Wykład Literatura: 11.05.2011
Toward Modernism:
· there are writers whose work can be placed in the context of later developments.
· some of their themes and styles are generally regarded as bringing the gap between the reflexive poetry of Transcendentalism and Whitman, and modern poetry.
Poetry in transition:
Ø E.L. Masters- Spoon River Anthology
Ø E.A. Robinson – The Children of the Night, Tristam, The Man who Died Twice
Ø R.Frost – A Boy’s Will, North of Boston, Mountain Interval
Ø R.Jeffers – Californians, Tamar and other Poems
Ø C.Sandburg – Chicago Poems, American Songbag
Ø V.Lindsay – The Congo and Other Poems
Ø Women – S.Teasdale, E.Wylie, E.St.Vincent Millay
Edgar Lee Masters (1868-1950)
Life
§ Edgar Lee Masters was born in Texas and reared in southern Illinois
§ He attended Knox Collage, studied law and became attorney
§ Masters gave up law practice, and devoted himself entirely to literature
§ He moved to NY, for 20 years he occupied a suite at the famed Hotel Chelsea, heaven of many writers of the “20’s” and “30’s”
§ Masters is buried in Petersburg, next to his beloved grandparents Squire Davie Master and Lucinda Masters.
Ô The Epitaph on Master’s tomb
“Tomorrow is My Birthday”
“Good friends, let’s to the fields – I have a fever
After a little walk, and by your pardon
I think I’ll sleep. There is no sweeter thing
Nor fate more blessed than to sleep. Here world,
I pass you like an orange to a child
I can no more with you. Do what you will...”
Ô Spoon River Anthology (1915)
- it was a literary sensation
- it was written in the form of epitaphs – poignant summaries of the lives of persons supposedly buried in the country cemetery (nearly 250 characters). The poems are in free verse the lines conveying a unit of thought (conversational speech, more shaped then common speech).
- most of the speakers reveal brief and bitter tales of twisted and wasted lives
- but some, like Lucinda Matlock speak with courage, conviction, optimism
Ô Speakers of Spoon River
- The speakers are inhabitants ( both real and imagined) of Spoon River, an area near Lewinstown and Petersburg, Illinois, where Masters spent his childhood
- some characters under disguised names, lately dead or still living in the region scandalous behaviour of some of them (judges, bankers, doctor, editors, churchmen, artists, night watch. Atheist, hat maker, gambler, a Negro, Anne Rutledge, first love of Abraham Lincoln etc.
- All are dead, “sleeping on the hill.” They die accidental, violent or unnoticed death.
- They discover and confess the real motives of their lives, the secret steps that stumbled them to failure or raised them to illusionary triumphs
- they talk about meaningless marriage, accidents and disease, economic exploitation, incapability, damaged lives
- death and darkness grant them the revelatory eyes for recognition of their own souls.
Ô Masters in Spoon River Anthology
- Masters clearly defends the characters – not against their sins, petty or great, for these they readily confess themselves- but against the punishments and inequalities life fixes upon us all.
- the epitaphs are ironic and extremely objective
Ô Flaws of Spoon River Anthology (1915)
- it is bigger, more inclusive then need to be
- the graveyard is overpopulated
- some headstones seem repetitious
- there is stiffness of some verses
- the poems resemble a statement-like recitations and seem formal
- the poems are sometimes unintentionally ludicrous (provoking laughter, ridiculous, comic)
Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935)
1. Robinson’s struggle
> Robinson struggled for 25 years before wide recognition came to him in 1922 with the first of the three Pulitzer Prizes he would win
> He is best known for his poems about the people who lived in the fictional New England “Tilbury Town”
2. Tilbury Town
> poetic method, vignettes
> vignette – a short impressionistic scene that focuses on one moment or gives a strong impression about a character, an idea, or a setting and sometimes an object
> “Tilbury Town” – in Main, (Robinson’s hometown was Gardiner, Main)
> the poems are character sketches, short dramatic poems of people living and imaginary. They are romantics not adjusted to life in a materialistic world
> they are helpless, struggle against fate too powerful for them
> Robinson hinted or probed deeply their psychology
Ô Rauben Bright
Because he was a butcher and thereby
Did earn an honest living (and did right)
I would not have you think that Rauben Bright
Was any more a brute than you and I
For when they told him that his wife must die
He stared at them, and shook with grief and fright
And cried like a great baby half that night
And made the women cry to see him cry
And after she was dead, and he had paid
The singers and the sexton and the rest
He packed a lot of things that she had made
Most mournfully away in an old chest
Of hers, and put sime chopped-up cedar boughs
In with them, and tore down the slaughter-house
3. Robinson’s poetry
> writing about ordinary people and events: a butcher, a miser with “eyes like little dollars”, ancient clerks in a dry goods store measuring out their days like bolts of cloth
> Robinson looks closely at people around him
> Rey Redman in 1926 called him “a biographer of souls...bound to humanity by the dual bond of sympathy and humour.”
> His poems insist that we not really know others that we do not really know ourselves
> Robinson said “Poetry is a language that tells us through more or less emotional reaction, something that cannot be said”
4. Robinson’s subjects
> those who failed in life, in love
> derelict (outcast), abandoned, deserted, downtrodden (oppressed by superior power)
> the old and bereft (suffering the death of a loved one)
> Robinson insisted that “the word is not a prison house, but a kind of spiritual kindergarten where millions of infants are trying to spell “God” with wrong blocks”. He and people are trying to encompass the truth
5. Robinson’s struggle
> he was struggling for two decades to get his poems published, surviving on the edge of poverty
> drink and depression shadowed his days but he believed in his calling
> “Behind the stark, simple words lies an unimaginable burden of pain” (R.Gray)
> their dramas are enacted within.
“Richard Cory”
Whenever Richard Cory went down town, We people on the pavement looked at him: He was a gentleman from sole to crown, Clean-favoured and imperially slim. And he was always quietly arrayed, And he was always human when he talked; But still he fluttered pulses when he said, "Good Morning!" and he glittered when he walked. And he was rich, yes, richer than a king, And admirably schooled in every grace: In fine -- we thought that he was everything To make us wish that we were in his place. So on we worked and waited for the light, And went without the meat and cursed the bread, And Richard Cory, one calm summer night, Went home and put a bullet in his head.
> there is a contrast between visible surfaces and what lies beneath them
> Richard Cory is admired by his neighbours (their perspective). Readers are not prepared for the horror of the final stanza
> Richard Cory finds failure in success
> he is lonely and acutely isolated quietly desperate
“Cliff Klingehagen”
Cliff Klingenhagen had me in to dine
With him one day; and after soup and meat,
And all the other things there were to eat,
Cliff took two glasses and filled one with wine
And one with wormwood. Then, without a sign
For me to choose at all, he took the draught
Of bitterness himself, and lightly quaffed
It off, and said the other one was mine.
And when I asked him what the deuce he meant
By doing that, he only looked at me
And smiled, and said it was a way of his.
And though I know the fellow, I have spent
Long time a-wondering when I shall be As happy as Cliff Klingenhagen is.
> Cliff Klingenlagen finds success if not in failure, at least in a muted life.
> Love can be rich and even ecstatic, but death parts even the happiest marriages and leaves a suicidal Luke Havergal, an inconsolable Reuben Bright, or orphaned children over whom the young mother in “For a Dead Lady” bends so tenderly
> Robinson later moved towards affirmation (midpoint in his career) “The Man against the Sky”. We want to live and look for meaning, search for values, remain dreamers
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