American poetry of the first half of 20th century. The specificity of Paul Laurence Dunbar poetry. Content introduction chapter I the Poets Paul Laurence Dunbar

Chapter II American poetry of the first half of 20the century
2.1. Poetry in the colonies
During the first part of the 20th century, the novel continued to reign as the nation's chief literary form. Nevertheless, serious poetry continued to be written. The most widely accepted date for marking a poetic renaissance in the United States and the beginning of modern American poetry is 1912, the year Poetry, A Magazine of Verse was founded by Harriet Monroe and a group of subscribers. The first issue of the magazine stated its purpose: "to give to poetry her own place, her own voice." From its founding down to the present, the magazine has served its function admirably well and has been instrumental in introducing many new American poets to the poetry-reading public.
A common attitude among the new poets of the interwar years was one of rebellion against Victorian poetry, a rebellion which was often manifested in their reactions against Victorian philosophy. More often, however, rather than rebelling against what the Victorian poets had said, the typical new poet reacted against how they had expressed themselves. He was against the conventional poetic techniques of the times.
Experimentation was common. Robert Frost observed that "Poetry. . .was tried without punctuation. It was tried without capital letters. It was tried without any image but those to the eye. . .It was tried without content under the name of poesie pure. It was tried * without phrase, epigram, coherence, logic, and consistency. It was tried without ability. . .It was tried without feeling or sentiment. . ."
The new poets felt that life was more complicated than most Romantic poets had admitted, and they set about to expose its conflicts and contrasting value systems. Consequently, most of these interwar poets
dealt with the incongruities of existence and resorted to such devices as humor, irony, and wit to point up the multiple aspects of life.
Taking their cue from the Imagists¹ of the early 20th century, American poets between the two World Wars believed that poetry should treat its subject directly, without much moralizing or added commentary; that only words which strengthened the poem should be used; and that rhythm should arise from longer phrases which approximated speech. They also avoided sentimentality and used a kind of understated or indirect approach, expecting the reader to discover the meaning for himself.
In contrast to the poetry of the 19th century, the new American poetry was both more intellectual and more related to real life situations. Another characteristic was its attempt to employ the most concentrated expression possible by eliminating all but the essential images.⁹
During the early years of the 20th-century poetic rebellion, an important battle was fought for the recognition of free verse. For many years, the casual reader believed that the "new poetry" and "free verse" were synonymous. Among the writers of such verse, in the tradition of Walt Whitman, were William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, and Wallace Stevens.
Gradually free verse won acceptance, but after a period during which it was used increasingly, it began to decline in popularity. By 1941 many leading poets considered it rather old-fashioned. Nevertheless, free verse had important effects, for it offered new insights about possible variations in verse forms. Even so "classical" a poet as Robert Frost was not immune to such influences toward freedom of versification.
Since the start of World War I in Europe, Frost had been publishing small collections of his verse. Though the first important recognition he received came from Britain, he was always essentially a New England poet. He was also a farmer, writing his poetry with the deceptive, rustic simplicity we associate with country life. He wrote about building
fences, picking apples, gathering flowers, sowing and harvesting. He wrote about the universal matters of life and death, good and evil, just as Faulkner did in his novels. The two World Wars and the Great Depression between them had little effect on his verse. National and international events left it unruffled. In both emotion and language, Frost was restrained, conveying his message by implication. The rhythms of his poetry were regular. They were not glibly smooth, but they fell easily on the ear. Though his language started out by being conventionally poetic, he soon found his individual voice. His poetry then gained a colloquial directness that allowed him to avoid the extremes of high-sounding phrases on the one hand and banality on the other.
For all his seeming serenity, Frost knew what sorrow and wickedness meant. As he said in one lyric, he was acquainted with the night. More than a handful of his poems reflect the tragedies that darkened his personal life. As he went on writing, he increased in wisdom. His poetic gifts never failed him, although he lived to be nearly ninety. His final book was issued in 1962.
Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, and Edward Arlington Robinson, along with other distinctively modern poets, had succeeded in accustoming readers to verse forms that embraced all types, from rhymed stanzas in regular meter to free verse. They had caught the authentic rhythms and accents of 20th-century America. Poetry,magazine also was furnishing a market for experimental verse. Within this atmosphere, the poetry of such new voices as those of William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, and Archibald MacLeish, was gradually accepted. This new group, many of whom were only a few years younger than the poets who had received recognition before World War I, grew in fame as the years passed. By the outbreak of World War II, they formed the nucleus of a goodly number of truly excellent modern poets.
In many ways, however, the first half of the 20th century was still an age of prose. The most notable writing continued to be fiction, as novelists competed for public attention. Writers like John Dos Passos, Willa Cather, and Thomas Wolfe were widely acclaimed. And one author, writina with a minimum of concessions to the critics and to the public, began to attract the attention of serious students of literature. She was a Southerner, Katherine Anne Porter.¹⁰
Miss Porter grew up in Texas and lived for a time in Mexico. She used both places as the settings for some of her rich, involved stories. She gathered her early tales in a book called Flowering Judas. Later collections of her works also proved to be distinguished. The best of them was Pale Horse, Pale Rider. The title story tells about a girl's love for a soldier who dies of influenza in camp during World War I. It is a remarkably appealing tale told in a style that is elegant but with a cutting edge. Much of the critical acclaim for this work resulted from Miss Porter's skillful use of symbols in it.
Some of her stories show Miss Porter's interest in the tensions between two cultures, in particular between the Mexican and the American, and between the Negro and the White. The short story, "Theft,"—unusually short for her—is a brilliant combination of clashes. It encompasses the encounters of races, nations, and sexes. The same talent for simultaneously treating several conflicts appears in her one long work, the novel entitled Ship of Fools. She pictures a German ship going from Mexico to Europe shortly before the beginning of the Nazi regime. The individual passengers represent various groups. Hostility and tension fill the sea air. Nearly everyone on board suffers from it. The voyage is a long one, and revealing because of Miss Porter's insight into human nature. It is a happy one for only a scattered few among the many passengers.
There is a sharp contrast between the steely, if feminine, strength of Miss Porter's writing in Ship of Fools and the fluid writing of Saul Bellow in The Adventures of Augie March. Bellow was a Canadian boy who migrated with his family to the United States in 1924. He grew up in Chicago and went to college there. He gradually displayed his gift for writing prose fiction and gained critical praise. His first two novels were conventional and tight in structure. Dangling Man (1944) is the diary of a draftee of Bellow's own age, waiting to be inducted into the army and meanwhile living in indecisive uncertainty. At times he tries to arouse himself but he always slips back into a state of inertia. At the end he welcomes being drafted because it means that he will have no decisions to make. The next novel, The Victim, is set in New York in the heat of summer. It deals with a worried businessman and an acquaintance who fastens onto him like a leech. The acquaintance lives off the businessman and harries him. As the novel goes along, we become less sure which man is being victimized, and which is the victim.
These first two Bellow novels showed good organization, but his Augie March sprawls. The main connection between the many episodes of this long book, published in 1953, is simply the central character. He is talkative, goodhearted, sometimes a bit of a rascal. This kind of novel is called "picaresque," after a Spanish word for "rogue." The setting is Chicago, which is pictured as a city full of vitality. Augie knocks on many doors, there and elsewhere, and they usually open for him.
Bellow has gone on to publish several more novels. Taken together, they establish his rank among today's leading American novelists. Among his more recent novels it is hard to pick out the best; each is good. However, the most noteworthy is probably Herzog, the story of a neurotic, alienated college professor. In a sense, the alienated man is still Bellow's favorite hero. After all, for many years Bellow saw himself as an outsider. He was a Canadian who came to the United States. He was a Midwesterner in a culture dominated by the eastern art of the country. He was a Jew in a gentile civilization. Like most authors, he usually put himself into his books.
Below is the best, but not the only, Jewish novelist who has turned his feeling of alienation into first-class fiction. In today's culture, one of the most appealing symbols of alienation has been the Jew. Only one symbol has been more effective. It is that of the Negro.
The Negro writer provides the most striking example of alienation in American literature. With the emergence of the Black Power² movement and the drive for a separate—and black—identity, he has come to the forefront. There has been a spate of Negro novels. Their general subject has been the oppression by the whites of a Negro minority. Their usual vehicle has been the story, generally set in a black ghetto, of a Negro youth and the cruel things that happen to him. The first notable example, Native Son by Richard Wright, appeared in 1940. After World War II more such novels appeared, especially in the late 1950s and 1960s. Since 1965 a significant number of new black poets and essayists have appeared.¹¹
The most gifted of black novelists, James Baldwin, has not written exclusively about his race, however. His alienated heroes have been white, as well as black. His first novel was Go Tell It on the Mountain, published in 1953. It is about the members of a Harlem³ church and, through flash-backs, about their ancestors. His second novel, Giovanni's Room, is about Whites. His later fiction and his essays explain pungently what it means to be a Negro. The essays also describe the dangers of ignoring the Negro's plight in American culture.
Talented though Baldwin is, his writing has been overshadowed by a single novel, Invisible Man, written by Ralph Ellison and published in 1952. This is considered by many critics to be the outstanding book of the past twenty years. The "invisible man" is the Negro. The white man simply does not see him as a human being: that is Ellison's central idea. He dramatizes this idea through the experience of a young man—basically Ellison himself—who attends a Negro college, is expelled through no fault of his own, and finally drifts to Harlem. There he assumes the leadership, by chance, in a struggle against a family's eviction. He attracts the attention of the local Communist party, joins it, but at length rebels against its discipline, which is as unacceptable to him as the Black Nationalism⁴ he also encounters. At the end of the story he withdraws completely from society, living in a sealed cellar.
The novel is written in a vivid, flexible style. Its characters are types, and yet they seem to move and have a life of their own. The gallery of whites and Negroes in Ellison's book includes a number of characters we are apt to remember, especially the main character himself and the Black Nationalist who calls himself Ras the Exhorter. The message of the novel is despair, but Ellison's energy is so brilliant that he makes us hopeful in spite of his own pessimism. In a way, Ellison's notable novel sums up American literature of today. It is energized by dissent and alienation.
After World War II, American poetry began to turn away from the orthodoxy—based on symmetry, intellect, irony, and wit—that had been established by T.S. Eliot and the new critics. The later poets discovered that they needed something more than the standardized intellectual, ironic, impersonal approaches of the previous thirty years. Seeking to communicate their experience, these poets (of whom Randall Jarrell is one example) expressed themselves with the emotional and the personal, in poetry of feeling and insight; they insisted on looking at World War II with their own eyes and telling its meaning with their own voices.