Literature: The New Poetry

LITERATURE: THE NEW POETRY

Peak Period

Much of the credit for the identification of the 1910s as a period of literary renaissance must be given to its poets, who revolutionized literature—and whose works had close ties to those of the visual artists of the period. Chicago and New York contributed equally to the flood of new poets and new styles. At least eight periodicals devoted exclusively to poetry were founded during the decade. More-general literary and arts periodicals of the day, such as The Smart Set, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic Monthly, The Little Review, and The Seven Arts, featured poetry prominently, as did the nation's book-stores.

Regionalism

Like several of their counterparts in prose, the greatest poets of the day chose specific regions of the country as their subjects. The poems in Edwin Arlington Robinson's The Town Down the River (1910) describe the residents of a fictional small town in New England. The same region was depicted in the work of the new poet Robert Frost, whose first three books—A Boys Will (1913), North of Boston (1914), and Mountain Interval (1916)—appeared during the decade and established his reputation. Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology, a collection of epitaphs for deceased residents of a fictional midwestern small town, was published in 1915; the following year Carl Sandburg's Chicago Poems appeared.

New Ideas and Forms

Much as the painters of the 1910s challenged the establishment, poets used verse freely, breaking old rules about meter and form and creating new (and increasingly abstract) styles. Inspired by the interplay among artists working in different media, some even found new functions for their art: poetry not only was to be read but also was to be seen and heard. In 1912 Gertrude Stein published her word portraits of Matisse and Picasso in Alfred Stieglitz's art periodical Camera Work. Vachel Lindsay traveled across America reading his poetry in exchange for food and lodging—though after the success of his 1912 poem "General William Booth Enters into Heaven," his recitations took place in more formal settings. T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," first published in a 1915 issue of Poetry, was innovative in form and content. (Seven years later his long poem The Waste Land was hailed as a landmark of modern poetry.) By the mid 1910s Eliot, like Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, had become an expatriate, he and Pound living in London and Stein in Paris. Yet the work of all three continued to appear in American periodicals.

Imagism

An inveterate inventor and promoter of literary "-isms," Pound created Imagism in 1912 with Hilda Doolittle (H. D.) and British poet Richard Aldington. They agreed on three principles: avoidance of superfluous words, direct treatment of the subject, and avoidance of strict meter in favor of musical phrasing. Pound championed the new movement by editing Des Imagistes (1914), which includes poems by the three original Imagists and eight other poets, including Americans Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams, Skipwith Cannell, and John Cournos. American John Gould Fletcher was also part of the movement. Convinced that Amy Lowell was trying to take over the movement, Pound soon developed new enthusiasms, while Lowell went on to edit three volumes of Some Imagist Poets (1915-1917). The wealthy Lowell, a member of the aristocratic Lowell family of Boston (the sister of Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell and grandniece of poet James Russell Lowell), became a patron of many of the new poets, regardless of their literary styles.

The Little Magazines

Important patronage also came from new periodicals devoted exclusively to poetry, which sprang up all over the country. They included Poetry Chicago, 1912), The Poetry Journal (Boston, 1912), The Glebe (Ridgefield, N.J., 1913), Others (Grantwood, N.J., 1915), Contemporary Verse (Philadelphia, 1916), The Poetry Review of America (Cambridge, Mass., 1916), The Sonnet (New York, 1917), and Youth (Cambridge, Mass., 1918). Chief among these magazines—which together signaled the flowering of poetry as an American art form—was Poetry, founded and edited by Harriet Monroe, with Pound serving as its overseas editor. This periodical was the first to publish the work of Lindsay and Sandburg; its other contributors during the 1910s included Frost, Robinson, Masters, Lowell, Sara Teasdale, Marianne Moore, Williams, Hart Crane, and Wallace Stevens (some of whom would be better known in the 1920s). Most of these poets—as well as H. D., Fletcher, and Conrad Aiken—also published poems in Others, which moved to New York City in 1916. Edited by poet and playwright Alfred Kreymborg, who founded the magazine as a rival to Poetry in Chicago, Others was influential but short-lived, folding in 1919. Though not exclusively a poetry magazine, The Little Review also played an important role in promoting new poets. Founded in Chicago in 1914 by Margaret Anderson, who moved the magazine to New York in 1917 (and to Paris in 1922), The Little Review is best known for its publication of parts of James Joyce's Ulysses in 1918-1920. As was the case with many arts periodicals and liberal magazines, few poetry journals survived World War I, but Poetry continues to be published in the 1990s.

NEWS AT THE MOVIES

B y the mid 1910s feature films were usually preceded by newsreels. In fact, the earliest movie studios were established to produce short films of newsworthy events, including the Spanish-American War of 1898, the funeral of assassinated president William McKinley in 1901, and the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. During the 1910s the production of weekly newsreels was a thriving, competitive component of the movie-studio business. The leaders in the field were Hearst-Selig, Pathé (a French-owned, New Jersey-based company that was the first to make daily newsreels, starting in June 1914), and Fox Studio News. There is little authentic newsreel coverage of the biggest news event of the decade, World War I. Commercial cameramen were kept away from combat, and those who managed to get near it had their films censored by the U.S. government. Lack of real footage did not prevent the movie studios from faking battle scenes and releasing them as dramatic coverage "from the front." A typical newsreel featured a combination of news and entertainment: footage of the president's activities, the woman suffrage campaign, labor strikes, and other "hard news," mixed with coverage of celebrities, sporting events, and the latest craze in clothing, hairstyles, or dances.

Source:

Raymond Fielding, The American Newsteel, 1911-1967 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972).

Sources:

Harriet Monroe, Poets and Their Art (New York: Macmillan, 1926; revised and enlarged, 1932);

Steven Watson, Strange Bedfellows: The First American Avant-Garde (New York: Abbeville Press, 1991);

Arthur Frank Wertheim, The New York Little Renaissance: Iconoclasm, Modernism, and Nationalism in American Culture, 1908—1917 (New York: New York University Press, 1976);

Michael Yatron, America's Literary Revolt (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959).