Modernists

Not even the loose tenets of Imagism could offer the freedom poets required after World War I. Pound and Eliot longed to break completely from traditional forms in the hope that they could then capture and convey new levels of meaning, address more modern anxieties, and bring the poet and the reader into a new, post-literal relationship. At its best, the new movement encouraged E. E. Cummings, Archibald MacLeish, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams to try poems that evoked ideas through unorthodox forms, private vocabularies, and bright new images.

They thought poetry could transcend language and become an experience in the same way that the new abstract artists were trying to stimulate an emotion, not describe it. A poem, MacLeish said, must not mean but be. At its worst, Modernism was an excuse for the obfuscations and pretentious complexities of Pound, Eliot, and Hart Crane.

The Modernists shared three characteristics: the forms were experimental, the language and references were personal, and the message was cerebral, not emotional. Cummings, and to a lesser extent MacLeish, kicked the traditional form off-center with unusual word- and line-breaks. Rhythm and rhyme were abandoned in favor of idioms and odd words that often stretched around to a new line, keeping the reader on his toes. As if the poet was drawing the reader into a game, this playful puzzle factor added an intellectual dimension to poetry not seen since Donne.

References in Modernist poems were not just remote, they were often obscure and personal, designed to coyly deny the reader access to the poem’s full meaning. Modernist poems were by poets, for poets, and about the poets, and they often seemed to have been written with disregard for whether anyone else would understand.

But the most unusual characteristic of Modernist poetry was that, except for E. E. Cummings, the poems seemed surprisingly unconcerned with feelings. Modernism was tranquility recollected in tranquility. From the Elizabethans forward for three centuries, poets had tried to use imagery, rhythm, and beautiful language to create an emotional experience. Even at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Imagists in America and the Georgians in England were deeply touching the hearts of their readers. But Stevens, Williams, and even Eliot at his best seemed to prefer an intellectual, almost clinical level of communication. They offered no joy in language, no exalted vision, and little shared emotion.

Immortal Poets: Their Lives and Verse, by Christopher Burns