1. Chapter 13
Modernist Poets
Williams * Frost * Sandburg * Cummings

2. I. Robert Lee Frost (1874 –1963)
1. Literary Status (a poet and playwright)
the most popular poet in postwar America
a lyrical poet, an authentic painter of local landscape
2. Life and Career
was born in San Francisco, California to a Journalist
highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech.
His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New England in the early twentieth century, using them to examine complex social and philosophical themes.
A popular and often-quoted poet, Frost was honored frequently during his lifetime, receiving four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry.

3. Robert Frost and his four Pulitzer Prizes
1924 for New Hampshire: A Poem
With Notes and Grace Notes
1931 for Collected Poems
1937 for A Further Range
1943 for A Witness Tree

4. Robert Frost 3. His Writings Poetry collections North of Boston (1914)
Mending Wall ; Mountain Interval (1916)
The Road Not Taken
New Hampshire (Holt, 1923; Grant Richards, 1924)
West-Running Brook (Holt, 1928? 1929)
A Further Range (Holt, 1936; Cape, 1937)
A Witness Tree (Holt, 1942; Cape, 1943)
A Further Range (1926)
Nothing Gold Can Stay ; Fire And Ice
Plays
A Way Out: A One Act Play (Harbor Press, 1929).
The Cow's in the Corn: A One Act Irish Play in Rhyme (Slide Mountain Press, 1929).
A Masque of Reason (Holt, 1945).
A Masque of Mercy (Holt, 1947).

5. Robert Frost his masterpieces of poems
Acquainted with the Night
Birches
Dedication
Design
Fire and Ice (1916)
Home Burial
Mending Wall
Mowing
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Out, Out- (1916)
Revelation
The Road Not Taken
A Servant to Servants
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
The Wood-Pile

6. This is the Robert Frost Farm in Derry, New Hampshire
This is the Robert Frost Farm in Derry, New Hampshire. This is where he lived from It was at this farm where he wrote many of his poems including West Running Brook, Tree at my Window, and Mending Wall.

7. The Road Not Taken

8. This is the stone wall at Frost's farm in which he described in "Mending Wall."

9. Mending Walls

10. I. Robert Frost 4. Features:
A. The image of Robert Frost is one of a white-haired old sage who speaks and sings in a manner as pleasant as it is edifying. Reading his poetry can be a highly ennobling and relaxing experience, an experience of wit and wisdom, peace and harmony, serenity and joy, which serve for him as “a momentary stay against confusion.” (p.198)
B. Frost has been linked with the tradition of nature poetry. Frost did write very much in the Wordsworthian tradition, and there is a good deal of Emerson in him. (P.199)
C. He stood consciously aside from the Modernist endeavor of his time: he did not seem particularly enthusiastic about experimentation in form. Frost was perfectly willing to follow the traditional pattern. In a sense, he retained a faith in the traditional forms of poetry. For him, form is as important as sense; the ordering of sound and theme is one major concern of his career. (p.200)

11. I. Robert Frost
D. Although Frost depicts mostly New England landscape, those scenes of rural life often reflect the fragmentization of modern experience. (p.201)
E. Another frightening aspect of Frost’s poems is seen in the great number of abnormal people they talk about. Those people suffern no less than the grotesques created by Sherwood Anderson. (p.202)
F. Robert Frost is often deceptively simple. What Frost did was in fact to juxtapose the regional and the cosmopolitan, and the human and the natural, in a word, to root his poetry in New England to reach the plane of universal meaning.(pp.202-3)
G. He was good at exploring the complexity of human existence through treating seemingly trivial subjects, and had always in view the ultimate aim in writing of making life “whole again beyond confusion.”

13. II. Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) 1. Literary Status
Mid-west Prairie poet, Chicago Poet
Poet of the People, 20th century Whitman
two Pulitzer Prizes, one for his poetry and another for a biography of Abraham Lincoln
2. Life and Career
born in Galesburg, Illinois to Swedish ancestry.
At 13 he left school and began driving a milk wagon -- a bricklayer -- a farm laborer on the wheat plains of Kansas. -- a hotel servant in Denver, then a coal-heaver in Omaha.
After Lombard College in Galesburg, he began his writing career as a journalist for the Chicago Daily News. Later he wrote poetry, history, biographies, novels, children's literature, and film reviews. Sandburg also collected and edited books of ballads and folklore. He spent most of his life in the Midwest before moving to North Carolina.

14. Carl Sandburg rented a room in this house where he lived for three years while he wrote the poem Chicago. It's now a Chicago landmark.

15. II. Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) Edgar Lee Masters Vachel Lindsay
3. Carl Sandburg and the other Chicago Poets
At about the same time Robinson and Robert Frost were writing and publishing in the east, the Chicago poets Vachel Lindsay ( )，Edgar Lee Masters（ ）and Carl Sandburg were making their voice heard in the Mid-west. These poets, along with other writers and artists in Chicago, made Chicago a center of literature and arts, and in the field of poetry, added to the momentum of the new verse then locked in battle with the dominant genteel tradition of the time.
Vachel Lindsay: “General William Booth Enters into Heaven”;
“The Congo” ; “Santa Fe Trail”
Edgar Lee Masters: Spoon River Anthology (a collection of 200-odd elegiac poems, portraying 200-odd different characters from all walks of life: workers, farmers, clergymen, clerks, prostitutes, judges, poets, philosophers, scientists, soldiers, atheists, Christians, etc. – almost everyone, now dead, but once associated with Spoon River town by birth or some other way. 19 plot lines intertwine and correlate) p.204
Edgar Lee Masters
Vachel Lindsay

16. II. Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) 4. Carl Sandburg’s Works
Quotations from Sandburg
A. Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during a moment.
B. Some people write about hell but have never seen it. But I write about Chicago after seeing it over and over again.
C. I'm an idealist. I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way.
4. Carl Sandburg’s Works
A. His poetic collections:
Chicago Poems (1916)
Cornhuskers (1918)
Smoke and Steel (1920)
Slabs of the Sunburnt West (1922)
Good Morning, America (1928)
The People, Yes (1936)
B. His imagist poems such as:
“Fog”, “Lost — ”， “The Harbor”, etc.
C. His collection of folklores and songs
The American Songbag (1927)
D. His Prose Work：
his multi-volume Biography of Abraham Lincoln
The Prairie Years (1926); The War Years (1940)

19. II. Carl Sandburg 5. Writing Features
A. Carl Sandburg was the greatest of the prairie poets of his time. For Sandburg’s most cherished ideal in life was to be “the word of the people,” to articulate in song the thoughts, feelings, and aspirations of ordinary men and women.
B. Carl Sandburg was probably the only great poet who wrote in the Whitmanesque tradition in the present century.
C. Sandburg was optimistic; and his attitude toward the industrial and mechanical civilization that America was developing was essentially affirmative.
D. Sandburg was a socialist. His was a hearty voice from the masses of the people he had close contact with all his life.

20. III. e. e. cummings (1894-1963) 1. Literary Status 2. Life and Career
an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright
interesting experimentalist in modern American poetry
“a juggler with syntax, grammar, and diction”
2. Life and Career
Edward Estlin Cummings in full name
born in Cambridge, Massachusetts to Edward Cummings, a professor of sociology and political science at Harvard University.
Cambridge Latin High School -- Harvard University, B.A. in 1915 and a M.A. in John Dos Passos - studied Greek and Latin very early – influenced by Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell – Cezanne, Picasso, Duchamp
3. His tendencies: p.207
his propensity for anti-orthodox innovation
His hatred for science and technology was so strong as to shun the radio and the television in his house. the inhumanity of science and materialism

21. III. E. E. Cummings 3. Poetic experimentation: p.207-208
His poetic innovation, a radical break with tradition.
He played with language on his typewriter, dabbled in cubist painting and read the latest criticism on modern art and literature.
His experiments included new spatial arrangements, both horizontal and vertical, new poems based on patterns of vowel or consonant groups, linguistic constructions dealing with “un-poetic” subjects -- casual conversations, banal statements, urban impressions – all presented by means of a variety of voices and a range of tones.
He tried to write in the spirit of cubism or Dadaism, using unusual diction and phrasing. In the last thirty years of his life, his linguistic play was more fully developed and controlled, with “his scrambled word order in syntactic anagram, his extension of the semantic possibilities of words he chooses to stretch, squeeze, or intensify by typographical acrobatics or grammatical innovations.”

22. III. E. E. Cummings 4. Thematic Concerns p.207
mostly love poems and poems with such motifs as the coming of dawn, an urban scene in snowfall, and a satiric rendering of religious preaching.
poems about nature, love and lust, poems about a child’s world, born anew with its simplicity, innocence, and spontaneous joy.
5. His basic outlook on life and society
He values vitality (“aliveness”), celebrates individualism and rejects groupiness. His abhorrence of collectivism and conformity
6. Poetic Form
He seemed to be juggling with syntax, grammar, and diction, and with verbal effects.
His poems, more ideogrammatical and pictorial than aural, with its low-case, peculiar punctuation, and jamming of words, produce often a shocking effect and reveal the author’s attitude of nonconformity.

23. 7. His works The Enormous Room (1922), a novel
Tulips and Chimneys (1923)
& (1925) (self-published)
XLI Poems (1925)
is 5 (1926)
HIM (1927) (a play)
ViVa (1931)
Eimi (1933)
No Thanks (1935)
Collected Poems (1960)
50 Poems (1940)
1 × 1 (1944)
XAIPE: Seventy-One Poems (1950)
i—six nonlectures (1953)
Poems, (1954)
95 Poems (1958)
73 Poems (1963) (p)
Fairy Tales (1965) (p)

24. 7. E.E. Cummings’ Cubist Poetry “In Just –
spring when the world is mud-
Luscious the little
Lame ballonman
whistles far and wee
and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it’s
spring
when the world is puddle-wonderful
the queer
balloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing
from hop-scotch and jump-rope and
it’s
spring
and
the
goat-footed
ballonMan whistles
far
wee

25. IV. Hart Crane 1. literary status
One of the best American poets of the 20th century
2. Life and Career:
Harold Hart Crane ("Hart" was his mother’s maiden name) , born in Garrettsville, Ohio in 1899 and committed suicide by leaping from the deck of the S. S. Orizaba somewhere off the Florida coast just before noon on April 26, 1932.
His education was informal and he never completed his final year of high school.Crane was sensitive to the problem of uprootedness. This became a subject in his own poetry.
Like other young poets, Crane admired what Eliot had achieved by broadening the scope of what could be treated within a poem, but he deplored what he saw as Eliot’s pessimism.

26. Hart Crane and his long poem The Bridge
The Bridge (long poem)
The Bridge, first published in 1930, is Hart Crane's first, and only, attempt at an American long poem. (Its primary status as either an epic or a series of lyrical poems remains contested; recent criticism tends to read it as a hybrid, perhaps indicative of a new genre, the 'modernist epic.'
The Bridge was inspired by New York City's Brooklyn Bridge, which has appeared in the work of so many poets that Poets.org named it a "poetry landmark.“ Crane lived for some time at 110 Columbia Heights in Brooklyn, where he had an excellent view of the bridge; only after The Bridge was finished did Crane learn that one of its key builders, Washington Roebling, had once lived at the same address.

29. The Contents of The Bridge
The Bridge comprises 15 short poems, arranged as follows:
Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge ("Proem" is a word meaning roughly "prelude.”)
Ave Maria
Powhatan's Daughter [section title]
The Harbor Dawn
Van Winkle
The River
The Dance
Indiana
Cutty Sark
Cape Hatteras
Three Songs [section title]
Southern Cross
National Winter Garden
Virginia
Quaker Hill
The Tunnel
Atlantis