Poetry: 1900 to the 1950s

i General

In Lyric Encounters Daniel Morris investigates the dialogues between speakers and other characters within poems and between poems and other cultural texts. The book includes discussions of Robert Frost (“Mending Wall”), William Carlos Williams (“The Crimson Cyclamen”), and Langston Hughes (“Theme for English B”). As Morris explains in his introduction, the book developed in response to his teaching of modern poetry. His emphasis on the dialogic character of lyric and his clear focus on major poems by each writer make the book a handy resource for the classroom. He also explains how his approach offsets that of Helen Vendler in her introductory textbook Poems, Poets, Poetry. As a result, his book could be assigned in conjunction with Vendler’s to expand the horizon of approaches students might adopt when discussing and writing about the poems in her textbook.

In How Did Poetry Survive? (Illinois, 2012) John Timberman New-comb explains why American poetry took on a new cultural vibrancy in the early 20th century after its status had “hit bottom between 1900 and 1905.” Reflecting a major trend in recent scholarship, he samples widely from various little magazines to develop this literary history, arguing that the shift from genteel to avant-garde poetic values reflected a cultural transformation that was both sociologically and artistically diverse and far more so than earlier accounts of modernism have allowed. The overall argument of the book is that “the New Verse movement was catalyzed not only—or even primarily—by innovations of style but also by its polemical expansion of subject matter.” Newcomb prefers New Verse to modernist because the former phrase is the one that was used during the early decades of the 20th century and because he believes it is a more inclusive and historically accurate category than modernism. Most of his book is devoted to lesser-known poets, so there is a recuperative element to the study. Newcomb believes an undue focus on canonical writers skews the picture of the past.

In the first two-thirds of his book, Newcomb covers work published in Poetry, the Masses, Others, and the Seven Arts. In his chapter on Poetry, he focuses on Harriet Monroe’s success in developing and sustaining the magazine. He makes the case for her business acumen in drumming up financial support for the venture and sustaining the journal, but he also defends her capacity as an editor to promote the cultural value of poetry, both in her provocative editorials and her skill at using controversy to support her venture. Newcomb demonstrates that Ezra Pound’s vilification of her has kept scholars from recognizing Monroe’s talents as an editor, her open-mindedness about artistic experimentation, and her savvy as a publicist. His coverage of the other journals shows how New Verse was far more socially engaged and aesthetically varied than previous scholarship has recognized. Driven by his concern with social engagement, Newcomb focuses on depictions of labor issues, censorship, city life, industrialization, gender, pluralism, and American responses to World War I.

In the final third of the book, Newcomb focuses on three features of city life that emerge as major sites of controversy and poetic revaluation: the gutter, the skyscraper, and the subway. These sites figure the overwhelming flux of city life, at the level of both the panoramic (skyline) and the microscopic (gutter). “Learning to represent the machine-age metropolis after 1910 did make American poets modern,” posits New-comb, “but not all in the same way.” He also explores the relevance of “representational and broadly realist” painting and photography to an assortment of poets because he seeks to unseat the “hegemonic narrative of art history” that “identifies modernism with the fracturing of realist surfaces.”

In “Making It Old: The Victorian/Modern Divide in Twentieth-Century American Poetry” (MLQ 73 [2012]: 37–67) Sarah Ehlers argues that “the Victorian was not restricted to the nineteenth century and to Britain but had a complex afterlife in twentieth-century America.” She uses two poets from Chicago to prove this claim: Monroe and Selma Walden. Like Newcomb’s examples in his book, Ehler’s choice of...