American Poetry 20th Century
Poesía Norteamericana
THE PHILOSOPHIC MATRIX OF MODERNISM, IMAGISM, CULTURAL BEARINGS, INFLUENCES
By the beginning of the XX c. in England, the poetry cultivated was one in the line of the Romantic poetry. Relevant figures such as Rudgard Kipling and Oscar Wilde:
Kipling’s poetry has a social use, official propaganda, in order to make the reader achieve social goals. The style is rhetorical and discursive. The language is the language of the public. (Morality)
Oscar Wilde stands for another type of poetry, with the idea of “art for art’s shake”. There’s no relation between art and life, so it’s an aesthetic idea of art. Art is an isolated being, in touch with no material beauty. This kind of poetry expresses sadness, disdain; it rejects the mimetic, materialism, and it turns to the contemplation of beauty. (Beauty)
So we can find two different trends: morality (Kipling) and beauty (Wilde). Some important poetry’s figures of the end of XIX and the beginning of the XX c. were Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman, but also the group called “The Fireside Poets” with Longfellow. There were writers and journalists who marked a style. This poetry of the 1850s is mainly romantic, with mythological imagination, with mournings… T.E. Hulme helped to change the poetic idiom (to find a poetic English language). Poems of that time were conventional, written for the mass to offer consolation. It must be taken into account that poetry in America was in hands of Ladies of society, most of whom did not work because of their economic privileges. However, their names did not survive, neither their anthologies. The atmosphere in America was so heavy that many writhers left it to go to Europe (Pound, Eliot, and H.D.)
There are two types of Modernism: high modernism (they escape to Europe. E.g. Eliot, Pound…) and low modernism stay in USA. E.g. Emerson)
The first ones wanted to look for a more cosmopolitan poetry, white poets who stayed wrote celebrating the
THE PHILOSOPHIC MATRIX OF MODERNISM, IMAGISM, CULTURAL BEARINGS, INFLUENCES
By the beginning of the XX c. in England, the poetry cultivated was one in the line of the Romantic poetry. Relevant figures such as Rudgard Kipling and Oscar Wilde:
Kipling’s poetry has a social use, official propaganda, in order to make the reader achieve social goals. The style is rhetorical and discursive. The language is the language of the public. (Morality)
Oscar Wilde stands for another type of poetry, with the idea of “art for art’s shake”. There’s no relation between art and life, so it’s an aesthetic idea of art. Art is an isolated being, in touch with no material beauty. This kind of poetry expresses sadness, disdain; it rejects the mimetic, materialism, and it turns to the contemplation of beauty. (Beauty)
So we can find two different trends: morality (Kipling) and beauty (Wilde). Some important poetry’s figures of the end of XIX and the beginning of the XX c. were Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman, but also the group called “The Fireside Poets” with Longfellow. There were writers and journalists who marked a style. This poetry of the 1850s is mainly romantic, with mythological imagination, with mournings… T.E. Hulme helped to change the poetic idiom (to find a poetic English language). Poems of that time were conventional, written for the mass to offer consolation. It must be taken into account that poetry in America was in hands of Ladies of society, most of whom did not work because of their economic privileges. However, their names did not survive, neither their anthologies. The atmosphere in America was so heavy that many writhers left it to go to Europe (Pound, Eliot, and H.D.)
There are two types of Modernism: high modernism (they escape to Europe. E.g. Eliot, Pound…) and low modernism stay in USA. E.g. Emerson)
The first ones wanted to look for a more cosmopolitan poetry, white poets who stayed wrote celebrating the