2. Stationary vs. Stationery
• Stationary means "fixed in place, unable to move;”
Stationery is letterhead or other special writing paper.
(Hint: Stationery with an e comes with an envelope.)
Examples: Evan worked out on his stationary bike. The
duke's initials and crest appeared atop his personal
stationery.
• http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sue-sommer/common-grammar
mistakes_b_935609.html#s338543&title=stationarystationery
3. AGENDA
The Chair Poet
Imagist Poetry
o “In a Station of the Metro.”
o “The Red Wheelbarrow”
o “To Elsie”
Author Introduction:
o Wallace Stevens
o Mina Loy
4. Chair Poet of the Day?
On the website, you will find a link to short American poems. You can get a
poem from there, but any American poem is fine. Simply commit the poem to
memory; each day from now until the end of the quarter I will ask if we have a
chair poet. All you have to do is raise your hand. I will take one or two a day. (If
there are multiple volunteers, we will schedule them for the next sessions.
A chair poet earns five extra participation points
for each member of his or her group.
• The first time I taught this class, a
student spontaneously recited “The
Red Wheelbarrow” while standing on
a chair. From that came the idea of a
chair poet a day.
5. LECTURE
Imagism
Crooked, crawling tide with long wet fingers
Clutching at the gritty beach in the roar and spurt of spray,
Tide of gales, drunken tide, lava-burst of breakers,
Black ships plunge upon you from sea to sea away.
From “Tide of Storms” by John Gould Fletcher
6. Imagism flourished in Britain and in the United States for a brief
period between 1909 and 1917. In an effort to move away from
the sentimentality and moralizing tone of nineteenth-century
Victorian poetry, imagist poets looked to many sources stimulate
new ideas:
• They studied the French symbolists, who were
experimenting with free verse, a form of poetry that
shunned the accustomed rhythm of metrical feet, or lines.
Rules of rhyming were also considered nonessential.
• The ancient form of Japanese haiku poetry influenced the
imagists to focus on one simple image.
• Greek and Roman classical poetry inspired some of the
imagists to strive for a high quality of writing that would
endure.
7. T. E. Hulme (an English Poet who lived from 1883–1917) was
instrumental in formulating and cultivating the ideas and
concepts that characterized imagism. Hulme proposed a
poetry based on absolutely accurate presentation of its
subject with no excess verbiage.
Imagist poetry aimed to replace muddy abstractions with
exactness of observed detail, apt metaphors, and economy
of language.
The first tenet of the Imagist manifesto was "To use the
language of common speech, but to employ always the
exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely
decorative word." While Hulme wrote only a modest
amount of poetry, his ideas inspired Ezra Pound.
8. Pound's definition of the image was "that which presents an
intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time."
Pound defined the tenets of Imagist poetry as follows:
I. Direct treatment of the "thing," whether subjective or
objective.
II. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to
the presentation.
I. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the
musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome.
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5658#sthash.D8754249.dpuf
9. Amy Lowell on Imagism
When Ezra Pound left the imagists, Amy Lowell led the movement. In
her book Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (New York: Macmillan
Company, 1917), she outlines what she sees as the major points of
imagism. She set them down “in order.”
1. To use the language of common speech, but to employ always the
exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word.
2. To create new rhythms -as the expression of new moods -- and not
to copy old rhythms, which merely echo old moods. We do not insist
upon "free-verse" as the only method of writing poetry. We fight for it
as for a principle of liberty. We believe that the individuality of a poet
may often be better expressed in free-verse than in conventional forms.
In poetry a new cadence means a new idea.
10. 3. To allow absolute freedom in the choice of subject. It is not good art to
write badly of aeroplanes and automobiles, nor is it necessarily bad art to
write well about the past. We believe passionately in the artistic value of
modem life, but we wish to point out that there is nothing so uninspiring nor
so old-fashioned as an aeroplane of the year 19 11.
4. To present an image (hence the name: "Imagist"). We are not a school of
painters, but we believe that poetry should render particulars exactly and not
deal in vague generalities, however magnificent and sonorous. It is for this
reason that we oppose the cosmic poet, who seems to us to shirk the real
difficulties of his art.
5. To produce poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite.
6. Finally, most of us believe that concentration is of the very essence of
poetry.
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/amylowell/imagism.htm
11. American Imagists
Ezra Pound
H.D
Amy Lowell
John Gould Fletcher
William Carlos Williams
English Imagists
Richard Aldington
James Joyce
F. S. Flint
D. H. Lawrence
It is almost impossible to discuss
the imagist movement in terms of
only Americans. Pound, who
spearheaded much of it, had
connections in both America and
Britain, and the ideas influenced all
of those poets in the same decade.
Though the Imagism movement
was over by 1917, the doctrine
profoundly influenced the free
verse style of the twentieth
century.
13. In a Station of the Metro by Ezra Pound
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Who can
paraphrase “In a
Station of the
Metro”?
14. New critical readings of “In a Station of the Metro”
1. In the first line, the word “apparition” means either a ghost/ghost-like people or
something becoming visible. Throw in the “faces in a crowd” and Pound at/on a
train, he could be perceiving the sea of faces so quickly that it seems as if they
appear out of thin air as ghosts. It’s also possible that he’s implying everyone on
the train/platform looks melancholy or depressed thereby making them look
dead. This in tandem with their quickly appearing faces may give off a ghostly
vibe. These “ghosts” may look dead due to the mundane acts of life—no vitality
for life because everyone is tired of the same thing day in and day out.
2. The speaker sits in a station of the Metro and observes people’s faces. Most faces
are grim which collectively look like ghosts, but there are few faces that stand out.
They must be some attractive women’s faces because beautiful women are often
compared to flower petals. In other words, “petals” are metaphoric to the faces of
attractive women. And the “wet, black bough” is a metaphor of sexy moist hair
that serves as a background to emphasize the women’s attractive faces. This
discovery brings the speaker into the world of fantasy from a routine busy
morning.
15. QHQ on “In a Station of the Metro”
1. Q: Why is the poem so short?
2. Q: Why is it important that Pound is using metaphors rather than
similes?
3. Q: Why does Pound choose to focus on only one simple image rather
than further developing the imagery?
4. Q: Is there a relationship between “petals” and “apparitions” and how
does it connect to an overall symbol of the passing of death?
5. Q: Could “In a Station of the Metro” be a representation of the dying
human connection to the world?
6. Q: Is this poem discussing the conflict between spirituality and
science?
7. Q: How is human individuality portrayed in the Pound’s poem?
16. William Carlos Williams
“No ideas but in things”
The Red Wheelbarrow
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N
qIl3oX_44s
17. The Paraphrase!
1. An enormous amount of an ambiguous item, substance,
idea, etc. is reliant on a brick-colored farm tool used to roll
around heavy loads. This tool, a red wheelbarrow, sits next
to egg-colored (no pun intended?) hens and roosters. The
wheelbarrow is shiny and reflective with precipitation.
2. A wheelbarrow, shining about with its redness due to the
rain, is one of the most important tools for farming. In
turn, thanks to the dripping water from the sky, the
chickens also become glassy and cleaned with whiteness.
As the chickens stand near the red wheelbarrow, they see
the red wheelbarrow as a vital tool to drink water that was
filled in it.
18. QHQ “The Red Wheelbarrow”
1. Q: Why does he have the wheelbarrow next to the
chickens? Why is it important to mention the chickens?
2. Q: What is the importance of the color? Does it have one?
Why is the chicken white and the wheelbarrow red?
3. Q: For what is the red wheelbarrow a metaphor?
4. Q: Why doesn’t “The Red Wheelbarrow” contain any
capital letters or punctuation?
19. QHQ
1. Q: How did his background as a well-known writer and
physician affect the way he writes this poem?
2. Q: What was the connection between “The Red
Wheelbarrow” and Spring and All, the collection it first
belonged to?
3. Q: How does “The Red Wheelbarrow” influence our
understanding of an imagist text? How does this round-
out, or help us understand the complicated subject that is
inherently ambiguous?
4. Q: If “The Red Wheelbarrow” and “In a Station of the
Metro” are poems, what constitutes a poem, and where
do we draw the line and no longer consider something a
poem?
22. Paraphraseof the first few lines of “To Elsie”
The natural resources and opportunities
of America are plentiful to anyone who
comes and settles here. People living in
the mountains of Kentucky and those
living as far as the north end of New
Jersey, where its lonely lakes and valleys
are home to the outcast people of
society, like the deaf-mutes that have
been written off by society, criminals, and
those who have been here long enough
that no one remembers them anymore,
linger. Careless, evil men flaunt their
promiscuity while they work on the
railroads, in the hopes of living out their
dreams of finding adventure.
The pure products of America
go crazy—
mountain folk from Kentucky
or the ribbed north end of
Jersey
with its isolate lakes and
valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves
old names
and promiscuity between
devil-may-care men who have taken
to railroading
out of sheer lust of adventure—
23. QHQ: “To Elsie”
1. Q: But why Elise? What made her so interesting
that he had to write about her?
2. Q: How is William Carlos Williams’ “To Elsie”
representative of the American Dream?
3. Q: Who, or What does Elsie symbolize, or
personify?
4. Q: Why is it that only the men work and strive to
achieve this dream of prosperity? How come the
only mention of women is overly sexualized?
25. • Wallace Stevens was born on October 2, 1879
• He lived a relatively privileged life
• He went to Harvard, trying to satisfy his father’s wish for him to
become a lawyer while at the same time satisfying his own need
to write.
• In 1900, he defied his parents and moved to NY to become a
Journalist for The New York Tribune, though eventually he did
return to law school and become a lawyer.
• He worked to make himself financially stable, but still he wrote.
• In 1923, he published his first collection of poetry.
Although Steven’s work is powerful in its use of images, he is not
classified as an imagist. Instead he writes in a number of styles—
often three line stanzas. His early poems sometimes rhymed, some
are in blank verse, and some a melodic free verse. The poems we
are reading are lyric poems
27. Although Mina Loy was born in England, she
did much of her work in Paris, Florence, and
New York City, where her beauty and
outlandish behavior shone at the center of
multiple avant-garde circles. The
unconventional vocabulary and syntax of Loy’s
poems and their scornful treatment of love
and other subjects can puzzle and offend, but
no reader can question the work’s originality
nor the poet’s fierce intelligence.
28. Neglect of Loy's poetry has lent qualified support to revisionist claims that
leading male modernists like T. S. Eliot, Pound, and Joyce defined modernism so
as to marginalize writers whose poetics and politics threatened their own largely
conservative stance.
However, Eliot and Pound praised Loy's work. High modernist champions of
technical innovation and intellectual rigor could not accuse Loy of formal
conservatism or sentimentality.
Literary historians may have marginalized Loy by making her a modernist icon,
woman-as-Dada, while relegating her writing to avant-garde obscurity; but
equally relevant is Loy's lessened attention to her poetry in later life.
Renewed interest in her poetry belongs to the recovery of the neglected,
multiple aspects of early modernism. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
(1933) Stein, whom Loy praised as "Curie / of the laboratory / of vocabulary,"
offers a definitive tribute to Loy's artistic vision. Recalling Loy's first husband's
plea that she punctuate the long sentences without commas in The Making of
Americans (1925), Stein notes that "Mina Loy . . . was able to understand
without the commas. She has always been able to understand."
29. HOMEWORK
Read: Mina Loy 295-96 and “Parturition” 296-99
Post #12: Respond to one of the following prompts:
1. QHQ on the “Parturition”
2. Discuss “Parturition” in conjunction with Loy’s Manifesto.
3. Discuss “Parturition” in conjunction with one critical theory
Read: Wallace Stevens
“The Snow Man” 283
“The Emperor of Ice Cream” 284
Post #13:
1. Paraphrase either poem. Be original!
2. Discuss the modernist aspects of one or both of these poems.
3. Or a brief “new critical” reading of one poem
4. Or do a QHQ for either “The Snow Man” or “The Emperor of
Ice Cream”
