20th Century Literature (Modernism)

(from WWI to WWII)

Background

the first world war---material destroyed, soul hurt, civilization collapsed, no order, no hope, nothing to do

Great Depression of 1930s---despair The second world war---writing in skeptical,

ironic way

fast developing of western philosophy and science---Freud’s psychology change people’s conception of art, describe and analyze inner world

influenced by European modernism---German expressionism drawing, French impressionism drawing, to express the reality in a subjective angle

(Era of) Modernism The years from 1910 to 1930 are often called the Era of

Modernism, for there seems to have been in both Europe and America a strong awareness of some sort of “break” with the past. Movements in all the arts overlapped and succeeded one another with amazing speed. The new artists shared a desire to capture the complexity of modern life, to focus on the variety and confusion of the 20th century by reshaping and sometimes discarding the ideas and habits of the 19th century. It included a wide range of artistic expressions such as symbolism, impressionism, post-impressionism, futurism, constructivism, imagism, expressionism, dada, and surrealism.

Imagism-definition

Imagism is a school of poetry that flourished in North America and England, but especially in the United States, at the beginning of the 20th century. Imagists rejected the sentimentalism of late 19th century verse in favor of a poetry that relied on concrete imagery.

Imagism-features

direct treatment of objects, concreteness of imagery

no ideas or insight but things or images

free verse without imposing a rhythmical pattern

common speech, economy of expressions

Imagism-representatives

Ezra Pound originally led the movement, but Amy Lowell soon became its most famous proponent.

Those taking part in the imagist movement included Hilda Doolittle, Carl Sandburg, William Carlos Williams, D. H. Lawrence and others.

Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

the father of modern American poetry

the most influential leader of the Imagist Movement.

wrote 70 books and over 1500 articles

Life Born in Idaho in 1885 and raised in Pennsylvania,

Ezra Pound spent most of his life in Europe. Pound was undoubtedly a genius. Before he gradu

ated from university, he had mastered 9 languages as well as English grammar and literature. After college in Pennsylvania and a brief stint as a teacher, in 1908 Pound travelled to Venice and then to London, where he refined his aesthetic sensibilities and edited the anthology Des Imagistes (1914).

He moved to Paris in 1920 and then settled in Italy in 1924.

Pound made anti-American radio broadcasts during World War II. He was arrested as a traitor in 1945 and initially confined in Pisa. He was then sent to the U.S., where he was deemed mentally unfit to stand trial for treason.

Pound was confined for 12 years in a hospital (actually prison) for the criminally insane in Washington. While in prison, he was awarded a prestigious poetry prize in 1949 for his last Cantos.

In 1958 he returned to Italy, where he continued to write and make translations until he died in 1972.

Major Works:

In a Station of the Metro 《在地铁站里》 The Cantos 《诗章》 Homage to Sextus Propertius 《向塞克斯特

斯 · 普罗波蒂斯致敬》 Personae 《人物》 Hugh Selwyn Mauberley 《休塞尔温莫伯利》 The Pisan Cantos 《比萨诗章》

His poetic features:

responsible for defining and promoting a modernist aesthetic in poetry.

believed that good poetry was based on images rather than ideas.

His technique came from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry. On one hand he stressed clarity, precision, and economy of language. On the other hand, Pound mused the traditional rhyme and meter.

In a Station of the Metro

Apparition meaning “appearance”, in the sense of something which appears, or shows up; something which can be clearly observed.( 意外的或不平常的出现 )

Apparition meaning something which seems real but perhaps is not real; something ghostly which cannot be clearly observed.( 幻影 )

In a Station of the Metro

He sees the faces, turned variously toward light and darkness, like flower petals which are half absorbed by, half resisting, the wet, dark texture of a bough.

在一个地铁车站

人群中那些面庞闪现，潮湿、黝黑树枝上的片片花瓣。

A Chinese imagistic poetry ---Autumn

Evening crows perch on old trees wreathed with withered vine,

Water of a stream flows by a family cottage near a tiny bridge.

A lean horse walks on an ancient road in western breeze,

The sun is setting in the west, The heart-broken one is at the end of the

Earth.

《天净沙 · 秋思》 --- 马致远枯藤、老树、昏鸦，小桥、流水、人家，

古道、西风、瘦马，夕阳西下，断肠人

在天涯。

《琵琶行》 --- 白居易

嘈嘈切切错杂弹，大珠小珠落玉盘。

Edwin Arlington Robinson(1869-1935)

Robinson is the first important poet of the twentieth century

Poet of transition Pulitzer Prize winner

for three times

Edwin Arlington Robinson was born on December 22, 1869, in Head Tide, Maine .His family moved to Gardiner, Maine, in 1870, which renamed "Tilbury Town," became the backdrop for many of Robinson's poems.

He attended Harvard, but his personal life was soon beset by a chain of tragedies that are reflected in his work. His father died, the family went bankrupt, one of his brothers became a morphine addict, and his mother contracted and eventually died from black diphtheria.

Robinson spent two years studied at Harvard University as a special student and his first poems were published in the Harvard Advocate.

Later, he met a woman, Emma Shepherd, with whom he fell deeply in love, but he was also convinced that marriage and familial responsibilities would hinder his work as a poet, so he introduced her to his eldest brother, who married her.

Unable to make a living by writing, he got a job as an inspector for the New York City subway system. In 1902 he published Captain Craig and Other Poems.

This work received little attention until President Theodore Roosevelt wrote a magazine article praising it and Robinson.

Roosevelt also offered Robinson a sinecure in a U.S. Customs House, a job he held from 1905 to 1910.

Robinson dedicated his next work, The Town Down the River (1910), to Roosevelt.

Robinson's first major success was The Man Against the Sky (1916).

For the last twenty-five years of his life, Robinson spent his summers at the MacDowell Colony of artists and musicians in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

Robinson never married and led a notoriously solitary lifestyle.

In 1922, Robinson received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Collected Poems: He won it again in 1925 for The Man Who Died Twice and in 1928 for Tristram, the third part of his trilogy.

He died in New York City on April 6, 1935.

Works The Torrent and the Night Before

1896 The Town Down the River 1910 The Man Against the Sky 1916 The Three Taverns 1920 “Richard Cory” “Miniver Cheevy” “Mr. Flood’s Party”

Richard Cory While stanza one introduces the

narrator, more importantly it emphasizes his limited view of Richard Cory. Line one introduces us to Cory while line two establishes that the narrator has only an external view of Cory. From this viewpoint, then, the narrator proceeds to make an assortment of limited value judgments.

Evaluation Robinson is a "people poet," writing

almost exclusively about individuals or individual relationships rather than on more common themes of the nineteenth century.

He exhibits a curious mixture of irony and compassion toward his subjects--most of whom are failures--that allows him to be called a romantic existentialist. He is a true precursor to the modernist movement in poetry.

Robinson is famous for his use of the sonnet and the dramatic monologue.

Many of his poems are on individuals and individual relationships; most of these individuals are failures.

He is traditional in the use of meter; many of his longer works are in blank verse.

The early twentieth century saw American poetry experimenting with new forms and content. He was noted for mastery of conventional forms.

He loved the traditional sonnet and quatrain and the often used the old-fashioned language of romantic poetry. But his poetry often focused on the modern problems.

Robert Frost (1874-1963)

He was the most popular American poet of the 20th century (national poet).

His poetry focuses on the landscape and people in New England.

Life

born in San Francisco and spent his early childhood in the Far West.

When 11 years old, father died, moved to Salem, New Hampshire.

Entered Dartmouth College, then Harvard, but neither was finished.

1912, sailed to England, published his first book, A Boy’s Will.

1914, returned home, teaching. Received honorary degrees from 44 colleges and

universities and won 4 Pulitzer Prizes.

Major Works

A Boy’s Wish 《少年心愿》 1913 North of Boston 《波士顿以北》 1914 Mountain Interval 《山间》 1916 New Hampshire 《新罕普什尔》 1923 West-Running Brook 《西流的溪涧》 1928 A Further Range 《又一片牧场》 1936 A Witness Tree 《一株作证的树》 1942

Frost’s Poetic Style---simple language, a graceful style and

traditional forms of poetry. 1) He often used regular iambic meter.

Sometimes he used blank verse. 2) He was often deceptively simple, exploring

complexity through triviality. 3) He used symbols from everyday life to

express profound ideas. 4) He made his poems seem effortless by

using colloquial and direct expression and conversational rhythms.

The Road Not Taken

classic five-line stanzas, rhyme scheme a-b-a-a-b, conversational rhythm.

Carl Sandburg(1878-1967)

American poet, historian, novelist and folklorist ，folk musician ， Political Organizer, Reporter

a central figure in the “Chicago Renaissance”

Sandburg was virtually unknown to the literary world when, in 1914, a group of his poems appeared in the nationally circulated Poetry magazine.

Two years later his book Chicago Poems was published, and the thirty-eight-year-old author found himself on the brink of a career that would bring him international acclaim.

Works

Collections

Chicago poems 1916

Cornhuskers 1918

Smoke and Steel 1920

Good Morning, America 1928

The People, Yes 1936

Poems“Chicago”“The Harbour”“Fog”“I Am the People, the Mob”

Collections of folk songsThe American Songbag 1927

Biographies Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years 1926 Abraham Lincoln: The War Years 1939

Chicago

The overwhelming theme in Illinois is the city of Chicago.

Sandburg said that the difference between Dante, Milton, and himself was that they wrote about hell and never saw the place whereas he had written about Chicago.

Chicago

芝加哥 世界的屠宰场， 工具制造所，小麦的堆积地， 铁路的玩弄者和国家的运输所； 急躁暴烈，魁梧结实，吵吵闹闹， 你这肩宽膀阔的城市：   他们告诉我，你心术不正。我相信 他们，因为我曾看见你那浓妆艳抹的女人在煤气灯 下勾引农村来的青年。 他们又告诉我，你心思邪恶，我答道： 是的，一点不错；我见过强盗杀人，自由地逃 走，再去杀人。 他们又告诉我，你野蛮残酷，我的回答是： 在妇女和孩子的脸上，我看到了饥饿的 菜色。 这样回答后，我又向那些嘲笑我这都市的人们，反 唇相讥道： 来吧，给我举出另一个城市，他生气勃勃， 粗壮狡狯，也同样高傲地昂首高歌。 在堆积职业的劳作中间投之以怪有魅力的诅咒，这 是个高大鲁莽的重击手与柔和的小城市形成的鲜 明对照。

凶猛得像条舔嘴吐舌、准备战斗的狗，狡狯得像个 与荒原搏斗的蛮人， 光着脑袋， 挥舞铁锹， 破坏不停， 设计不止， 建造、破坏、重建， 头上一片烟雾，嘴上尽是尘埃， 露出白牙轰笑着， 在可怕的命运重压下，像年轻人一样轰笑着， 轰笑着，甚至像个从没输过的傻斗士， 自吹自擂，哈哈笑，手腕下面是人民的脉搏，肋骨 下边是人民的心脏跳跃。 轰笑着！ 轰笑着年轻人的笑：急躁暴烈，粗重沙哑，吵吵闹 闹；半裸身子，汗水淋淋，狂妄自负，因为是世 界的屠宰场，工具制造所，小麦的堆积地，铁路 的玩弄者和国家的运输所。

Fog

a delightful poem, using simple imagery. Fog leaves the natural and becomes surreal

and ethereal, but always anchored to the familiar reality we all know.

雾 雾来了 踮着猫的细步 他弓起腰蹲着 静静地俯瞰 港湾和城市 又再往前走

雾飘过来踩着小猫的脚步他蹲下身子悄悄俯视港口和城市然后继续上路

Evaluation Carl Sandburg was one of the best

known and most widely read poets in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s.

His subject matter is the people themselves. Sandburg exclaimed: “I am the People, the Mob!”

His poetic tone is always affirmative and he is free from rhyme and regular meter.

Sandburg's poems are often full of slang and the language of ordinary Americans.

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)

Main Works: Harmonium 《风琴》 The Man with the Blue Guitar 《弹蓝吉他的人》 The Auroras of Autumn 《秋天的晨曦》 Collected Poems 《诗集》

Features of his poems

use references to painting, music, and color---impressionistic techniques.

His poetry is “abstract,” philosophical, and difficult. More concerned about what active role poetry must play and he saw poetry as a personal transaction between self and reality.

His use of language is meticulous（注重细节的） , though frequently exotic（异国风情的） . Coined words are frequent, and some are employed simply for sound effects.

Anecdote of the Jar

rural Tennessee (wild, chaotic and formless)

---the world of nature. Jar---art, imagination I---poet (archetype of creative power)

坛子佚闻

我把坛子置于田纳西州， 它是圆的，立在小山顶。 它使得散乱的荒野

都依此为中心。荒野全部向坛子涌来，俯伏四周，不再荒野。坛子圆圆的，在地上巍然耸立，风采非凡。

它统领四面八方，这灰色无花纹的坛子它不孳生鸟雀或树丛，与田纳西的一切都不同。

（飞 白 译）

Thomas Sterns Eliot (1888-1965)

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in the U.S. Get married and settled down in London in

1915. In 1948, won Nobel Prize.

English writerAmerican writer

T.S.Eliot

a great modernist

poet, an important verse dramatist, a great prose

writer.

Main Works:

The Waste Land 《荒原》 Ash Wednesday 《圣灰星期三》 Four Quartets 《四个四重奏》 Murder in the Cathedral 《大教堂谋杀案》 Family Reunion 《大团圆》 Cocktail Party 《鸡尾酒会》 The Hollow Man 《空心人》 The Sacred Wood 《圣林》 Gerontion 《老人》

T.S. Eliot’s Poetry Style

The image, his own philosophy and the music of words are all harmoniously blended.

Eliot mingled grand images with commonplace ones, he combined trivial and tawdry images with traditional poetic subjects.

The Theme of The Waste Land

modern spiritual barrenness, the despair and depression that

followed the First World War, the sterility and turbulence of the

modern world, the decline and break-down of Western

culture. the search for regeneration by people

living in a chaotic world.

Structure of The Waste Land

The Waste Land is 433 lines long. The Waste Land itself is a desolate and sterile country ruled by an impotent king. The whole poem is divided into five parts.

I. “The Burial of the Dead II. “The Game of Chess”, III. “The Fire Sermon”, IV. “Death by Water”, V. “What the Thunder Said”,

Waste Land Painters

“Waste Land Painters” refer to such writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. With their writings, all of them painted the postwar Western world as a waste land, lifeless and hopeless.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

It is composed at Harvard in 1910 and published in 1915, the poem is a dramatic monologue. The title of the poem suggests two contrasting elements: “the love song” of Prufrock and his attempted loveless courtship. In other words, the title of the poem is ironic in that the “Love Song” is in fact about the absence of love.

Dramatic Monologue

a poem in which a single speaker who is not the poet utters the entire poem at a critical moment. The speaker has a listener within the poem, but we too are his/her listener, and we learn about the speaker's character from what the speaker says. In fact, the speaker may reveal unintentionally certain aspects of his/her character. Robert Browning perfected this form. (My Last Duchess)

Character-Alfred Prufrock

Prufrock is the image of an ineffectual, sorrowful, tragic 20th century Western man, possibly the modern intellectual who is divided between passion and timidity, between desire and impotence. His tragic flaw is timidity; his “curse” is his idealism. Knowing everything, but able to do nothing, he lives in an area of life and death; and caught between the two worlds, he belongs to neither. He craves love but has no courage to declare himself. He despairs of life. He discovers its emptiness and yet has found nothing to replace it.

Sinclair Lewis(1885-1951)

Sinclair Lewis He is noted for his novels(22) that mock and

satire the American middle class and bourgeois life in the villages and towns of the Middle West.

He was the first American writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1930.

Life Experiences Born in the town of Sank Center, Minnesota; Graduated from Yale; Became an editor and a writer; Published Main Street in 1920 and won the

Nobel Prize in literature; Published Babbitt in 1922.

Main Works

Our Mr. Wrenn (1914) The Trial of the Hawk (1915) Main Street (1920) Babbitt (1922) Arrowsmith (1925) The Man Who Knew Coolidge (1928) It Can’t Happen Here (1935)

Main Street

Main Street was a study of idealism and reality in a narrow-minded small-town.

It meant cheap shops, ugly public buildings, and citizens who were bound by rigid conventions.

Through the heroine of “Main Street” Lewis expressed his own feelings, particularly his dissatisfactions.

The photographs of “Main Street”The photographs of “Main Street”

Main Street (1920)

Babbitt (1922)

He appears to be a stereotype of millions of American men.

He sells real estate and lives in a typical middle-class house.

He has a typical family, a wife and three children. He expresses typical American prejudices.

Henry L. Mencken(1880-1956)

Mencken’s Life Experiences

Born in Baltimore; Studied at the Baltimore Polytechnic; Began his career on the Baltimore Morning Herald at the

age of 18; from 1906 until his death was on the staff of the

Baltimore Sun or Evening Sun; (1914-1923) was creditor of the Smart Set with George

Jean Nathan; together they founded the American Mercury in 1924, and Mencken was its sole editor from 1925 to 1933.

Mencken’s Major Works

The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States, 2nd ed. (1921)

Prejudices, First Series “Criticism of Criticism of Criticism” “A Neglected Anniversary”

The American Language (1919)

It contrasted American English with British English;

It explained the origin of many colorful American slang expressions;

It examined uniquely American geographical and personal names;

It traced the influence of immigrant languages on the American idiom.

The American Mercury

It was the most influential magazine of its time. In the magazine, he wanted to “stir up the

animals.” He wanted to arouse his antagonists, and he

usually succeeded. Nothing was sacred to him. He attacked the

churches, the business and the government in America.

Mencken & His Writing Mencken was the most prominent newspaperm

an, book reviewer, and political commentator of his day.

Mencken's writing is endearing because of its wit, its crisp style, and the obvious delight he takes in it.

He had a rollicking(欢闹的 ), rambunctious(喧闹的 ) style of writing.

He meant what he said, but he said it with wit.