So What Is “Modernism” Anyway?

Finding Information in the Norton Anthology of American Literature

Introduction to 1914-1945 and the Author Headnotes

Time-Period Introduction:

• Of course, I'd recommend reading the whole introduction, but focus especially on:
  • The two full paragraphs at the end of the "Two Wars" section
  • The section, "American Versions of Modernism"
  • The section, "Modernism Abroad and on Native Grounds"

Robert Frost:

• “The clarity of Frost’s diction, the colloquial rhythms, the simplicity of his images, and above all the folksy speaker -- these are intended to make the poems look natural, unplanned.  In the context of the modernist movement, however, they can be seen as a thoughtful reply to high modernism’s fondness for obscurity and difficulty.  Although Frost’s ruralism affirmed the modernist distaste for cities, he was writing the kind of traditional, accessible poetry that modernists argued could no longer be written.  [WHY?]  In addition, by investing in the New England terrain, he rejected modernist internationalism and revitalized the tradition of New England regionalism. . . . Frost achieved an internal dynamic in his poems by playing the rhythms of ordinary speech against formal patterns of line and verse and containing them within traditional forms.  The interaction of colloquial diction with blank verse is especially central to his dramatic monologues.  To Frost traditional forms were the essence of poetry, material with which poets responded to flux and disorder . . . by forging something permanent. . . . In the 1930s when writers tended to be political activists, he was seen as one  whose old-fashioned values were inappropriate, even dangerous, in modern times.”

Willa Cather:

• “She paid little attention to formal structure; her novels often read more like chronicles than plot-driven stories, which makes them seem artless and real while concealing the sentence-by-sentence care that has gone into her work.  She once described her work as deliberately  ‘unfurnished,’ meaning that it was cut down to only those details absolutely necessary; ‘suggestion rather than enumeration’ was another way she described her goal.  The resulting spareness and clarity of her fiction puts it in the modernist tradition.”

Langston Hughes:

• "[He] wanted to capture the dominant oral and improvisatory traditions of black culture in written form. . . . In the activist 1930s he was much absorbed in radical politics.  Hughes and other blacks were drawn by the American Communist Party . . . Harlem poets, aware that the audience for their poetry was almost all white, had to consider whether a particular image of black people would help or harm the cause.  To the extent that they felt compelled to idealize black folk, their work risked lapsing into racist primitivism.  African American writers questioned, too, whether their work should emphasize their similarities to or differences from whites. . . . Hughes's solution to these problems was to turn from the rural black populations toward the city.  The shift to the contemporary urban context freed Hughes from the concerns over primitivism; he could be a realist and modernist.  He could use stanza forms deriving from blues music and adapt the vocabulary of everyday black speech to poetry without affirming stereotypes.  And he could insist that whatever the differences between black and white Americans, all Americans were equally entitled to liberty, justice, and opportunity."

Zora Neale Hurston:

• "Hurston's work was not entirely popular with the male intellectual leaders of the Harlem community.  She quarreled especially with Langston Hughes, refusing to align her work with anybody's ideologies; she rejected the idea that a black writer's chief concern should be how blacks were being portrayed to the white reader.  She did not write to 'uplift the race,' either; because in her view it was already uplifted, she (like Claude McKay) was not embarrassed to present her characters as mixtures of good and bad, strong and weak. . . . Their Eyes Were Watching God, in 1937.  This novel about an African American woman's quest for selfhood has become a popular and critical favorite, both a woman's story, and a descriptive critique of southern African American folk society, showing its divisions and diversity.  Technically, it is a loosely organized, highly metaphorical novel, with passages of broad folk humor and of extreme artistic compression."

William Carlos Williams:

• “A modernist known for his disagreements with all the other modernists . . . Williams also wanted to speak as an American within an American context. . . Williams detested Eliot’s The Waste Land, describing its popularity as a ‘catastrophe,’ deploring not only its internationalism but also its pessimism and deliberate obscurity.  To him these characteristics were un-American. . . . He objected to Robert Frost’s homespun poetry . . . for nostalgically evoking a bygone rural America rather than engaging with what he saw as the real American present. . . . the overall impact of his poetry is social rather than autobiographical.  The social aspect of Williams's poetry rises from its accumulation of detail; he opposed the use of poetry for general statements and abstract critique. . . . Williams drew his vocabulary from up-to-date local speech and searched for a poetic line derived from the cadences of street talk.  He objected to ‘free verse’ as an absurdity.”

Wallace Stevens:

• ADD

Marianne Moore:

• ADD

Ernest Hemingway:

• ADD

T. S. Eliot:

• ADD

Katherine Anne Porter:

• “Each story was technically skilled, emotionally powerful, combining traditional narration with new symbolic techniques and contemporary subject matter. . . . Although not a feminist, Porter devoted much of her work to exploring the tensions in women's lives in the modern era.”

Susan Glaspell:

• “In 1922 Cook and Glaspell withdrew from the group, finding that it had become too commercially successful to suit their experimental aims.”

William Faulkner:

• "He developed . . . his own unmistakable narrative voice, urgent, intense, highly rhetorical.  He experimented with narrative chronology and with techniques for representing mind and memory. . . . He learned about the experimental writing of James Joyce and the ideas of Sigmund Freud. . . . The Sound and the Fury (1929) . . . and As I Lay Dying (1930) were dramatically experimental attempts to articulate the inexpressible aspects of individual psychology. . . . Absalom, Absalom!, which followed in 1936, is thought by many to be Faulkner's masterpiece.  The story . . . is related by four different speakers, each trying to find "the meaning" of the story.  The reader, observing how the story changes in each telling, comes to see that making stories is the human way of making meaning.."

D'Arcy McNickle:

• "McNickle's complicated and multiple identities allowed him to write fiction convincingly from many perspectives and to depict cross-cultural tensions and misrecognitions with particular acuity."

Muriel Rukeyser:

• "She was attracted early on to radical causes, identifying herself throughout life with the disadvantaged and oppressed and associating with the Socialists, Communists, labor activists, and free-spirited artists . . . She perceived the idealism and solidarity of the labor movement as a liberating alternative to the emptiness and shallowness of affluent individualism, which she portrayed in surrealistic montages of destruction and despair.  While vigorously forwarding a program of social consciousness in poetry, however, Rukeyser was equally vigorously dedicated to the principle of artistic freedom and personally devoted to an aesthetic of poetic complexity; thus unlike many social poets of the 1930s she did not try to write in the supposed style of simple working people.  She denied that there was any conflict between poetry written at a high level of technical and textual sophistication and poetry that was politically motivated and dedicated.  For her poetry was a way of seeing the world, and instrument for writing about anything and everything."

Your Summary/Synthesis -- So, What is "Modernism" Anyway?