11.04.2011.doc

LITERATURA USA                                                                                                                              11.04.2011

WYKŁAD

Toward Modernism

·         There are writers whose work can be placed in the context of later developments.

·         Some of their themes and styles are generally regarded as bringing the gap between the reflexive poetry of Transcendentalism and Whitman, and modern poetry.

Poetry in transition

·         E.L. Masters - Spoon River Anthology

·         E.A. Robinson - The Children of the Night, Tristam, The Man who Died Twice

·         R. Frost - A Boy’s Will, North of Boston, Mountain Interval

·         R. Jeffers - Californians, Tamar and Other poems

·         C. Sandburg - Chicago Poems, American Songbag

·         V. Lindsay - The Congo and Other Poems

·         Women: S. Teasdale, E. Wylie, E. St. Vincent Millay 

EDGAR LEE MASTERS (1868 – 1950)

Life:

·         He was born in Texas and reared in southern Illinois.

·         He attended Knox Collage, studied law and became attorney.

·         He gave up law practice and devoted himself entirely to literature.

·         He moved to New York, for 20 years he occupied a suite at the famed Hotel Chelsea, heaven of many writers of the 20’s and 30’s.

·         He is buried in Petersburg, next to his beloved grandparents Squire Davie Masters and Lucinda Masters.

The epitaph of Master’s tomb

·         “Tomorrow is My Birthday”

“Spoon River Anthology” (1915)

·         It was literary sensation.

·         It was written in the form of epitaphs – poignant summaries of the lives of persons supposedly buried in the country cemetery (nearly 250 characters). The poems are in free verse, the lines conveying a unit of thought (conversational speech, more shaped then common speech).

·         Most of the speakers reveal brief and bitter tales of twisted and wasted lives.

·         But some, like Lucinda Matlock, speak with courage, conviction, optimism.

Speakers of Spoon River

·         The speakers are inhabitants (both real are imagined) of Spoon River, an area near Lewinstown and Petersburg, Illinois, where Masters spent his childhood.

·         Some characters under disguise names, lately dead or still living in the region, scandalous behavior of some of them (judges, bankers, doctor, editors, churchmen, artists, night watch, atheist, hat maker, gambler, a Negro, Anne Rutledge, first love of A. Lincoln, etc.).

·         All are dead, “sleeping on the hill”. They died accidentally, violent or unnoticed death.

·         The discover and confess the real motives of their lives, the secret steps that stumbled them to failure or raised them to illusionary triumphs.

·         They talk about meaningless marriages, accidents and disease, economic exportation, incapability, damaged lives.

·         Death and darkness grant them the revelatory eyes for recognition of their own souls.

Masters in “Spoon River Anthology”

·         Masters clearly defends the characters – not against their sins, petty or great, for these they readily confess themselves – but against the punishments and inequalities life fixes upon us all.

·         The epitaphs are ironic an extremely objective.

Flaws of “Spoon River Anthology”

·         It is bigger, more inclusive than need to be.

·         The graveyard is overpopulated.

·         Some headstones seem repetitious.

·         There is stiffness of some verses.

·         The poems resemble a statement-like recitations and seem formal.

·         The poems are sometimes unintentionally ludicrous (provoking laughter, ridiculous, comic).

ERWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON (1869 – 1935)

Robinson’s struggle

·         Robinson struggled for 25 years before wide recognition came to him in 1922 with the first of the three Pulitzer Prizes he would win.

·         He is best known for his poems about the people who lived in the fictional New England “Tilbury Town”.

Tilbury Town

·         Poetic method: vignettes.

·         Vignette – a short impressionistic scene that focuses on one moment or gives a strong impression about a character, an idea, or a setting and sometimes an object.

·         “Tilbury Town” – in Maine (Robinson’s hometown was Gardiner, Maine).

·         the poems are character sketches, short dramatic poems of people living and imaginary. They are romantics not adjusted to life in a materialistic world.

·         They are helpless; struggle against fate too powerful for them.

·         Robinson hinted or probed deeply their psychology.

“Reuben Bright”

Robison’s poetry

·         Writing about ordinary people and events: a butcher, a miser with “eyes like little dollars”, “ancient clerks in a dry goods store measuring out their days like bolts of cloth”.

·         Robinson looks closely at people around him.

·         Rey Redman in 1926 called him “a biographer of souls… bound to humanity by the dual bond of sympathy and humour”.

·         His poems insist that we do not really know others, that we do not really know ourselves.

·         Robinson said: “Poetry is a language that tells us, through more or less emotional reaction, something that cannot be said”.

Robinson’s subjects

·         Those who failed in life, in love.

·         Derelict (outcast), abandoned, deserted, downtrodden (oppressed by superior power).

·         The old and benefit (suffering the death of a loved one). 

·         Robinson insisted that “the world is not a ‘prison house’ but a kind of spiritual kindergarten where millions of infants are trying to spell ‘God’ with wrong blocks”. He and people are trying to encompass the truth.

Robinson’s struggle

·         He was struggling for two decades to get his poems published, surviving on the edge of poverty.

·         Drink and depression shadowed his days but he believed in his calling.

·         “Behind the stark, simple words lie an unimaginable burden of pain” (R. Gray).

·         Their dramas are enacted within.
 

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