fulbright grant to Cambridge My boy, it’s your last resort.
University in England. There she met her charis- Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.
matic husband-to-be, poet Ted Hughes, with
whom she had two children and settled in a coun- Plath dares to use a nursery rhyme language, a
try house in England. brutal directness. She has a knack for using bold
images from popular culture. Of a baby she
Beneath the fairy-tale success festered unre- writes, “Love set you going like a fat gold watch.”
solved psychological problems evoked in her high- In “Daddy,” she imagines her father as the
ly readable novel The Bell Jar (1963). Some of Dracula of cinema: “There’s a stake in your fat
these problems were personal, while others black heart / And the villagers never liked you.”
arose from her sense of repressive attitudes
toward women in the 1950s. Among these were Anne Sexton (1928-1974)
the beliefs — shared by many women themselves
— that women should not show anger or ambi- Like Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton was a passionate
tiously pursue a career, and instead find fulfill- woman who attempted to be wife, mother, and
ment in tending their husbands and children. poet on the eve of the women’s movement in the
Professionally successful women like Plath felt United States. Like Plath, she suffered from men-
that they lived a contradiction. tal illness and ultimately committed suicide.

Plath’s storybook life crumbled when she and Sexton’s confessional poetry is more autobio-
Hughes separated and she cared for the young graphical than Plath’s and lacks the craftedness
children in a London apartment during a winter of Plath’s earlier poems exhibit. Sexton’s poems
extreme cold. Ill, isolated, and in despair, Plath appeal powerfully to the emotions, however. They
worked against the clock to produce a series of thrust taboo subjects into close focus. Often they
stunning poems before she committed suicide by daringly introduce female topics such as child-
gassing herself in her kitchen. These poems were bearing, the female body, or marriage seen from a
collected in the volume Ariel (1965), two years woman’s point of view. In poems like “Her Kind”
after her death. Robert Lowell, who wrote the (1960), Sexton identifies with a witch burned at
introduction, noted her poetry’s rapid develop- the stake:
ment from the time she and Anne Sexton had
attended his poetry classes in 1958. I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
Plath’s early poetry is well crafted and tradition- learning the last bright routes, survivor
al, but her late poems exhibit a desperate bravura where your flames still bite my thigh
and proto-feminist cry of anguish. In “The and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
Applicant” (1966), Plath exposes the emptiness in A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
the current role of wife (who is reduced to an I have been her kind.
inanimate “it”):

A living doll, everywhere you look. The titles of her works indicate their concern
It can sew, it can cook. with madness and death. They include To Bedlam
It can talk, talk, talk. and Part Way Back (1960), Live or Die (1966), and
the posthumous book The Awful Rowing Toward
It works, there is nothing wrong with it. God (1975).
You have a hole, it’s a poultice.

83

John Berryman (1914-1972) JAMES DICKEY hand or ancient riddles: “Who
stunned the dirt into noise? / Ask the
John Berryman’s life paralleled Photo © Nancy Crampton mole, he knows.”
Robert Lowell’s in some respects.
Born in Oklahoma, Berryman was Richard Hugo (1923-1982)
educated in the Northeast — at prep
school and at Columbia University, Richard Hugo, a native of Seattle,
and later was a fellow at Princeton Washington, studied under
University. Specializing in traditional Theodore Roethke. He grew up poor
forms and meters, he was inspired in dismal urban environments and
by early American history and wrote excelled at communicating the
self-critical, confessional poems in hopes, fears, and frustrations of
his Dream Songs (1969) that feature working people against the back-
a grotesque autobiographical char- drop of the northwestern United
acter named Henry and reflections States.
on his own teaching routine, chronic
alcoholism, and ambition. Hugo wrote nostalgic, confession-
al poems in bold iambics about
Like his contemporary, Theodore shabby, forgotten small towns in his
Roethke, Berryman developed a part of the United States; he wrote
supple, playful, but profound style of shame, failure, and rare moments
enlivened by phrases from folklore, of acceptance through human rela-
children’s rhymes, clichés, and tionships. He focused the reader’s
slang. Berryman writes, of Henry, attention on minute, seemingly
“He stared at ruin. Ruin stared inconsequential details in order to
straight back.” Elsewhere, he wittily make more significant points.
writes, “Oho alas alas / When will “What Thou Lovest Well, Remains
indifference come, I moan and American” (1975) ends with a per-
rave.” son carrying memories of his old
hometown as if they were food:
Theodore Roethke
(1908-1963) in case you’re stranded in some
odd empty town
The son of a greenhouse owner,
Theodore Roethke evolved a special and need hungry lovers for
language evoking the “greenhouse friends, and need feel
world” of tiny insects and unseen
roots: “Worm, be with me. / This is you are welcome in the street
my hard time.” His love poems in club they have formed.
Words for the Wind (1958) celebrate
beauty and desire with innocent Philip Levine (1928- )
passion. One poem begins: “I knew
a woman, lovely in her bones, / When Philip Levine, born in Detroit,
small birds sighed, she would sigh Michigan, deals directly with the
back at them.” Sometimes his economic sufferings of workers
poems seem like nature’s short- through keen observation, rage, and
painful irony. Like Hugo, his back-
ground is urban and poor. He has

84

been the voice for the lonely individ- ELIZABETH BISHOP includes later work, Dickey’s repu-
ual caught up in industrial America. tation rests largely on his early
Much of his poetry is somber and Photo © UPI/The Bettmann collection Poems 1957-1967 (1967).
reflects an anarchic tendency amid Archive
the realization that systems of gov- Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)
ernment will endure. and Adrienne Rich (1929- )

In one poem, Levine likens him- Among women poets of the idio-
self to a fox who survives in a dan- syncratic group, Elizabeth Bishop
gerous world of hunters through his and Adrienne Rich have garnered
courage and cunning. In terms of his the most respect in recent years.
rhythmic pattern, he has traveled a Bishop’s crystalline intelligence and
path from traditional meters in his interest in remote landscapes and
early works to a freer, more open metaphors of travel appeal to read-
line in his later poetry as he ers for their exactitude and subtlety.
expresses his lonely protest against Like her mentor Marianne Moore,
the evils of the contemporary world. Bishop wrote highly crafted poems
in a descriptive style that contains
James Dickey (1923-1997) hidden philosophical depths. The
description of the ice-cold North
James Dickey, a novelist and Atlantic in “At the Fishhouses”
essayist as well as poet, was a native (1955) could apply to Bishop’s own
of Georgia. At Vanderbilt University poetry: “It is like what we imagine
he studied under Agrarian poet and knowledge to be: / dark, salt, clear,
critic Donald Davidson, who encour- moving, utterly free.”
aged Dickey’s sensitivity to his
southern heritage. Like Randall With Moore, Bishop may be
Jarrell, Dickey flew in World War II placed in a “cool” female poetic tra-
and wrote of the agony of war. dition harking back to Emily
Dickinson, in comparison with the
As a novelist and poet, Dickey was “hot” poems of Plath, Sexton, and
often concerned with strenuous Adrienne Rich. Though Rich began
effort, “outdoing, desperately / by writing poems in traditional form
Outdoing what is required.” He and meter, her works, particularly
yearned for revitalizing contact with those written after she became an
the world — a contact he sought in ardent feminist in the 1980s,
nature (animals, the wild), sexuality, embody strong emotions.
and physical exertion. Dickey’s novel
Deliverance (1970), set in a south- Rich’s special genius is the
ern wilderness river canyon, metaphor, as in her extraordinary
explores the struggle for survival work “Diving Into the Wreck”
and the dark side of male bonding. (1973), evoking a woman’s search
When filmed with the poet himself for identity in terms of diving down
playing a southern sheriff, the novel to a wrecked ship. Rich’s poem
and film increased his renown. “The Roofwalker” (1961), dedicated
While Selected Poems (l998) to poet Denise Levertov, imagines

85

poetry writing, for women, as a dangerous craft. Olson’s theory of “projective verse,” which insist-
Like men building a roof, she feels “exposed, larg- ed on an open form based on the spontaneity of
er than life, / and due to break my neck.” the breath pause in speech and the typewriter line
in writing.
EXPERIMENTAL POETRY
Robert Creeley (1926-2005), who writes with a
The force behind Robert Lowell’s mature terse, minimalist style, was one of the major Black
achievement and much of contemporary Mountain poets. In “The Warning” (1955), Creeley
poetry lies in the experimentation begun in imagines the violent, loving imagination:
the 1950s by a number of poets. They may be divid-
ed into five loose schools, identified by Donald For love — I would
Allen in The New American Poetry, 1945-1960 split open your head and put
(1960), the first anthology to present the work of a candle in
poets who were previously neglected by the criti- behind the eyes.
cal and academic communities.
Love is dead in us
Inspired by jazz and abstract expressionist if we forget
painting, most of the experimental writers are a the virtues of an amulet
generation younger than Lowell. They have tended and quick surprise
to be bohemian, counterculture intellectuals who
disassociated themselves from universities and The San Francisco School
outspokenly criticized “bourgeois” American
society. Their poetry is daring, original, and some- The work of the San Francisco School owes
times shocking. In its search for new values, it much to Eastern philosophy and religion, as well as
claims affinity with the archaic world of myth, leg- to Japanese and Chinese poetry. This is not sur-
end, and traditional societies such as those of the prising because the influence of the Orient has
American Indian. The forms are looser, more always been strong in the U.S. West. The land
spontaneous, organic; they arise from the subject around San Francisco — the Sierra Nevada
matter and the feeling of the poet as the poem is Mountains and the jagged seacoast — is lovely and
written, and from the natural pauses of the spo- majestic, and poets from that area tend to have a
ken language. As Allen Ginsberg noted in deep feeling for nature. Many of their poems are
“Improvised Poetics,” “first thought best set in the mountains or take place on backpacking
thought.” trips. The poetry looks to nature instead of literary
tradition as a source of inspiration.
The Black Mountain School
San Francisco poets include Jack Spicer,
The Black Mountain School centered around Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Duncan, Phil
Black Mountain College, an experimental liberal Whalen, Lew Welch, Gary Snyder, Kenneth
arts college in Asheville, North Carolina, where Rexroth, Joanne Kyger, and Diane diPrima. Many
poets Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and Robert of these poets identify with working people. Their
Creeley taught in the early 1950s. Ed Dorn, Joel poetry is often simple, accessible, and optimistic.
Oppenheimer, and Jonathan Williams studied
there, and Paul Blackburn, Larry Eigner, and At its best, as seen in the work of Gary Snyder
Denise Levertov published work in the school’s (1930- ), San Francisco poetry evokes the delicate
magazines Origin and Black Mountain Review. balance of the individual and the cosmos. In
The Black Mountain School is linked with Charles Snyder’s “Above Pate Valley” (1955), the poet
describes working on a trail crew in the moun-

86

tains and finding obsidian arrow- California. The charismatic Allen

head flakes from vanished Indian Ginsberg (1926-1997) became the

tribes: group’s chief spokesperson. The

son of a poet father and an eccentric

On a hill snowed all but summer, mother committed to Communism,

A land of fat summer deer, Ginsberg attended Columbia

They came to camp. On their University, where he became fast

Own trails. I followed my own friends with fellow students

Trail here. Picked up the Kerouac (1922-1969) and William

cold-drill, Burroughs (1914-1997), whose vio-

Pick, singlejack, and sack lent, nightmarish novels about the

Of dynamite. underworld of heroin addiction

Ten thousand years. include The Naked Lunch (1959).

Beat Poets These three were the nucleus of the
Beat movement.

The San Franciso School blends Other figures included publisher

into the next grouping — the Beat Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919- ),

poets, who emerged in the 1950s. whose bookstore, City Lights, estab-

The term beat variously suggests lished in San Francisco’s North

musical downbeats, as in jazz; angel- Beach in l951, became a gathering

ical beatitude or blessedness; and place. One of the best educated of

“beat up” — tired or hurt. The the mid-20th century poets (he

Beats (beatniks) were inspired by received a doctorate from the

jazz, Eastern religion, and the wan- Sorbonne), Ferlinghetti’s thought-

dering life. These were all depicted ful, humorous, political poetry

in the famous novel by Jack Kerouac included A Coney Island of the Mind

On the Road, a sensation when it (1958); Endless Life (1981) is the

was published in l957. An account of title of his selected poems.

a 1947 cross-country car trip, the Gregory Corso (1930-2001), a petty

novel was written in three hectic criminal whose talent was nurtured

weeks on a single roll of paper in ALLEN GINSBERG by the Beats, is remembered for vol-
what Kerouac called “spontaneous umes of humorous poems, such as

bop prose.” The wild, improvisation- the often-anthologized “Marriage.” A

al style, hipster-mystic characters, gifted poet, translator, and original

and rejection of authority and con- critic, as seen in his insightful

vention fired the imaginations of American Poetry in the Twentieth

young readers and helped usher in Century (1971), Kenneth Rexroth

the freewheeling counterculture of (1905-1982) played the role of elder

the 1960s. statesman to the anti-tradition. A

Most of the important Beats labor organizer from Indiana, he saw

migrated to San Francisco from the Beats as a West Coast alternative

America’s East Coast, gaining their to the East Coast literary establish-

initial national recognition in Photo © The Bettmann Archive ment. He encouraged the Beats with

87

his example and influence. JOHN ASHBERY and Kenneth Koch — met while they
Beat poetry is oral, repetitive, and were undergraduates at Harvard
Photo © Nancy Crampton University. They are quintessentially
immensely effective in readings, urban, cool, nonreligious, witty with a
largely because it developed out of poignant, pastel sophistication.
poetry readings in underground Their poems are fast moving, full of
clubs. Some might correctly see it as urban detail, incongruity, and an
a great-grandparent of the rap music almost palpable sense of suspended
that became prevalent in the 1990s. belief.
Beat poetry was the most anti-estab-
lishment form of literature in the New York City is the fine arts cen-
United States, but beneath its shock- ter of America and the birthplace of
ing words lies a love of country. The abstract expressionism, a major
poetry is a cry of pain and rage at what inspiration of this poetry. Most of the
the poets see as the loss of America’s poets worked as art reviewers or
innocence and the tragic waste of its museum curators, or collaborated
human and material resources. with painters. Perhaps because of
their feeling for abstract art, which
Poems like Allen Ginsberg’s Howl distrusts figurative shapes and obvi-
(1956) revolutionized traditional ous meanings, their work is often
poetry. difficult to comprehend, as in the
later work of John Ashbery (1927- ),
I saw the best minds of my perhaps the most critically
generation destroyed by esteemed poet of the late 20th
madness, starving hysterical century.
naked,
Ashbery’s fluid poems record
dragging themselves through the thoughts and emotions as they wash
negro streets at dawn over the mind too swiftly for direct
looking for an angry fix, articulation. His profound, long
poem, Self-Portrait in a Convex
angelheaded hipsters burning Mirror (1975), which won three
for the ancient heavenly major prizes, glides from thought to
connection to the starry thought, often reflecting back on
dynamo in the itself:
machinery of night...
A ship
The New York School Flying unknown colors has

Unlike the Beat and San Franciso entered the harbor.
poets, the poets of the New York You are allowing extraneous
School were not interested in overtly
moral questions, and, in general, they matters
steered clear of political issues. They To break up your day...
had the best formal educations of any
group. Surrealism and Existentialism

The major figures of the New York In his anthology defining the new
School — John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara,

88

schools, Donald Allen includes a AMY CLAMPITT cized values that he felt played a part
fifth group he cannot define in the Vietnam War in poems like
because it has no clear geographical Photo © Nancy Crampton “The Teeth Mother Naked at Last.”
underpinning. This vague group
includes recent movements and It’s because we have new
experiments. Chief among these packaging for smoked
are surrealism, which expresses oysters
the unconscious through vivid
dreamlike imagery, and much poetry that bomb holes appear in the
by women and ethnic minorities rice paddies.
that has flourished in recent years.
Though superficially distinct, surre- The more pervasive surrealist
alists, feminists, and minorities influence has been quieter and
appear to share a sense of alien- more contemplative, like the poem
ation from mainstream literature. Charles Wright describes in “The
New Poem” (1973):
Although T.S. Eliot, Wallace
Stevens, and Ezra Pound had It will not attend our sorrow.
introduced symbolist tech- It will not console our children.
niques into American poetry in the It will not be able to help us.
1920s, surrealism, the major force
in European poetry and thought in Mark Strand’s surrealism, like
Europe during and after World War Merwin’s, is often bleak; it speaks of
II, did not take root in the United an extreme deprivation. Now that
States. Not until the 1960s did sur- traditions, values, and beliefs have
realism (along with existentialism) failed him, the poet has nothing but
become domesticated in America his own cavelike soul:
under the stress of the Vietnam
conflict. I have a key
so I open the door and walk in.
During the 1960s, many American It is dark and I walk in.
writers — W.S. Merwin, Robert Bly, It is darker and I walk in.
Charles Simic, Charles Wright, and
Mark Strand, among others — WOMEN POETS AND
turned to French and especially FEMINISM
Spanish surrealism for its pure
emotion, its archetypal images, and Literature in the United States, as
its models of anti-rational, existen- in most other countries, was long
tial unrest. evaluated on standards that often
overlooked women’s contributions.
Surrealists like Merwin tend to Yet there are many women poets of
be epigrammatic, as in lines such distinction in American writing. Not
as: “The gods are what has failed to all are feminists, nor do their sub-
become of us / If you find you no jects invariably voice women’s con-
longer believe enlarge the temple.” cerns. Also, regional, political, and

Bly’s political surrealism criti-

89

racial differences have shaped their NIKKI GIOVANNI Jane Eyre. In that novel, a wife is dri-
work. Among distinguished women ven mad by her husband’s ill treat-
poets are Amy Clampitt, Rita Dove, Photo © Nancy Crampton ment and is imprisoned in the
Louise Glück, Jorie Graham, Carolyn attic; Gilbert and Gubar compare
Kizer, Maxine Kumin, Denise women’s muffled voices in
Levertov, Audre Lorde, Gjertrud literature to this suppressed female
Schnackenberg, May Swenson, and figure.
Mona Van Duyn.
Feminist critics of the second
Before the 1960s, most women wave challenged the accepted canon
poets had adhered to an androgy- of great works on the basis that aes-
nous ideal, believing that gender thetic standards were not timeless
made no difference in artistic excel- and universal but rather arbitrary,
lence. This gender-blind position culture bound, and patriarchal.
was, in effect, an early form of fem- Feminism became in the 1970s a dri-
inism that allowed women to argue ving force for equal rights, not only
for equal rights. By the late l960s, in literature but in the larger culture
American women — many active in as well. Gilbert and Gubar’s The
the civil rights struggle and protests Norton Anthology of Literature by
against the Vietnam conflict, or Women (1985) facilitated the study
influenced by the counterculture of women’s literature, and a
— had begun to recognize their women’s tradition came into focus.
own marginalization. Betty Friedan’s
outspoken The Feminine Mystique Other influential woman poets
(1963), published in the year Sylvia before Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton
Plath committed suicide, decried include Amy Lowell (1874-1925),
women’s low status. Another land- whose works have great sensuous
mark book, Kate Millett’s Sexual beauty. She edited influential Imagist
Politics (1969), made a case that anthologies and introduced modern
male writings revealed a pervasive French poetry and Chinese poetry in
misogyny, or contempt for women. translation to the English-speaking
literary world. Her work celebrated
In the l970s, a second wave of love, longing, and the spiritual
feminist criticism emerged follow- aspect of human and natural beauty.
ing the founding of the National H.D. (1886-1961), a friend of Ezra
Organization for Women (NOW) in Pound and William Carlos Williams
l966. Elaine Showalter’s A Literature who had been psychoanalyzed by
of Their Own (1977) identified a Sigmund Freud, wrote crystalline
major tradition of British and poems inspired by nature and by the
American women authors. Sandra Greek classics and experimental
Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The drama. Her mystical poetry cele-
Madwoman in the Attic (l979) brates goddesses. The contribu-
traced misogyny in English classics, tions of Lowell and H.D., and those
exploring its impact on works by of other women poets of the early
women, such as Charlotte Brontë’s 20th century such as Edna St.

90

Vincent Millay, are only now being A Chicano/Latino Poetry
fully acknowledged.
number of Spanish-influenced poetry en-
MULTIETHNIC POETS academic jour- compasses works by many diverse
nals, professional groups. Among these are Mexican
The second half of the 20th centu- organizations, Americans, known since the 1950s
ry witnessed a renaissance in multi- and literary mag- as Chicanos, who have lived for
ethnic literature that has continued azines focusing many generations in the southwest-
into the 21st century. In the 1960s, on ethnic groups ern U.S. states annexed from
following the lead of African were initiated. Mexico in the Mexican-American
Americans, ethnic writers in the Conferences War ending in 1848.
United States began to command devoted to the
public attention. The 1970s saw the study of specific Among Spanish Caribbean popu-
founding of ethnic studies programs ethnic literatures lations, Cuban Americans and
in universities. had begun, and Puerto Ricans maintain vital and
the canon of distinctive literary traditions. For
In the 1980s, a number of academic “classics” had example, the Cuban-American genius
journals, professional organizations, been expanded to for comedy sets it apart from the
and literary magazines focusing on include ethnic elegiac lyricism of Chicano writers
ethnic groups were initiated. writers in such as Rudolfo Anaya. New immi-
Conferences devoted to the study of anthologies and grants from Mexico, Central and
specific ethnic literatures had course lists. South America, and Spain constantly
begun, and the canon of “classics” replenish and enlarge this literary
had been expanded to include eth- realm.
nic writers in anthologies and
course lists. Important issues Chicano, or Mexican-American,
included race and ethnicity, spiritual poetry has a rich oral tradition in the
life, familial and gender roles, and corrido, or ballad, form. Seminal
language. works stress traditional strengths
of the Mexican community and the
Minority poetry shares the discrimination it has sometimes
variety and occasionally the met with among whites. Sometimes
anger of women’s writing. It the poets blend Spanish and English
has flowered in works by Latino and words in a poetic fusion, as in the
Chicano Americans such as Gary poetry of Alurista and Gloria
Soto, Alberto Rios, and Lorna Dee Anzaldúa. Their poetry is much influ-
Cervantes; in Native Americans such enced by oral tradition and is very
as Leslie Marmon Silko, Simon powerful when read aloud.
Ortiz, and Louise Erdrich; in African-
American writers such as Amiri Some poets have written largely
Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Michael S. in Spanish, in a tradition going back
Harper, Rita Dove, Maya Angelou, to the earliest epic written in the
and Nikki Giovanni; and in Asian- present-day United States — Gaspar
American poets such as Cathy Song, Pérez de Villagrá’s Historia de la
Lawson Inada, and Janice Mirikitani. Nueva México, commemorating the
1598 battle between invading
Spaniards and the Pueblo Indians at

91

Acoma, New Mexico. Photo © Nancy Crampton times. Indian poets have also voiced
A central text in Chicano poetry, I a tragic sense of irrevocable loss of
GARY SOTO their rich heritage.
Am Joaquin by Rodolfo Gonzales
(1928-2005) evokes acculturation: LESLIE MARMON SILKO Simon Ortiz (1941- ), an Acoma
the speaker is “Lost in a world of Pueblo, bases many of his hard-hit-
confusion/Caught up in a whirl of Photo © Nancy Crampton ting poems on history, exploring the
gringo society/Confused by the contradictions of being an indige-
rules....” nous American in the United States
today. His poetry challenges Anglo
Many Chicano writers have found readers because it often reminds
sustenance in their ancient Mexican them of the injustice and violence at
roots. Thinking of the grandeur one time done to Native Americans.
of Mexico, Lorna Dee Cervantes His poems envision racial harmony
(1954- ) writes that “an epic corri- based on a deepened understand-
do” chants through her veins, while ing.
Luis Omar Salinas (1937- ) feels
himself to be “an Aztec angel.” In “Star Quilt,” Roberta Hill
Whiteman (1947- ), a member of the
Much Chicano poetry is highly Oneida tribe, imagines a multicul-
personal, dealing with feelings and tural future like a “star quilt, sewn
family or members of the communi- from dawn light,” while Leslie
ty. Gary Soto (1952- ) writes out of Marmon Silko (1948- ), who is part
the ancient tradition of honoring Laguna Pueblo, uses colloquial lan-
departed ancestors, but these guage and traditional stories to
words, written in 1981, describe the fashion haunting, lyrical poems. In
multicultural situation of Americans “In Cold Storm Light” (1981), Silko
today: achieves a haiku-like resonance:

A candle is lit for the dead out of the thick ice sky
Two worlds ahead of us all running swiftly
pounding
In the 1980s, Chicano poetry swirling above the treetops
achieved a new prominence, and
works by Cervantes, Soto, and The snow elk come,
Alberto Rios were widely antholo- Moving, moving
gized.
white song
Native-American Poetry storm wind in the branches.

Native Americans have written Louise Erdrich (1954- ), like Silko
fine poetry, most likely because a also a novelist, creates powerful
tradition of shamanistic song plays a dramatic monologues that work like
vital role in their cultural heritage. compressed dramas. They unspar-
Their work has excelled in vivid, liv- ingly depict families coping with
ing evocations of the natural world, alcoholism, unemployment, and
which become almost mystical at poverty on the Chippewa reservation.

92

In Erdrich’s “Family Reunion” Photo © David Ash / Rita Dove (1952- ) was named
(1984), a drunken, abusive uncle CORBIS OUTLINE poet laureate of the United States
returns from years in the city. As he for 1993-1995. Dove, a writer of
suffers from a heart disease, the LOUISE ERDRICH fiction and drama as well, won the
abused niece, who is the speaker, 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Thomas and
remembers how this uncle had MAYA ANGELOU Beulah (1986), in which she cele-
killed a large turtle years before by brates her grandparents through a
stuffing it with a firecracker. The Photo © Nancy Crampton series of lyric poems. She has said
end of the poem links Uncle Ray that she wrote the work to reveal
with the turtle he has victimized: the rich inner lives of poor people.

Somehow we find our way back, Michael S. Harper (1938- ) has
Uncle Ray similarly written poems revealing
the complex lives of African
sings an old song to the body Americans faced with discrimina-
that pulls him tion and violence. His dense, allu-
sive poems often deal with crowded,
toward home. The gray fins that dramatic scenes of war or urban
his hands have become life. They make use of surgical
images in an attempt to heal. His
screw their bones in the “Clan Meeting: Births and Nations: A
dashboard. His face Blood Song” (1971), which likens
cooking to surgery (“splicing the
has the odd, calm patience of a meats with fluids”), begins “we
child who has always reconstruct lives in the intensive /
care unit, pieced together in a buf-
let bad wounds alone, or a fet.” The poem ends by splicing
creature that has lived together images of the hospital,
racism in the early American film
for a long time underwater. Birth of a Nation, the Ku Klux Klan,
And the angels come film editing, and x-ray technology:

lowering their slings and litters. We reload our brains as the
cameras,
African-American Poetry
the film overexposed
Black Americans have produced in the x-ray light,
many poems of great beauty with a locked with our double door
considerable range of themes and light meters: race and sex
tones. African-American literature spooled and rung in a hobby;
is the most developed ethnic writing we take our bundle and go
in America and is extremely diverse.
Amiri Baraka (1934- ), the best- home.
known African-American poet of the
1960s and 1970s, has also written History, jazz, and popular culture
plays and taken an active role in pol- have inspired many African
itics. The writings of Maya Angelou
(1928- ) encompass various literary
forms, including poetry, drama, and
her well-known memoir, I Know Why
The Caged Bird Sings (1969).

93

Americans, from Harper (a college RITA DOVE ditions — for example, comparing
professor) to West Coast publisher the concepts of Tao and Logos.
and poet Ishmael Reed (1938- ), Photo © Christopher Felver /
known for spearheading multicultur- CORBIS Asian-American poets have drawn
al writing through the Before on many sources, from Chinese
Columbus Foundation and a series opera to Zen Buddhism, and Asian
of magazines such as Yardbird, Quilt, literary traditions, particularly Zen,
and Konch. have inspired numerous non-Asian
poets, as can be seen in the 1991
Many African-American poets, anthology Beneath a Single Moon:
such as Audre Lorde (1934-1992), Buddhism in Contemporary
have found nourishment in American Poetry. Asian-American
Afrocentrism, which sees Africa as a poets span a spectrum, from the
center of civilization since ancient iconoclastic posture taken by Frank
times. In sensuous poems such as Chin (1940- ), co-editor of Aiiieeeee!
“The Women of Dan Dance With (an early anthology of Asian-
Swords in Their Hands To Mark the American literature), to the gener-
Time When They Were Warriors” ous use of tradition by writers such
(1978), she speaks as a woman war- as Maxine Hong Kingston (1940- ).
rior of ancient Dahomey, “arming Janice Mirikitani (1942- ), a sansei
whatever I touch” and “consuming” (third-generation Japanese Ameri-
only “What is already dead.” can), evokes Japanese-American
history and has edited several
Asian-American Poetry anthologies, such as Third World
Women (1973); Time To Greez!
Like poetry by Chicano and Latino Incantations From the Third World
writers, Asian-American poetry is (1975); and Ayumi: A Japanese
exceedingly varied. Americans of American Anthology (1980).
Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino
descent may often have lived in the The lyrical Picture Bride (1983) of
United States for eight generations, Chinese American Cathy Song
while Americans of Korean, Thai, and (1955- ) also dramatizes history
Vietnamese heritage are likely to be through the lives of her family. Many
fairly recent immigrants. Each group Asian-American poets explore cul-
has grown out of a distinctive lin- tural diversity. In Song’s “The
guistic, historical, and cultural tradi- Vegetable Air” (1988), a shabby town
tion. with cows in the plaza, a Chinese
restaurant, and a Coca-Cola sign
Developments in Asian-American hung askew becomes an emblem of
literature have included an empha- rootless multicultural contemporary
sis on the Pacific Rim and women’s life made bearable by art, in this
writing. Asian Americans generally case an opera on cassette:
have resisted the common stereo-
types as the “exotic” or “good” then the familiar aria,
minority. Aestheticians have com- rising like the moon,
pared Asian and Western literary tra-

94

lifts you out of yourself, MAXINE HONG KINGSTON transcendence, categories of genre
transporting you to another country and canonical texts or accepted liter-
where, for a moment, you travel Photo © Nancy Crampton ary works. Instead they propose
open forms and multicultural texts.
light. They appropriate images from popu-
lar culture and the media, and
THE LANGUAGE SCHOOL, refashion them. Like performance
EXPERIMENTATION, AND poetry, language poems often resist
NEW FORMALISM interpretation and invite participa-
tion.
At the end of the 20th century,
directions in American poetry Performance-oriented poetry —
included the Language Poets loosely sets of chance operations such as
associated with Temblor magazine those of composer John Cage, jazz
and Douglas Messerli, editor of improvisation, mixed media work,
“Language” Poetries: An Anthology and European surrealism — have
(1987). Among them: Bruce influenced many U.S. poets. Well-
Andrews, Lyn Hejinian, Bob known figures include Laurie
Perelman, and Barrett Watten, Anderson (1947- ), author of the
author of Total Syntax (1985), a col- international hit United States
lection of essays. These poets (1984), which uses film, video,
stretch language to reveal its poten- acoustics and music, choreography,
tial for ambiguity, fragmentation, and and space-age technology. Sound
self-assertion within chaos. Ironic poetry, emphasizing the voice and
and postmodern, they reject “meta- instruments, has been practiced by
narratives” — ideologies, dogmas, poets David Antin (who extempo-
conventions — and doubt the exis- rizes his performances) and New
tence of transcendent reality. Yorkers George Quasha (publisher
Michael Palmer writes: of Station Hill Press), the late
Armand Schwerner, and Jackson
This is Paradise, a mildewed book Mac Low. Mac Low has also written
Left too long in the house visual or concrete poetry, which
makes a visual statement using
Bob Perelman’s “Chronic placement and typography.
Meanings” (1993) begins:
Ethnic performance poetry
The single fact is matter. entered the mainstream with rap
Five words can say only. music, while across the United
Black sky at night, reasonably. States over the last decade, poetry
I am, the irrational residue... slams — open poetry reading con-
tests that are held in alternative art
Viewing art and literary criticism galleries and literary bookstores
as inherently ideological, they — have become inexpensive, high-
oppose modernism’s closed forms, spirited, participatory entertain-
hierarchies, ideas of epiphany and ments.

95

At the opposite end of the theoretical spectrum Philip Dacey and David Jauss, poets and editors of
are the self-styled New Formalists, who champion
a return to form, rhyme, and meter. All groups are Strong Measures: Contemporary American Poetry
responding to the same problem — a perceived
middle-brow complacency with the status quo, a in Traditional Forms (1986); Brad Leithauser; and
careful and overly polished sound, often the prod-
uct of poetry workshops, and an overemphasis on Gjertrud Schnackenberg. Robert Richman’s The
the personal lyric as opposed to the public ges-
ture. Direction of Poetry: An Anthology of Rhymed and

The Formal School is associated with Story Line Metered Verse Written in the English Language
Press; Dana Gioia, the poet who became chairman
of the National Endowment for the Arts in 2003; Since 1975 is a 1988 anthology. Though these poets

have been accused of retreating to 19th-century

themes, they often draw on contemporary stances

and images, along with musical languages and tra-

ditional, closed forms. ■

96

CHAPTER THE REALIST LEGACY AND
THE LATE 1940s
8
As in the first half of the 20th century, fiction
AMERICAN PROSE, in the second half reflected the character
1945-1990: of each decade. The late 1940s saw the
aftermath of World War II and the beginning of
REALISM AND the Cold War.
EXPERIMENTATION
World War II offered prime material: Norman
Narrative in the decades following World Mailer (The Naked and the Dead, 1948) and
War II resists generalization: It was James Jones (From Here to Eternity, 1951) were
extremely various and multifaceted. It two writers who used it best. Both of them
was vitalized by international currents such as employed realism verging on grim naturalism;
European existentialism and Latin American both took pains not to glorify combat. The same
magical realism, while the electronic era brought was true for Irwin Shaw’s The Young Lions
the global village. The spoken word on television (1948). Herman Wouk, in The Caine Mutiny
gave new life to oral tradition. Oral genres, (1951), also showed that human foibles were as
media, and popular culture increasingly influ- evident in wartime as in civilian life.
enced narrative.
Later, Joseph Heller cast World War II in satir-
In the past, elite culture influenced popular ical and absurdist terms (Catch-22, 1961), argu-
culture through its status and example; the ing that war is laced with insanity. Thomas
reverse seems true in the United States in the Pynchon presented an involuted, brilliant case
postwar years. Serious novelists like Thomas parodying and displacing different versions of
Pynchon, Joyce Carol Oates, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., reality (Gravity’s Rainbow, 1973). Kurt Vonnegut,
Alice Walker, and E.L. Doctorow borrowed from Jr., became one of the shining lights of the coun-
and commented on comics, movies, fashions, terculture during the early 1970s following publi-
songs, and oral history. cation of Slaughterhouse-Five: or, The Children’s
Crusade (1969), his antiwar novel about the fire-
To say this is not to trivialize this literature: bombing of Dresden, Germany, by Allied forces
Writers in the United States were asking serious during World War II (which Vonnegut witnessed
questions, many of them of a metaphysical on the ground as a prisoner of war).
nature. Writers became highly innovative and
self-aware, or reflexive. Often they found tradi- The 1940s saw the flourishing of a new contin-
tional modes ineffective and sought vitality in gent of writers, including poet-novelist-essayist
more widely popular material. To put it another Robert Penn Warren, dramatists Arthur Miller,
way, American writers in the postwar decades Lillian Hellman, and Tennessee Williams, and
developed a postmodern sensibility. Modernist short story writers Katherine Anne Porter and
restructurings of point of view no longer sufficed Eudora Welty. All but Miller were from the South.
for them; rather, the context of vision had to be All explored the fate of the individual within the
made new. family or community and focused on the balance
between personal growth and responsibility to
the group.

97

Robert Penn Warren with the territory.”

(1905-1989) Death of a Salesman, a landmark

Robert Penn Warren, one of the work, still is only one of a number of

southern Fugitives, enjoyed a fruit- dramas Miller wrote over several

ful career running through most of decades, including All My Sons

the 20th century. He showed a life- (1947) and The Crucible (1953).

long concern with democratic val- Both are political — one contempo-

ues as they appeared within histor- rary and the other set in colonial

ical context. The most enduring of times. The first deals with a manu-

his novels is All the King’s Men facturer who knowingly allows

(1946), focusing on the darker defective parts to be shipped to air-

implications of the American plane firms during World War II,

dream as revealed in this thinly resulting in the death of several

veiled account of the career of a American airmen. The Crucible

flamboyant and sinister southern depicts the Salem (Massachusetts)

politician, Huey Long. witchcraft trials of the 17th century

in which Puritan settlers were

Arthur Miller (1915-2005) wrongfully executed as supposed

New York-born dramatist witches. Its message, though — that
Arthur Miller reached his “witch hunts” directed at innocent
personal pinnacle in 1949 people are anathema in a democracy

with Death of a Salesman, a study — was relevant to the era in which

of man’s search for merit and the play was staged, the early

worth in his life and the realization 1950s, when an anti-Communist cru-

that failure invariably looms. Set sade led by U.S. Senator Joseph

within the family of the title charac- McCarthy and others ruined the lives

ter, Willy Loman, the play hinges on of innocent people. Partly in

the uneven relationships of father response to The Crucible, Miller

and sons, husband and wife. It is a was called before the House

mirror of the literary attitudes of (of Representatives) Un-American

the 1940s, with its rich combination ROBERT PENN WARREN Activities Committee in 1956 and
of realism tinged with naturalism; asked to provide the names of per-

carefully drawn, rounded charac- sons who might have Communist

ters; and insistence on the value of sympathies. Because of his refusal

the individual, despite failure and to do so, Miller was charged with

error. Death of a Salesman is a contempt of Congress, a charge

moving paean to the common man that was overturned on appeal.

— to whom, as Willy Loman’s A later Miller play, Incident at

widow eulogizes, “attention must Vichy (1964), dealt with the

be paid.” Poignant and somber, it is Holocaust — the destruction of

also a story of dreams. As one char- much of European Jewry at the

acter notes ironically, “a salesman hands of the Nazis and their collab-

has got to dream, boy. It comes Photo © Nancy Crampton orators. In The Price (1968), two

98

brothers struggle to free them- TENNESSEE WILLIAMS were blacklisted (refused employ-
selves from the burdens of the ment in the American entertain-
past. Other of Miller’s dramas Photo © Nancy Crampton ment industry) for a time. These
include two one-act plays, Fame events are recounted in Hellman’s
(1970) and The Reason Why (1970). memoir, Scoundrel Time (1976).
His essays are collected in Echoes
Down the Corridor (2000); his auto- Tennessee Williams
biography, Timebends: A Life, (1911-1983)
appeared in 1987.
Tennessee Williams, a native
Lillian Hellman (1906-1984) of Mississippi, was one of the
more complex individuals on
Like Robert Penn Warren, Lillian the American literary scene of the
Hellman’s moral vision was shaped mid-20th century. His work focused
by the South. Her childhood was on disturbed emotions within fami-
largely spent in New Orleans. Her lies — most of them southern. He
compelling plays explore power’s was known for incantatory repeti-
many guises and abuses. In The tions, a poetic southern diction,
Children’s Hour (l934), a manipula- weird gothic settings, and Freudian
tive girl destroys the lives of two exploration of human emotion. One
women teachers by telling people of the first American writers to live
they are lesbians. In The Little openly as a homosexual, Williams
Foxes (1939), a rich old southern explained that the longings of his
family fights over an inheritance. tormented characters expressed
Hellman’s anti-fascist Watch on the their loneliness. His characters live
Rhine (1941) grew out of her trips and suffer intensely.
to Europe in the l930s. Her mem-
oirs include An Unfinished Woman Williams wrote more than 20 full-
(l969) and Pentimento (1973). length dramas, many of them auto-
biographical. He reached his peak
For many years, Hellman had a relatively early in his career — in
close personal relationship with the 1940s — with The Glass
the remarkable scriptwriter Menagerie (1944) and A Streetcar
Dashiell Hammett, whose street- Named Desire (1949). None of the
wise detective character, Sam works that followed over the next
Spade, fascinated Depression-era two decades and more reached the
Americans. Hammett invented the level of success and richness of
quintessentially American hard- those two pieces.
boiled detective novel: The Maltese
Falcon (l930); The Thin Man Katherine Anne Porter
(1934). (1890-1980)

Hellman, like Arthur Miller, had Katherine Anne Porter’s long life
refused to “name names” for the and career encompassed several
House Un-American Activities eras. Her first success, the short
Committee, and she and Hammett story “Flowering Judas” (1929),

99