in verse #70 : image, rhythm, voice

I will now take up the question of how three Western American writers — Pound, Eliot and Frost — brought in a new poetry for the new century.  I will examine the oddities and contradictions in their lives and in their poetry.  So when I make broad, sweeping generalizations like that in the first sentence, or in the next, I beg you to hear me out.  I will examine with each poet that quality most renewed in their verse:  with Robert Frost, the matter of voice in poetry; with T. S. Eliot, the matter of rhythm; with Ezra Pound, the matter of the image with which he is irrevocably associated.  This should take a couple of years.

Of the three, Pound, the most radical, spent the least time in the west.[i]  He was born in Hailey, Idaho, on 30 October 1885, where his father worked in the land office, and taken away on a train in a blizzard by a mother with pretensions of gentility 18 months later, to New York.  The family eventually settled in Philadelphia, where Homer, the father, worked in the U.S. Mint, having learned assaying in Hailey.  All of Pound’s formal education occurred in the East.  Eventually he moved abroad, first to Venice and then to London.

Frost was born in San Francisco on 26 March 1874 to William Prescott Frost, Jr., and Isabelle Moodie, an immigrant from Scotland.  His father, a teacher and journalist, worked for two newspapers there.  After he died on 5 May 1885, Isabelle took the family east, where Robert was educated, up through two years in Harvard.  His grandfather, who had fostered the family in Lawrence, Massachusetts, bought a farm for Frost and his wife, Elinor Miriam White, in Derry, New Hampshire.  He worked the farm for 9 years, writing poems at night, but, possibly because he was a city boy, gave up farming.  He taught for six years until, in 1912, he moved to London.

Eliot lived longest in the west, perhaps because his parents had only moved to the Midwest, to St. Louis, Missouri, where he was born on 26 September, 1888, 2 years after Emily Dickinson died. He lived in St. Louis until he was 16, when, in 1905, his family sent him back East to school.  He earned a Bachelor’s and a Master’s at Harvard, studied in the Sorbonne, came back to Harvard, then moved to England, to study at Oxford, in 1914.  By 1916 he had finished a doctoral dissertation for Harvard, but never returned to defend it in an oral exam.

All three of these radically American poets were first published in England.

Frost’s first two books, consisting of poems mostly written on that farm, were A boy’s will (1913) and North of Boston (1914), published in London in  by David Nutt.  In 1915, following the outbreak of the war to end all wars, he returned with his family to the States to live.  Neither Eliot nor Pound ever moved back to the states, although I say that with a caveat in Pound’s case.

But in the few minutes remaining, I want to present some evidence to back up my generalizations.  Herewith, then, from his third book, Mountain Interval, published in 1920 by Holt in New York (they had published North of Boston in 1914 and A boy’s will in 1915) is one of the finest of his renderings of ordinary experience in colloquial American speech:

An Old Man’s Winter Night

All out of doors looked darkly in at him
Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars,
That gathers on the pane in empty rooms.
What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze
Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand.
What kept him from remembering what it was
That brought him to that creaking room was age.
He stood with barrels round him — at a loss.
And having scared the cellar under him
In clomping here, he scared it once again
In clomping off; — and scared the outer night,
Which has its sounds, familiar, like the roar
Of trees and crack of branches, common things,
But nothing so like beating on a box.
A light he was to no one but himself
Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what,
A quiet light, and then not even that.
He consigned to the moon, such as she was,
So late-arising, to the broken moon
As better than the sun in any case
For such a charge, his snow upon the roof,
His icicles along the wall to keep;
And slept. The log that shifted with a jolt
Once in the stove, disturbed him and he shifted,
And eased his heavy breathing, but still slept.
One aged man — one man — can’t fill a house,
A farm, a countryside, or if he can,
It’s thus he does it of a winter night. ^[ii]

This is blank verse, but as opposed to Shakespeare’s blank verse, written rather to be heard than acted, and as opposed to Milton’s, written on a small, rather than an epic, scale.  The first and third lines, perfect iambic pentameter, sandwich a line in which Frost twice breaks from iambs to preserve the speaking voice.  He does that again in lines 5 and 6, and lines 18 and 24.  And in line 22, the only time he does this in this poem, departs from the normal word order of “to keep his icicles along the wall” to extend the mystery of what he consigned to the moon, before ending the sentence abruptly with “and slept.”  This is the work of a master craftsman capturing an insignificant moment.

T. S. Eliot tries to do the same thing in “Preludes.” But although the scenes he depicts are no less bleak than that Frost captures, they seem to leave a sour taste in the mouth. Read them aloud:

Preludes

I

The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.

II

The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.
With the other masquerades
That time resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.

III

You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed’s edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.

IV

His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.^[iii]

Eliot’s mastery of rhythm is perfect here, and his variable line and scraps of rhyme show how adept he was at painting these images.  This poem shows Pound’s influence as well, in the sharpness of such images as “And now a gusty shower wraps The grimy scraps Of withered leaves about your feet And newspapers from vacant lots.”  Eliot received help from Pound in understanding and editing verse, although I don’t know whether Pound saw the poems in Prufrock and other observations before the book was published, again in London, in 1917.

Pound self-published two volumes, A lume spento in Venice, in July, 1908 (a month before moving to London) and, in London, in December of that same year, A quinzaine for this Yule.  The title A lume spento comes from Dante’s Purgatorio.  A quinzaine is a French form (although there appears to be no quinzaine in this collection[iv]).  These illustrate one aspect of Pound’s personality, and indeed of his œuvre:  a fascination with the poetry of Europe, one that would last a lifetime.  But as an American, determined to see things new, and see them in detail, he was determined to focus on the words and on the experiences he found.  One of his most famous poems, and justly so, defined this theory of “imagism”, and I introduce it here to give you some idea of the impact his writing could have, as first published in the American magazine Poetry in April, 1913:

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition      of these faces      in the crowd       :
Petals      on a wet, black      bough.

Despite its puny size, there is much that can be said about this poem, for example that Pound sets it in a station of the Metro, rather than, say, the Underground — thus making it a little more universal.  His use of “apparition” where one might expect “appearance” brings in the idea of ghostly faces, and the faces perhaps of people not really living.  Putting them “in the crowd” cuts even more into their individuality, allowing the poet to depersonalize them as “petals” which have fallen from the fruiting body, petals plastered by rain onto the bough.  He gains force by the consonance and alliteration of “petals”, “black” and “bough” (instead of, say, “limb”).  When he reprinted the poem, he removed the extra spaces, having perhaps reconsidered their effect.

There is much more to say about Pound, and I intend to begin with that next month, because of his outsize effect on not only Eliot and Frost but also the entire “modernist” movement in European and American poetry.

But hold on, I hear you say:  No longer poem by Pound?

Your turn.

____________________

[i] In the biographical sketches that follow, unless otherwise credited, information comes from Wikipedia; I leave it to you to pursue that information further at this point.  I will go into greater detail when I discuss each poet in the months to come.

[ii] https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/old-mans-winter-night, accessed 27 October 2016; corrected from “In clomping there” to “In clomping here” as it stands in Collected poems, prose, & plays / Robert Frost.  —  New York : Library of America, 1995. (Library of America ; 81), pp. 105-106.

[iii] https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/preludes, accessed 27 October 2016; checked against the text in The complete poems and plays. 1909-1950 / T. S. Eliot.  — New York : Harcourt, Brace & World, c1962, pp. 12-13.

[iv] I am working with Poems and translations / Ezra Pound New York : Library of America, c2003. (Library of America ; 144).  The collection is reprinted on pp. 67-80, but the editor, Richard Sieburth, says in his “Note on the Texts” (p. 1235) that he prints a poem only the first time it appears in Pound’s œuvre, so the quinzaine may have been written earlier, under another title.