“In a Station of the Metro”

By Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

(1913)

"In a poem of this sort, one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective."

-- Ezra Pound

MODERNISM

• The English novelist Virginia Woolf declared that human nature underwent a fundamental change "on or about December 1910." The statement testifies to the modern writer's fervent desire to break with the past, rejecting literary traditions that seemed outmoded and diction that seemed too genteel to suit an era of technological breakthroughs and global violence.

• "On or about 1910," there was an explosion of innovation and creative energy that shook every field of artistic endeavor. Artists from all over the world converged on London, Paris, and other great cities of Europe to join in the ferment of new ideas and movements: Cubism, Constructivism, Futurism, Acmeism, and Imagism were among the most influential banners under which the new artists grouped themselves. It was an era when major artists were fundamentally questioning and reinventing their art forms.

MODERNISM

• The excitement, however, came to a terrible climax in 1914 with the start of the First World War, which wiped out a generation of young men in Europe, catapulted Russia into a catastrophic revolution, and sowed the seeds for even worse conflagrations in the decades to follow. By the war's end in 1918, the centuries-old European domination of the world had ended and the "American Century" had begun. For artists and many others in Europe, it was a time of profound disillusion with the values on which a whole civilization had been founded. But it was also a time when the avant-garde experiments that had preceded the war would, like the technological wonders of the airplane and the atom, inexorably establish a new dispensation, which we call Modernism. Among the most instrumental of all artists in effecting this change were a handful of American poets. Ezra Pound, the most aggressively modern of these poets, made "Make it new!" his battle cry. Pound and others exalted the imagination for its ability to "press back against the pressure of reality."

Ezra PoundEzra Pound is generally considered the poet most responsible

for defining and promoting a modernist aesthetic in poetry. In the early teens of the twentieth century, he opened a seminal exchange of work and ideas between British and American writers, and was famous for the generosity with which he advanced the work of such major contemporaries as W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, H. D., James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and especially T. S. Eliot. His own significant contributions to poetry begin with his promulgation of Imagism, a movement in poetry which derived its technique from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry--stressing clarity, precision, and economy of language, and foregoing traditional rhyme and meter in order to, in Pound's words, "compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome."

(Source: www.poets.org, The Academy of American Poets)

Imagism – Discussion & Definition

• The Imagist movement included English and American poets in the early twentieth century who wrote free verse and were devoted to "clarity of expression through the use of precise visual images." Imagism was officially launched in 1912 by the American poet Ezra Pound.

• The movement sprang from ideas developed by T.E. Hulme, who as early as 1908 was proposing a poetry based on absolutely accurate presentation of its subject with no excess verbiage. The first tenet of the Imagist manifesto was "To use the language of common speech, but to employ always the exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word.“

• Imagism was a reaction against the flabby abstract language and "careless thinking" of Georgian Romanticism. Imagist poetry aimed to replace muddy abstractions with exactness of observed detail, apt metaphors, and economy of language. For example, Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" started from a glimpse of beautiful faces in a dark subway and elevated that perception into a crisp vision by finding an intensified equivalent image. The metaphor provokes a sharp, intuitive discovery in order to get at the essence of life.

Imagism – Discussion & Definition (continued)

• Pound's definition of the image was "that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time."

Pound defined the tenets of Imagist poetry as:

I. Direct treatment of the "thing," whether subjective or objective.

II. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.

III. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome.

• Though Imagism as a movement was over by 1917, the ideas about poetry embedded in the Imagist doctrine profoundly influenced free verse poets throughout the twentieth century.

“Notes for Canto CXX”

by Ezra Pound

I have tried to write Paradise

Do not move Let the wind speak

that is paradise.

Let the Gods forgive what I have made

Let those I love try to forgive what I have made.

William Carlos Williams(1883-1963)

William Carlos Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, in 1883. He began writing poetry while a student at Horace Mann High School, at which time he made the decision to become both a writer and a doctor. He received his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, where he met and befriended Ezra Pound. Pound became a great influence in Williams' writing, and in 1913 arranged for the London publication of Williams's second collection, The Tempers.

Returning to Rutherford, where he sustained his medical practice throughout his life, Williams began publishing in small magazines and embarked on a prolific career as a poet, novelist, essayist, and playwright. Following Pound, he was one of the principal poets of the Imagist movement, though as time went on, he began to increasingly disagree with the values put forth in the work of Pound, who he felt was too attached to European culture and traditions.

(Source: www.poets.org, The Academy of American Poets)

William Carlos Williams(1883-1963)

Continuing to experiment with new techniques of meter and lineation, Williams sought to invent an entirely fresh—and singularly American—poetic, whose subject matter was centered on the everyday circumstances of life and the lives of common people.

His influence as a poet spread slowly during the twenties and thirties; however, his work received increasing attention in the 1950s and 1960s as younger poets, including Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, were impressed by the accessibility of his language and his openness as a mentor.

(Source:www.poets.org, The Academy of American Poets)

“The Uses of Poetry”

By William Carlos Williams

I've fond anticipation of a day O'erfilled with pure diversion presently, For I must read a lady poesy The while we glide by many a leafy bay, Hid deep in rushes, where at random play The glossy black winged May-flies, or whence flee Hush-throated nestlings in alarm, Whom we have idly frighted with our boat's long sway. For, lest o'ersaddened by such woes as spring To rural peace from our meek onward trend, What else more fit? We'll draw the latch-string And close the door of sense; then satiate wend, On poesy's transforming giant wing, To worlds afar whose fruits all anguish mend.

“This Is Just To Say”

By William Carlos Williams

I have eaten the plums

that were in the icebox

and which you were probably

saving for breakfast

Forgive me they were delicious

so sweet and so cold

“The Red Wheelbarrow”

By William Carlos Williams

so much depends upon

a red wheel barrow

glazed with rain water

beside the white chickens.

“To A Poor Old Woman”

By William Carlos Williams

munching a plum on the street a paper bag

of them in her hand

They taste good to her They taste good

to her. They taste good to her

You can see it by the way she gives herself

to the one half sucked out in her hand

Comforted a solace of ripe plums seeming to fill the air They taste good to her

Edward Estlin Cummings(1894-1962)

Edward Estlin (“e.e.”) Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, October 14, 1894. He began writing poems as early as 1904 and studied Latin and Greek at the Cambridge Latin High School. He received his B.A. in 1915 and his M.A. in 1916, both from Harvard. His studies there introduced him to avant-garde writers such as Ezra Pound.

In 1917, Cummings' first published poems appeared in the anthology Eight Harvard Poets. The same year, Cummings left the United States for France as a volunteer ambulance driver in World War I. Five months after his assignment, however, he and a friend were interned in a prison camp by the French authorities on suspicion of espionage (an experience recounted in his novel, The Enormous Room) for his outspoken anti-war convictions.

(Source:www.poets.org, The Academy of American Poets)

Edward Estlin Cummings(1894-1962)

After the war, he settled into a life divided between houses in rural Connecticut and Greenwich Village, with frequent visits to Paris. He also traveled throughout Europe, meeting poets and artists, including Pablo Picasso, whose work he particularly admired.

In his work, Cummings experimented radically with form, punctuation, spelling and syntax, abandoning traditional techniques and structures to create a new, highly idiosyncratic means of poetic expression. Later in his career, he was often criticized for settling into his signature style and not pressing his work towards further evolution. Nevertheless, he attained great popularity, especially among young readers, for the simplicity of his language, his playful mode and his attention to subjects such as war and sex.

At the time of his death, September 3, 1962, he was the second most widely read poet in the United States, after Robert Frost.

(Source:www.poets.org, The Academy of American Poets)

“why must itself up every of a park”

by e.e. cummings

why must itself up every of a park anus stick some quote statue unquote to prove that a hero equals any jerk who was afraid to dare to answer "no"?

quote citizens unquote might otherwise forget(to err is human;to forgive divine)that if the quote state unquote says "kill" killing is an act of christian love.

"Nothing" in 1944 A.D. "can stand against the argument of mil itary necessity"(generalissimo e) and echo answers "there is no appeal

from reason"(freud)-- you pays your money and you doesn't take your choice. Ain't freedom grand

“why must itself up every of a park”

by e.e. cummings

why must itself up every of a park anus stick some quote statue unquote to prove that a hero equals any jerk who was afraid to dare to answer "no"?

quote citizens unquote might otherwise forget(to err is human;to forgive divine)that if the quote state unquote says "kill" killing is an act of christian love.

"Nothing" in 1944 A.D. "can stand against the argument of mil itary necessity"(generalissimo e) and echo answers "there is no appeal

from reason"(freud)-- you pays your money and you doesn't take your choice. Ain't freedom grand

“it may not always be so; and i say”

by e.e. cummings

it may not always be so; and i say ____that if your lips, which i have loved, should touch ____another's, and your dear strong fingers clutch ____his heart, as mine in time not far away; ____if on another's face your sweet hair lay ____in such a silence as i know, or such ____great writhing words as, uttering overmuch, ____stand helplessly before the spirit at bay; ____

if this should be, i say if this should be-- ____you of my heart, send me a little word; ____that i may go unto him, and take his hands, ____saying, Accept all happiness from me. ____Then shall i turn my face, and hear one bird ____sing terribly afar in the lost lands. ____

“the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls”

by e.e. cummingsthe Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds (also, with the church's protestant blessings daughters, unscented shapeless spirited) they believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead, are invariably interested in so many things- at the present writing one still finds delighted fingers knitting for the is it Poles?

perhaps. While permanent faces coyly bandy scandal of Mrs. N and Professor D ....the Cambridge ladies do not care, above Cambridge if sometimes in its box of sky lavender and cornerless, the moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy

“the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls”

by e.e. cummingsthe Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls Aare unbeautiful and have comfortable minds B(also, with the church's protestant blessings Cdaughters, unscented shapeless spirited) Dthey believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead, Dare invariably interested in so many things- Cat the present writing one still finds Bdelighted fingers knitting for the is it Poles? A

perhaps. While permanent faces coyly bandy Escandal of Mrs. N and Professor D .... Fthe Cambridge ladies do not care, above GCambridge if sometimes in its box of Gsky lavender and cornerless, the Fmoon rattles like a fragment of angry candy E

“Chansons Innocentes: I”by e.e. cummings

in Just- spring when the world is mud- luscious the little lame balloonman

whistles far and wee

and eddieandbill come running from marbles and piracies and it's spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer old balloonman whistles far and wee and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it's spring and the goat-footed

balloonMan whistles far and wee

“r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r”

by e.e. cummingsr-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r

     who a)s  w(e  loo) k upnowgath     PPEGORHASS                     eringint (o- aThe) :l   eA            !p: S                      a   (r rIvInG    .gRrEaPsPhOs)        to rea (be) rran (com) gi (e) ngly ,grasshopper;

“since feeling is first”by e.e. cummings

since feeling is first who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool while Spring is in the world

my blood approves, and kisses are a far better fate than wisdom lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry --the best gesture of my brain is less than your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for eachother: then laugh, leaning back in my arms for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

“i love you much(most beautiful darling)”

by e.e. cummingsi love you much(most beautiful darling)

more than anyone on the earth and Ilike you better than everything in the sky-

sunlight and singing welcome your coming

although winter may be everywherewith such a silence and such a darknessnoone can quite begin to guess

(except my life)the true time of year-

and if what calls itself a world should havethe luck to hear such singing(or glimpse suchsunlight as will leap higher than highthrough gayer than gayest someone's heart at your each

nearness)everyone certainly would(mymost beautiful darling)believe in nothing but love

“i carry your heart with me (i carry it in”

by e.e. cummingsi carry your heart with me(i carry it in my heart)i am never without it(anywhere i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done by only me is your doing,my darling)

i fear no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true) and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows higher than soul can hope or mind can hide) and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

“I do not love you”by Pablo Neruda

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,in secret, between the shadow and the soul.I love you as the plant that never bloomsbut carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;so I love you because I know no other waythat this: where I does not exist, nor you,so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.