Modernist Women's Poetry and the Sentimental Tradition (Part 3)

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En provenance du cours de University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Modern American Poetry

41 notes

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Modern American Poetry

41 notes

Twelve experienced faculty members from across the United States present their analyses of ground-breaking modern American poets in richly illustrated video lectures. The course highlights both major poets—from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson through T.S. Eliot, H.D., Amy Lowell, Hart Crane, Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser, and many others—and influential movements. The course mixes historical overview with close readings of individual poets and poems. Most courses give only one instructor’s point of view. This one matches the diversity of US poetry with lectures by a score of talented faculty. They bring their special perspective to the material while also presenting a coherent view of more than fifty years of US poetry. Throughout the course the lectures are illustrated with vivid images of the events, people, and places mentioned in the poems themselves. Readings by both the poets themselves and experienced faculty highlight the texts. On screen displays of text and quotations make it easy to follow the material. This is a course that takes advantage of the medium to bring you sights and sounds that would be difficult to incorporate in classroom lectures.

À partir de la leçon

Module 2

The Difference Women Made

Modernist Women's Poetry and the Sentimental Tradition (Part 1)6:40

Modernist Women's Poetry and the Sentimental Tradition (Part 2)9:08

Modernist Women's Poetry and the Sentimental Tradition (Part 3)8:09

Modernist Women's Poetry and the Sentimental Tradition (Part 4)5:45

Modernist Women's Poetry and the Sentimental Tradition (Part 5)9:32

Modernist Women's Poetry and the Sentimental Tradition (Part 6)4:02

Rencontrer les enseignants

Cary Nelson
Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts & Sciences
English Department

[MUSIC]

Over the last century, these poems have been loved and hated, praised and

scorned in equal measure.

Critics remained divided over this poetry's meaning and significance.

The influential poet and critic,

Amy Lowell was one of the first to speak out against this women's traditions.

In December 1923, Lowell published an essay titled

Two Generations in American Poetry, which appeared in a special

issue of The New Republic magazine dedicated to modern American poetry.

Like Harry and Monroe, Lowell is an aspect for women writers.

But she nonetheless believe that the sonnets, rondeau and sapphics being

popularized by American women poets were inferior to modernism's new poetry.

According to Lowell, modernist poets such as, TS Eliot, Ezra Pound and

HD, quote, aimed at a major expression.

While these feminine poets were,

quote, forcing themselves to adhere to a minor one.

Lowell cites Edna St.

Vincent Millay and Elinor Wiley as the most prominent representatives of this new

feminine movement, in which a motion is the chief stock in trade,

and poets concern themselves primarily with the perennial theme of love.

Although Lowell admires their technical expertness, she cautions her readers,

quote, we should not expect a high degree of intellectual content.

It is a fact that the younger group deliberately seeks the narrow

personal note, Lowell concludes.

It is a symptom, I suppose, a weariness of far horizons,

a breath-taking before a final leap.

Because they wrote using traditional or

inherited poetic forms, Lowell believed that these women poets were imposing,

quote, willfully restricted limits on their poetic ambitions.

Indeed, Lowell feared that these women poets, and the feminine

men who followed in their footsteps might reverse the formal progress of modernism.

Genevieve Taggard disagreed.

In 1925, Taggard published a response to Lowell in the feminist periodical,

Equal Rights.

In which she defended Millay and

her contemporaries against the charge that they were conventional unambitious poets.

Taggard writes, because in the English lady's past,

her poetry was often like her embroidery.

We have an audience now that minimizes this lyricism.

In an article a year ago, in the New Republic,

Miss Amy Lowell lamented that the new school of poetry,

of which Miss Millay is the chief figure, was essentially a feminine and

minor affair, claiming for her own the adjectives and major and masculine.

Subjective poetry for

Miss Lowell is, according to the article, always, or usually, minor.

Taggard and Lowell were both feminists and poets but they disagreed fundamentally

about the shape that a modernist feminist's poetry should take.

Their essays show us the rich variety of esthetic and

political debate that characterize modern American poetry in the 1920s.

Taggart believes that Lowell is devaluing women's lyric poetry

when she says that it is all subjective.

Taggard notes, for instance, that Lowell only professionalizes the supposedly

masculine endeavors of high modern poets.

Lowell writes, their object is science rather than art.

Or perhaps it is fairer to say that to them art is akin to mathematics.

They are much intrigued by structure,

in a sense quite other than that in which it is usually employed in poetry.

Unlike scientists and

mathematicians, the labor of the feminine movement is utterly invisible to Lowell.

Secreted away like the embroidery of an English lady.

Taggard argues rightly that this is an antiquated vision of the woman poet and

out of sync with our modern feminist poetry.

But despite Taggard's defense of the so called feminine movement,

Lowell’s criticism caught on.

By the 1930s, the New Critics were making similar accusations against Millay and

her contemporaries.

The New Critics were an influential generation of literary critics who rose to

prominence in the American Academy in the 1930s.

They included figures such as John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks and Allen Tate.

Much of what we know about modernist poetry dates to this period,

when the New Critics began culling, collating and canonizing modernist poetry.

Like Lowell, the New Critics argues repeatedly and

convincingly that Millay was a personal, and hence, minor poet.

Their campaign against women's poetry was in fact, so successful that by the late

1930s, even Taggard had began to criticize the poetry she once defended passionately.

John Crowe Ransom's essay The Poet as Woman is the harshest and

most notorious of their critical devaluations.

Ransom's stated goal in the essay is to demonstrate the categorical distinction

between Millay's sentimental sonnets and

a metaphysical sonnet tradition extending back to John Donne.

John Donne was an essential part of the New Critics poetic canon.

Following TS Elliot, who had popularized the metaphysical

poets in a series of publications and lectures throughout the 1920s,

the New Critics claim that the formal and intellectual difficulty

found in metaphysical poetry provided an essential model for modernism.

Because of the New Critics' commitment to metaphysical poetry,

Millay posed a particular problem for them.

In the 1920s, Millay's beauty and

magnetism as a performer had helped to catapult her to popular celebrity.

But Millay had also written intricate, complexly formed sonnets and

sonnet sequences, which were grounded in the same metaphysical tradition

that the new critics were now extolling.

In the Poet is Woman,

Ransom relies on misogyny in order to dismiss Millay from a metaphysical canon.

In Ransom's estimation, Millay is not a poet, but a woman.

Ransom writes, no poet ever registered herself more deliberately in that light.

She therefore fascinates the male reviewer but

at the same time horrifies him a little too.

When Ransom calls Millay a woman,

he is denying her poetry any share of the difficulty, depth, and

complexity that would become defining features of the new critical cannon.

A woman lives for love, Ransom goes on to explain, and,

quote, man distinguishes himself from woman by intellect.

Ms. Millay is rarely and barely very intellectual,

and I think everybody knows it, Ransom concludes.

Millay's poetry emerges, and Ransom's influential assessment as

a pretty lovely surface, completely lacking in material substance.

At one point, Ransom refers derisively to Millay's

sonnets as her, quote, little girl things.

[MUSIC]

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