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One of America's most cited poets, EDGAR LEE MASTERS pioneered the psychological character study. A neglected, one-book poet offhandedly admired for his Spoon River Anthology (1915), a collection of poetic laments spoken by different characters, he maintained his appeal through repeated anthologizing of his curt, often grimly regretful verse monologues. He is considered a transitional figure at the beginning of the twentieth century who drew on his readings of English Romantic poets, including Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, and Browning, as well as the Americans Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, for a massive output of essay, drama, novel, biography, and history. Masters, a maverick by nature, refused to be drawn into arguments about criticism and poetic styles of writing. Rather, he consciously chose everyday naturalistic truths over dense poetic complexities.
Masters was a native of Garnett, Kansas, who grew up in Petersburg and Lewistown, Illinois, in grass country near Spoon River. During hard times, the family lived comfortably on handouts of clothing, firewood, apples, and root vegetables from his grandfather's farm, which Masters cherished as an oasis from an unhappy home life. In boyhood, he displayed an interest in publishing by working as a reporter, printer's helper, and storywriter and verse writer for magazines. Masters struggled to hold on to literature, his heart's aim, as did the figures in the Spoon River cemetery. Masters dutifully read law with his father because his father, disdainful of poetry, insisted that his son study law; he achieved bar certification in 1891. He joined a Chicago law firm allied with attorney Clarence Darrow and specialized in labor and industrial casework. After his marriage to Helen Jenkins, mother of their three children, he often visited Spring Lake, Wisconsin, where he established a sizable farm and he escaped his life as a lawyer.
Masters gave up artsy poetry and initiated a characteristic style and subject choice that improved with succeeding poems. He produced a collection of self-revelatory verse epitaphs, Spoon River Anthology, drawing on settings and ordinary people he remembered from his youth in Lewiston. The cleverly arranged verse soliloquies, naturalistic in their probing of the sterility of village life, earned him the 1916 Levinson Prize and a critical deluge that ranged from the highest praise to outright castigation. In 1920, two years after the publication of Toward the Gulf, a collection of lyrical ballads, Masters abandoned law to become a full-time poet, taking up residence in New York's Chelsea Hotel. A later anthology, The New Spoon River (1924), criticized urbanism and helped to bracket the poet into the limited category of caustic satirist ridiculing city life.
JOHN ROBINSON JEFFERS, a master of cadenced verse in short lyric and long narrative, stands out from his contemporaries for earnest craftsmanship and tragic, doomed battles between nature and technology. Amid the constant cycles of earth, sea, and sky, his harsh voice strove in vain for a lyrical contentment in nature. In a poetic struggle unmatched by his contemporaries, Jeffers' solitary strife sets him apart from literary movements in a poetic world order of his own making.
Z wykładów – Beauty of his descriptions of the natural Word – Early environmentalist, the first one to grasp the devastating extent of the changes of human Technologies and populations had on The Rest of earth's biological life. There is some pessimism of human culture, which is destructive and out of hand. Jeffers wanted to discover our relationships with the foundations of nature. He insisted that human kind should acknowledge the superior value of the instinctive life.
Jeffers's impact – depends upon perspective. Human life is seen from an immense distance, as it were placed within the larger dimensions of earth, sea and sky. Colloquial speech, first conflict than union between human nature and nature. Recognition of the needs and limits of the human character.
Jeffers attended the University of Pittsburgh and Occidental College, where he edited a school journal, The Occidental. His only satisfying achievements in college were swim meets and running the mile. Unfocused graduate work at the universities of Southern California, Zurich, and Washington proved that his future lay in verse, not medicine or forestry. After publishing a tentative volume, Flagons and Apples (1912), Jeffers came into a legacy that allowed him leisure to produce a steady flow of rough-hewn, idiosyncratic poems. In 1916, Jeffers published Californians, then achieved critical and popular fame with Tamar and Other Poems (1924). Subsequent collections cinched his reputation for tragic lyricism and austere themes and backgrounds. His mature work — Cawdor and Other Poems (1928) and Dear Judas and Other Poems (1929) — reached toward a hopeful humanism. The Double Axe (1948), and Hungerfield and Other Poems (1953), he revealed a complex world view comprised of bleak introversion and inept reaches for the sublime through myth.
Acclaimed America's people's poet, CARL AUGUST SANDBURG spoke directly and compellingly of the worker, a vigorous, enduring composite character who embodied Sandburg's free-verse portraits of democracy's inhabitants. Some audiences were bowled over by Sandburg's engagingly slangy phrasing and shadowy figures; the poet's massive correspondence linked him to the personalities of his day, including socialist Lincoln Steffens, actor Gary Cooper, President Lyndon Johnson, and editor Harry Golden, Sandburg's traveling buddy. Others, like Robert Frost, were repulsed by Sandburg's folksy affectation. Frost once described his contemporary as "the most artificial and studied ruffian the world has had." The description was not without merit.
Z wykładów - Sandburg spoke for common man and woman. "The Chicago Poems" followed by "Cornhuskers" raised him to leadership among the Chicago Renaissance Group (including Dreiser, Lindsay and Andersen). He was an admirer of Abraham Lincoln and published a monumental biography of his hero. Subject of his poems – his poems celebrate work and the worker, men and women alike, arrogance, coarseness and vitality of a young nation.
Sandburg was fortunate in gaining the support of Philip Green Wright, an English professor who printed Sandburg's first poetry collection, In Reckless Ecstasy (1904), on a basement press. Sandburg was a correspondent during Spanish-American War, politician, newspaper worker, poet, folksinger and journalist.
Sandburg published his famous "Chicago" in 1914 in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, and produced pulsing, realistic verse set in America's urban industrial complex, which he idealized as a brusque, up-and-coming national treasure. In addition, he staked out new territory with a cross-cultural collection of folk ballads, The American Songbag (1927). He travelled around the U.S. and collected 280 songs and ballads that were collected from convicts, cowboys and farmers. The work derives from his voice-and-guitar platform presentations.
Chief Works - Sandburg's poem "Chicago" is self-consciously artless — a brash, assertive statement of place. It's his best known poem, filled with vigorous imagery which bombards the senses of the reader. In 1914, the poem thrust him into national prominence as a modernist poet and image-maker for the laboring class. A rambunctious portrait of a flourishing urban center, the poem makes a vigorous proletarian thrust with its initial images of a butcher, tool maker, harvester, and freight handler. Outside the pre-modern niceties of predictable line lengths and rhyme, the poet ignores scholars and entrepreneurs as he surges toward the city skyline. With crudely forceful, startling figures, he mines the verbal subsoil for the source of Chicago's raw energy and steadying optimism. He applauds its ample frame, personified as a muscular, essentially male pair of shoulders, but balances his realistic assessment by chastising the urban penchant for vice and crime.
As though addressing an individual, Sandburg personifies the city as a brutal depriver of women and children, who perform a lesser role as victims dependent on man-sized protection and support. He confronts the attacker who would vilify his "alive," "coarse," "strong," and "cunning" city, a "tall bold slugger" of a metropolis. To further the image of growth, the poet piles up present participles, beginning with a dog lapping and moving briskly through "building, breaking, rebuilding." With a return to the opening stanza, Sandburg repeats the skills of the burly, uncompromising city, the sources of its might. By its nature, the poem itself becomes one of the enduring homegrown products of America's "second city."
A persistent contrast to "Chicago" is "Fog" (1916), which is often a companion piece in anthologies. An American haiku, the poem captures a phenomenon of nature in a second natural image. A feral image of sinuous grace, the diminutive cat shape perches over the skyline before soundlessly creeping away. The silky presence relieves the gathering fog of menace as it unifies the harbor and city streets under one silent, soft-furred cloud. Simple, yet rich in brooding, elusive mysticism, the figure compels the reader to draw conclusions from personal experience with both fog and cats.
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