MODERNISM - Central Dauphin School District
Poetry Unit III
MODERNISM
Representative Modernist Poets and Poems
• Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)-"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"; "The Snowman"; "Peter Quince at the Clavier"; "Anecdote of the Jar"
• William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)-"Red Wheelbarrow"; "This is Just To Say"; "Danse Russe"; "Spring and All"; "The Great Figure"; 'The Yachts"; "Desert Music" “The Descent"
• H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) (1886-1961)-"Star Wheels in Purple"; "Helen"; "Heat"
• Marianne Moore (1887-1972)-"Poetry"; "Baseball and Writing"; "To a Snail"
• T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)-"Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"; "Ash Wednesday"
• e. e. cummings (1894-1962)-" anyone lived in a pretty how town"; "next to of course god america i"; "spring is like a perhaps hand"; "i sing of Olaf glad and big"
Related Modernist Prose
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (1882-1941), Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (1897-1962), and The Awakening by Kate Chopin (1851-1904)
A Quick Definition
Modernism is often characterized as a revolutionary force. In the field of science, Einstein was reassessing time, space, and our relationship to these concepts. In global politics, two calamitous world wars bracketed decades of intense technological advances in the mass killing of soldiers and civilians.
In the field of visual arts, surrealism, futurism, abstraction, and cubism overthrew most accepted traditional ideas about pictorial representation. Not surprisingly, literature in the twentieth century also saw a thorough questioning of what had come before and a willingness to experiment with new forms, a goal shared with the symbolists, but with which the modernists were much more daring in their first movements.
What to look for in Modernist Poetry
• Chock full of allusions, these poems reduce human experience to fragments. For example, e. e. cummings breaks language down into its component parts, using pieces of overheard conversation alongside more grandiose pronouncements. H.D. in her 18-line poem entitled "Helen," assumes the reader has a working knowledge of the incident that prompts the Trojan War (chronicled in The Iliad by Homer) to make sense of why" All Greece hates / the still eyes in the white face."
• Some of these poems are influenced by cubism, and they try to see the world from as many points of view as possible at the same time. Wallace Stevens's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" comes in thirteen sections, each of which refers explicitly or implicitly to a blackbird, and can be seen as a kind of analogue to Picasso's cubist presentation of a still life in Guitar, Bottle, Bowl of Fruit and Glass on Table.
Anecdote of the Jar
by Wallace Stevens (1879 – 1955)
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
This Is Just To Say
by William Carlos Williams (1883 – 1963)
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
Poetry
by Marianne Moore (1887 – 1972)
I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
they are
useful. When they become so derivative as to become
unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand: the bat
holding on upside down or in quest of something to
eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless
wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse
that feels a flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician--
nor is it valid
to discriminate against "business documents and
school-books"; all these phenomena are important. One must make
a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the
result is not poetry,
nor till the poets among us can be
"literalists of
the imagination"--above
insolence and triviality and can present
for inspection, "imaginary gardens with real toads in them,"
shall we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.
THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE
Representative Poets and Poems of the Harlem Renaissance
• Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906)-"Frederick Douglass"; "Sympathy"; "We Wear the Mask"
• Claude McKay (1889-1948)-"If We Must Die"; "The White House"; "The Tropics of New York"
• Langston Hughes (1902-1967)-"I, Too, Sing America"; "The Negro Speaks of Rivers"; "Theme for English B"; "Montage of a Dream Deferred"
• Countee Cullen (1903-1946)-"Incident"; "For A Lady I Know"; "Yet Do I Marvel"
Related Prose from the Harlem Renaissance
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), Passing by Nella Larsen (1891- 1964), Black Boy and Native Son by Richard Wright (1908-1960), and Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1913-1994)
A Quick Definition
Art associated with the Harlem Renaissance was mostly created in the first half of the twentieth century, after World War I, during the movement of African Americans to northern industrial cities (called the Great Migration). Many African Americans who settled in these cities lived, or were forced to live, in the same neighborhoods. Harlem, in New York City, was one of the most famous African American neighborhoods during this time. Jazz, poetry, painting, dance, electrified blues, and the study of folklore thrived in these neighborhoods and took on many of the same concerns as the modernists. In fact, one could think of Harlem Renaissance poetry, and Langston Hughes's poetry in particular, as a branch of modernism.
What to look for in Harlem Renaissance Poetry
o Content is often directly related to African American concerns and issues of thetime. Consider Dunbar's "Frederick Douglass," which elegizes the famous abolitionist in such a way as to draw attention to his continuing positive influence on the culture: "Oh, Douglass, thou hast passed beyond the shore, /But still thy voice is ringing o'er the gale!"
o Many Harlem Renaissance poems rely on repetitive structure similar to blues lyrics (see Dunbar's "Sympathy") or on fragmented structure similar to jazz improvisation (see Hughes's "Montage of a Dream Deferred").
o Several of these poets, especially Langston Hughes, consciously sought a new American idiom alongside other African American artists such as blues singer Bessie Smith.
Other poets combined European forms like the sonnet with a content and a tone more related to African American concerns, such as McKay's “If We Must Die."
The Harlem Renaissance
We Wear the Mask
by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872 – 1906)
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,--
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.
Why should the world be overwise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.
We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!
I, Too, Sing America
by Langston Hughes (1902 – 1967)
I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.
Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed--
I, too, am America
POSTMODERNISM
A Quick Definition
Academic controversy continues as to whether works labeled postmodern are merely a later version of the modernist tendencies developed in the twentieth century or whether they are actually part of a new and separate movement. Usually the most that academics can agree on regarding the postmodern is that the term is insufficient. Most postmodern works were created in the second half of the twentieth century and though they share some of the concerns and motivations of modernists, they often take these principles to a much different end. If Einstein's theory of relativity represents the modem era, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is the emblem of the postmodern. The uncertainty principle holds, in reductive terms, that one cannot know both the speed and the location of an object simultaneously, which introduces a note of chance or chaos into scientific inquiry.
Even more so than other literary labels, postmodern is a label that is rejected by the majority of artists who are labeled as such. Instead, smaller contingents of writers exist, often in conflict with other postmodern groups. These smaller groups include the Beats, the confessional poets, the Black Arts movement, the Black Mountain school, and the New York school of poets.
Each of these groups is dealt with separately below because each had such a different aesthetic program. A few statements can be applied to postmodern art in general, however, and will be discussed before going into the specific sub-movements.
What to look for in Postmodern Poetry
o Parody, irony, and narrative instability often inform the tone.
o Allusions are just as likely to be made to popular culture as they are to classical learning.
o Strictly binary concepts (hot and cold; black and white) often collapse. Here, ideas that spread across a spectrum, rather than fit strictly into one box or the other, predominate.
o There is no real center. The Internet is a perfect example of a postmodern invention.
o The surface is often more interesting to postmodern artists than any ideas of depth.
The following quote is attributed to Andy Warhol, a kind of patron saint of postmodernism and a notorious wig wearer: "Wear a wig and people notice the wig. Wear a silver wig and people notice the silver."
THE BEATS
Representative Beat Poets and Poems
• Lawrence Ferlinghetti (b. 1919)-" A Coney Island of the Mind"; "The Changing Light"; "Vast Confusion"; "Wild Dreams of a New Beginning"
• Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)-"Howl"; "America"; "A Supermarket in California"; "Kaddish"
• Gregory Corso (1930-200l)-"Marriage"; "Bomb"; "The Mad Yak"
• Gary Snyder (b. 1930)-"Four Poems for Robin"; "For All"; "Hay for the Horses"
Related Beat Prose
Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) and On The Road by Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)
A Quick Definition
A post-World War II phenomenon, the Beats used different settings over the years to practice their brand of hallucinogenic, visionary, anti-establishment art: New York City (many of the original group were Columbia University students or dropouts), San Francisco, Tangiers, Prague, and Mexico City witnessed Beat events, as did many places in between.
Beat poets were quite good at mythologizing themselves, and they shared a sense of personal frankness with the confessional poets and a sense of interdisciplinary energy.(especially in its overlap with music) with the New York school. Buddhism was important to many members (especially Gary Snyder), as were many of the tenets of William Blake's version of romanticism, such as the importance of the individual, the imagination freed from society's constraints, and the yearning for transcendence.
In Ferlinghetti's "The Changing Light," a reader can feel the deep connection Beats often felt to nature, even as the speaker of this poem is describing a city scene. In Corso's "Marriage," the oppositional stance the Beats took toward the suburban bourgeoisie is in bold relief. Ginsberg's" America" shares much of the same satirical tone, but Ginsberg was also capable of writing angry, ranting, Whitmanesque masterpieces like "Howl" and a tender, meditative elegy for his mother in "Kaddish."
"First thought, best thought" describes the aesthetic ideal of the Beat poet. Moved by jazz improvisation and Buddhist ideas of impermanence, these poets considered themselves the chroniclers of their age. Politics directly informs many of their poems, either through specific references to members of the government or specific references to issues important to them, such as Gary Snyder's commitment to the environment.
A Supermarket in California
by Allen Ginsberg (1926 – 1997)
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked
down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking
at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon
fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at
night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!
--and you, García Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking
among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops?
What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you,
and followed in my imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy
tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the
cashier.
Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in a hour.
Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and
feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade
to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automo-
biles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America
did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a
smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of
Lethe?
CONFESSIONAL POETS
Representative Confessional Poets and Poems
• John Berryman (1914-1972)-"Dream Song I"; "Dream Song 4"; "Dream Song 29"
• Robert Lowell (1917-1977)-"Skunk Hour"; "For the Union Dead"; "Memories of West Street and Lepke"; "Home After Three Months Away"
• Anne Sexton (1928-1967)-"Wanting to Die"; "The Truth the Dead Know"; "For My Lover, Returning to his Wife"
• Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)-"Daddy"; "Lady Lazarus"; "Balloons"; "Ariel"
Related Confessional Prose
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
A Quick Definition
As the name suggests, confessional poets took the personal pronouns (I, me, my) seriously and explored intimate content in their poetry. Love affairs, suicidal thoughts, fears of failure, ambivalent or downright violent opinions about family members, and other autobiographically sensitive material moved front and center in these poets' works. As Berryman wrote, using his alter ego "Henry" as a mask for his own feelings of distress in Dream Song 1, "I don't see how Henry, pried / open for all the world to see, survived." These poets "pried open" their innermost thoughts and opened them for all the world to see, even if it meant sharing one's troubled feelings about one's father, as Plath did in a poem full of Holocaust imagery entitled Daddy, writing "Daddy, I have had to kill you. / You died before I had time ... "
In a cultural milieu much more discreet than that of the current era, these poets ripped the façade off of an outwardly comfortable suburban life to reveal the doubts and anxieties that kept the occupants awake at night behind white picket fences. Robert Lowell, for example, wrote in "Home After Three Months Away" how he felt when faced with the details of his life, such as the recent birth of his child: "I keep no rank nor station. / Cured, I am frizzled, stale and small." And Anne Sexton wrote with existential dread, "Since you ask, most days I cannot remember. / I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage. / Then the almost unnameable lust returns." The "unnameable lust" is the speaker's desire for death, and she writes eloquently about it at a time when mental illness was much less understood or accommodated by law.
More than just poets who shared personal stories with their readers, these poets also invested a good deal of time and effort in their craft, constructing verse that paid careful attention to rewritten prosody.
Wanting to Die
by Anne Sexton (1928 – 1967)
Since you ask, most days I cannot remember.
I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage.
Then the almost unnameable lust returns.
Even then I have nothing against life.
I know well the grass blades you mention,
the furniture you have placed under the sun.
But suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.
Twice I have so simply declared myself,
have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy,
have taken on his craft, his magic.
In this way, heavy and thoughtful,
warmer than oil or water,
I have rested, drooling at the mouth-hole.
I did not think of my body at needle point.
Even the cornea and the leftover urine were gone.
Suicides have already betrayed the body.
Still-born, they don't always die,
but dazzled, they can't forget a drug so sweet
that even children would look on and smile.
To thrust all that life under your tongue!--
that, all by itself, becomes a passion.
Death's a sad Bone; bruised, you'd say,
and yet she waits for me, year after year,
to so delicately undo an old wound,
to empty my breath from its bad prison.
Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet,
raging at the fruit, a pumped-up moon,
leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss,
leaving the page of the book carelessly open,
something unsaid, the phone off the hook
and the love, whatever it was, an infection.
NEW YORK SCHOOL OF POETS
Representative New York School Poets
• Barbara Guest (1920-2006)-"The Blue Stairs"; "Wild Gardens Overlooked by Night Lights"; "Sound and Structure"; "Echoes"
• Kenneth Koch (1925-2002)-"One Train May Hide Another"; "Talking to Petrizia"; "To Various Persons Talked to All at Once;" "Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams"
• Frank O'Hara (1926-1966)-"In Memory of My Feelings"; "The Day Lady Died"; "A Step Away From Them"; "Lines to a Depressed Friend"
• John Ashbery (b. 1927)-"The Painter"; "The Instruction Manual"; "Daffy Duck in Hollywood"; "The New Higher"
A Quick Definition
New York school poets saw themselves as fellow travelers of the abstract expressionist school of painters. Many of these poets wrote art criticism, and Frank O'Hara even rose to the rank of assistant curator for the Museum of Modem Art. Their aesthetic mode overlapped with Beat spontaneity and with confessional-poet frankness, but was much more ironic, and more interested in the surreal combination of high art and popular art allusions. Many of their poems, especially those called Lunch Poems by Frank O'Hara, seem to be catalogues of what one might see on a walk in midtown Manhattan. The urban environment, of course, allows for many spontaneous intersections. A taxi goes by a construction site. A billboard advertising tourism to a natural paradise hovers over a traffic jam, providing ironic contrast.
These poets often see themselves as helping the reader see the world in new and different ways. For example, Barbara Guest in "The Blue Stairs" writes in an ekphrastic mode (or a mode based on putting visual art into words), "Now I shall tell you / why it is beautiful/Design: extraordinary /color: cobalt blue" and O'Hara writes in "The Day Lady Died," an elegy for Billie Holiday, "and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of / leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT / while she whispered a song along the keyboard / to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing." Barbara Guest's speaker describes looking at a painting while O'Hara's speaker describes hearing a song at a jazz club, but both speakers are interested in inspiring us to look or listen again.
Surrealists wanted to jar their audience's senses by juxtaposing uncommon objects. John Ashbery mixes "Rumford's Baking Powder, a celluloid earring, Speedy Gonzales, the latest from Helen Topping Miller's fertile Escritoire" in his poem "Daffy Duck in Hollywood," and Kenneth Koch consciously mixes tones in his poem "To Various Persons Talked to All at Once," writing, "I suppose I wanted to impress you. / It's snowing. / The Revlon Man has come from across the sea. / This racket is annoying. / We didn't want the baby to come here because of the hawk. / What are you reading? / In what style would you like the humidity to explain?" These poets reveled in the combination of the serious and the silly, the profound and the absurd, the highly formal and the relentlessly casual.
My Philosophy of Life
by John Ashbery (1927-)
Just when I thought there wasn't room enough
for another thought in my head, I had this great idea--
call it a philosophy of life, if you will. Briefly,
it involved living the way philosophers live,
according to a set of principles. OK, but which ones?
That was the hardest part, I admit, but I had a
kind of dark foreknowledge of what it would be like.
Everything, from eating watermelon or going to the bathroom
or just standing on a subway platform, lost in thought
for a few minutes, or worrying about rain forests,
would be affected, or more precisely, inflected
by my new attitude. I wouldn't be preachy,
or worry about children and old people, except
in the general way prescribed by our clockwork universe.
Instead I'd sort of let things be what they are
while injecting them with the serum of the new moral climate
I thought I'd stumbled into, as a stranger
accidentally presses against a panel and a bookcase slides back,
revealing a winding staircase with greenish light
somewhere down below, and he automatically steps inside
and the bookcase slides shut, as is customary on such occasions.
At once a fragrance overwhelms him--not saffron, not lavender,
but something in between. He thinks of cushions, like the one
his uncle's Boston bull terrier used to lie on watching him
quizzically, pointed ear-tips folded over. And then the great rush
is on. Not a single idea emerges from it. It's enough
to disgust you with thought. But then you remember something
William James
wrote in some book of his you never read--it was fine, it had the
fineness,
the powder of life dusted over it, by chance, of course, yet
still looking
for evidence of fingerprints. Someone had handled it
even before he formulated it, though the thought was his and
his alone.
It's fine, in summer, to visit the seashore.
There are lots of little trips to be made.
A grove of fledgling aspens welcomes the traveler. Nearby
are the public toilets where weary pilgrims have carved
their names and addresses, and perhaps messages as well,
messages to the world, as they sat
and thought about what they'd do after using the toilet
and washing their hands at the sink, prior to stepping out
into the open again. Had they been coaxed in by principles,
and were their words philosophy, of however crude a sort?
I confess I can move no farther along this train of thought--
something's blocking it. Something I'm
not big enough to see over. Or maybe I'm frankly scared.
What was the matter with how I acted before?
But maybe I can come up with a compromise--I'll let
things be what they are, sort of. In the autumn I'll put up jellies
and preserves, against the winter cold and futility,
and that will be a human thing, and intelligent as well.
I won't be embarrassed by my friends' dumb remarks,
or even my own, though admittedly that's the hardest part,
as when you are in a crowded theater and something you say
riles the spectator in front of you, who doesn't even like the idea
of two people near him talking together. Well he's
got to be flushed out so the hunters can have a crack at him--
this thing works both ways, you know. You can't always
be worrying about others and keeping track of yourself
at the same time. That would be abusive, and about as much fun
as attending the wedding of two people you don't know.
Still, there's a lot of fun to be had in the gaps between ideas.
That's what they're made for! Now I want you to go out there
and enjoy yourself, and yes, enjoy your philosophy of life, too.
They don't come along every day. Look out! There's a big one...
BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT
Representative Black Arts Movement Poets and Poems
• Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)-"The Bean-Eaters"; "We Real Cool"; "The Lovers of the Poor"; “The Mother"
• Amiri Baraka (also known as Leroi Jones) (b. 1934)-"Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note"; “Black Art"; "Ka'Ba"; "In the Funk World"
• Sonia Sanchez (b. 1934)-"Ballad"; "Malcolm"; "I Have Walked a Long Time"; "For Sweet Honey in the Rock"
• Ntozake Shange (b. 1948)-"My Father is a Retired Magician"; "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf"
A Quick Definition
These poets were often associated with members of the Black Power movement who grew frustrated with the pace of the changes enacted by the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. These poems are often politically charged, even aggressive, challenges to the white establishment.
We Real Cool
by Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)
THE POOL PLAYERS.
SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL.
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.
BLACK MOUNTAIN POETS
Representative Black Mountain Poets and Poems
• Charles Olson (1910-1970)-Excerpts from "The Maximus Poems"
• Denise Levertov (1923-1997)-"The Mutes"; "In California During the Gulf War";
"When We Look Up"
• Robert Creeley (1926-2005)-"Age"; "For Love"; "A Wicker Basket"; "America"
A Quick Definition
Besides teaching in the same place (Black Mountain College in Black Mountain, North Carolina) for some time and sharing an abiding interest in process over product, these poets seem quite different. Olson's poems spill across the page, while Creeley's lines compress into tight comers. Levertov often tackles political issues head-on, while Olson delved deeply into the archeology and history of Gloucester, Massachusetts.
My Mother Would Be a Falconress
by Robert Duncan (1919
My mother would be a falconress,
And I, her gay falcon treading her wrist,
would fly to bring back
from the blue of the sky to her, bleeding, a prize,
where I dream in my little hood with many bells
jangling when I'd turn my head.
My mother would be a falconress,
and she sends me as far as her will goes.
She lets me ride to the end of her curb
where I fall back in anguish.
I dread that she will cast me away,
for I fall, I mis-take, I fail in her mission.
She would bring down the little birds.
And I would bring down the little birds.
When will she let me bring down the little birds,
pierced from their flight with their necks broken,
their heads like flowers limp from the stem?
I tread my mother's wrist and would draw blood.
Behind the little hood my eyes are hooded.
I have gone back into my hooded silence,
talking to myself and dropping off to sleep.
For she has muffled my dreams in the hood she has made me,
sewn round with bells, jangling when I move.
She rides with her little falcon upon her wrist.
She uses a barb that brings me to cower.
She sends me abroad to try my wings
and I come back to her. I would bring down
the little birds to her
I may not tear into, I must bring back perfectly.
I tear at her wrist with my beak to draw blood,
and her eye holds me, anguisht, terrifying.
She draws a limit to my flight.
Never beyond my sight, she says.
She trains me to fetch and to limit myself in fetching.
She rewards me with meat for my dinner.
But I must never eat what she sends me to bring her.
Yet it would have been beautiful, if she would have carried me,
always, in a little hood with the bells ringing,
at her wrist, and her riding
to the great falcon hunt, and me
flying up to the curb of my heart from her heart
to bring down the skylark from the blue to her feet,
straining, and then released for the flight.
My mother would be a falconress,
and I her gerfalcon raised at her will,
from her wrist sent flying, as if I were her own
pride, as if her pride
knew no limits, as if her mind
sought in me flight beyond the horizon.
Ah, but high, high in the air I flew.
And far, far beyond the curb of her will,
were the blue hills where the falcons nest.
And then I saw west to the dying sun--
it seemd my human soul went down in flames.
I tore at her wrist, at the hold she had for me,
until the blood ran hot and I heard her cry out,
far, far beyond the curb of her will
to horizons of stars beyond the ringing hills of the world where
the falcons nest
I saw, and I tore at her wrist with my savage beak.
I flew, as if sight flew from the anguish in her eye beyond her sight,
sent from my striking loose, from the cruel strike at her wrist,
striking out from the blood to be free of her.
My mother would be a falconress,
and even now, years after this,
when the wounds I left her had surely heald,
and the woman is dead,
her fierce eyes closed, and if her heart
were broken, it is stilld
I would be a falcon and go free.
I tread her wrist and wear the hood,
talking to myself, and would draw blood.
OTHER IMPORTANT REPRESENTATIVE POETS AND POEMS
The poets and poems listed below are important but do not fit easily into the structure of literary movements.
-Emily Dickinson (1830-1886). Writing in near absolute isolation during the transcendental period, this astonishingly prolific and powerful poet does not easily fit into the transcendental rubric, and she shares many more attributes with the compressed wit and irony of the metaphysical poets.
Poems: "Because I could not stop for death"; "I heard a fly buzz when I died"; "Tell all the truth but tell it slant"; '1 measure every grief I meet."
-Robert Frost (1874-1963). Frost was active during modernism's heyday, and concerned himself with more traditionally minded verse forms and a locally colored content that cloaked a profound philosophical vein. Poems: "Out, Out"; "Birches"; "The Death of the Hired Man"; "Mending Wall"; "Design"/, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening."
-W. H. Auden (1907-1973). Auden wrote the first half of his poems as an English citizen before World War II, the second half of his poems as an American citizen after World War II, and is one of the giants of twentieth-century literature. His is more similar to the modernists than any other school, but he really transcends labels. Poems: "As I Walked Out One Evening"; "In Memory of W. B. Yeats"; "The Unknown Citizen"; "Musee des Beaux Arts."
-Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979). Sometimes placed with the confessional poets because of her friendship with Robert Lowell, Bishop is more reticent than the confessional poets. Poems: "In the Waiting Room"; "Filling Station"; "At the Fishhouses"; "One Art"; "The Moose."
-Adrienne Rich (b. 1929). An important feminist and political poet, Rich shares some background with the confessional poets, but she has taken the role of the poet in society so seriously that she has transcended the personal and become a kind of icon. Poems: "Diving into the Wreck"; "North American Time"; "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers"; "Miracle Ice Cream."
-Seamus Heaney (b. 1939). Heaney uses rural imagery to take on issues of identity, from the postcolonial confusion of what it means to be Irish to the late-twentieth-century confusion of what it means to be a poet. Poems: "Digging"; "The Harvest Bow."
Literary Elements to consider while journaling:
1. Rhythm
2. Elements of sound
3. Diction
4. Imagery/Figurative Language
5. Form
6. Tone
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