The

The Literary Renaissance

New Directions: The First Wave

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935)

Sought for perfection in his poetry (in detail, structure and phrasing)
Faced such difficulty in getting his poetry published that in 1896 he had his first poem published at his own expense.
Was appointed clerk at the US Custom House at New York by President Roosevelt, who had heard of his financial plight
His Arthurian poems show his development of a highly individualized blank verse, lofty in character yet modern in it speech rhythms, equally adaptable for sustained narrative, dialogue, and dramatic effects, ad for the poet’s characteristic discussion of ideas.
Was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his first collection of poems in 1921, for his novel The Man Who Died Twice in 1924, and for his work Tristram.
If a formula could be given for a typical poem of Robinson, it would include the following elements: characterization; indirect and allusive narration; contemporary setting and recognition of the impingement of setting on individual lives; psychological realism and interest in exploring the tangles of human feelings and relationships; an onlooker or observer as speaker, making the poems impersonal and objective with respect to Robinson himself; a penchant for the humorous point of view combined with an awareness that life is more essentially tragic; a language that is colloquial, sinewy, and subtle as it conveys twists of implication in continually active thinking; a mindfulness of the difficulty of moral judgment but also a concern for it. Feeling that all this can justly
No poet ever understood loneliness or separateness better than Robinson or knew the self-consuming furnace that the brain can become in isolation, the suicidal hellishness of it, doomed as it is to feed on itself in answerless frustration, fated to this condition by the accident of human birth, which carries with it the hunger for certainty and the intolerable load of personal recollections. He understood loneliness in all its many forms and deities and was thus less interested in its conventional poetic aspects than he was in the loneliness of the man in the crowd, or alone with his thoughts of the dead, or feeling at some unforeseen time the metaphysical loneliness, the angst, of being "lost among the stars," or becoming aware of the solitude that resides in comfort and in the affection of friend and family--that desperation at the heart of what is called happiness.

Willa Cather (1873-1947)

· First modern novelist to find success in writing about the West and Southwest and its rich cultural heritage and history of immigrant transplantation

· Wrote poetry, short stories, essays, and novels, winning many awards including the Gold Metal of the National Institute of Arts and Letters

· In 1922 she won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel, One of Ours, about a Nebraska farm boy who went off to World War I. Her novel

· A Lost Lady, was made into a silent movie in 1925, It premiered in Red Cloud, Nebraska and starred Irene Rich.

· Another movie of A Lost Lady was made in 1934, starring Barbara Stanwyck.

· Other well-known Cather novels include My Antonia, O Pioneers, Death Comes for the Archbishop, and The Professor's House.

· was a tomboy at home in the saddle

· enjoyed distinguished careers as journalist, editor, and fiction writer.

· Is most often thought of as a chronicler of the pioneer American West.

· Critics note that the themes of her work are intertwined with the universal story of the rise of civilizations in history, the drama of the immigrant in a new world, and views of personal involvements with art

· Her fiction is characterized by a strong sense of place, the subtle presentation of human relationships, an often unconventional narrative structure, and a style of clarity and beauty

· While she spent forty years of her life with her companion, Edith Lewis, in New York city, she never wrote openly about lesbian or gay themes, because nothing overt would have been tolerated by the publishers (and probably by the reading public as well).

Robert Frost (1874-1963)

· Was somewhat of a regionalist

· Was valedictorian of his graduating class

· Taught English at Pinkerton Academy at Derry, N H for a while

· In 1916 he read his poem “The Ax-Helve” as the Phi Beta Kappa poem at Harvard University

· Won the Pulitzer Prize for his poem New Hampshire (1923); Collected Poems (1930); and A Further Range (1936)

· Frost's importance as a poet derives from the power and memorability of particular poems. despair of these situations

· Frost's poetic and political conservatism caused him to lose favor with some literary critics, but his reputation as a major poet is secure. He unquestionably succeeded in realizing his life's ambition: to write "a few poems it will be hard to get rid of."

· His poetry is meditative, realistic and universally appealing

· Consistency to Frost's conservatism in his background is what probably makes Frost's works enjoyable for the common man

· He is a quintessentially modern poet in his adherence to language as it is actually spoken, in the psychological complexity of his portraits, and in the degree to which his work is infused with layers of ambiguity and irony

· Was invited to read his poem The Gift Outright at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration

Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)

· His experiences working and traveling greatly influenced his writing and political views

· As a hobo he learned a number of folk songs, which he later performed at speaking engagements

· He saw first-hand the sharp contrast between rich and poor, a dichotomy that instilled in him a distrust of capitalism

· When the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898 he volunteered for service, and at the age of twenty was ordered to Puerto Rico, where he spent days battling only heat and mosquitoes. Upon his return to his hometown later that year, he entered Lombard College, supporting himself as a call fireman

· was born in the three-room cottage at 313 East Third Street in Galesburg on January 6, 1878. The modest house, which is maintained by the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, reflects the typical living conditions of a late nineteenth century working-class family. Many of the furnishings once belonged to the Sandburg family. Behind the home stands a small wooded park. There, beneath Remembrance Rock, lie the ashes of Carl Sandburg, who died in 1967.

· His college years shaped his literary talents and political views

· Grew increasingly concerned with the plight of the American worker

· Was awarded the

· The second part of his Lincoln biography, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (1939), won him the Pulitzer Prize, and he received a second Pulitzer Prize for his Complete Poems in 1950

· His poetry embodies the rhythms and symbols of the American idiom while embodying the common idealism of the people in form often of notable subtlety

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)

· His first book of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published in 1917, and immediately established him as a leading poet of the avant-garde

· With the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, was already considered by many to be the single most influential poetic work of the twentieth century, by 1930, and for the next thirty years, he was the most dominant figure in poetry and literary criticism in the English-speaking world

· His poems in many respects articulated the disillusionment of a younger post-World-War-I generation with the values and conventions—both literary and social—of the Victorian era

· As a critic also, he had an enormous impact on contemporary literary taste, propounding views that, after his conversion to orthodox Christianity in the late thirties, were increasingly based in social and religious conservatism

· Became a British citizen in 1927

Received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948

· His poetry employs intellectual discipline and cultural memory in preference to more accessible and sensuous images and emotional suggestions

· His later poetry takes a positive turn toward faith in life, n strong contrast with the desperation of The Wasteland

· Is known today as an artist whose ideas are large, whose craftsmanship is the expression of artistic responsibility, and whose poems represent progressive refinement and illustration of his aesthetics

Poets of Idea and Order

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)

His writings display a special knowledge of humanity, a diagnostic reserve toward its frailty or strength, and enough humor to preserve his sanity
Characteristically, he is a poet of realism
His poems reveal a connection to the ordinary and common whereas he seeks beauty and truth in the common (often the vulgar) as much as the uncommon
Williams’ training as a doctor strongly influenced his works as did his interest in painting
Is the only writer since Whitman that concentrated on the use of the variable foot in his poetry
Received the Dial Award for Services to American Literature in 1926; the Guarantors Prize in 1931; the Loines Award in 1948; and the National Book Award in 1949

A Literature of Social and Cultural Challenge

E. E. Cummings (1849-1962)

Is a poet of experimentation and intensity as evidenced in his mechanics: the reduction of capital letters, purposeful underpunctuation, the dissociation of phrases from logical relationships, his stream-of-consciousness technique, and his dexterous novelty of versification
His work identifies him as individualistic and moralistic in his freedom of expression on a multitude of topics: animal instincts, untrammeled youth, sexual experiences, and his insistence on the passionate character of genuine love
Though his greatest talent lies in his lyricism, he also is a master of satire, at times showing a sparkling with, and at other times wielding a heavy club of irony as he attacked advertisers, Babbits, and super-patriots

Langston Hughes (1902-1967)

Is one most talented and long lasting of the Harlem Renaissance writers
Though he was born in Joplin, Missouri, Hughes spent much time moving about as a young boy, and later used the people he grew up with as the subjects of his writing
His hunger for Primitivism was a contributing factor to his great success

While his is known primarily as a poet, he proved successful at every genre he attempted (fiction, autobiographies, children’s books, dramas and plays)

William Falkner (1897-1962)

A creative genius in his ability to construct a world of imagination in which reality is more accessible than it is in the everyday actualities of life, Falkner has few equals in modern literature
Because his writing is difficult, obscure, and often disagreeable, his works were not widely read until years after his death
He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949, but was not awarded it until 1950 for his Collected Stories. During his acceptance speech, he encouraged younger writers by telling them that the only subject “worth the agony and sweat: of the artist is “the human heart in conflict with itself.”
His stories come from family papers and county records from the first settlements of the Indians (from his hometown of Oxford, MS)
Received the National Book Award also for his Collected Stories
His style is complex, but is consistent with his objective: to keep continuously in focus the immediate character, “the human heart in conflict,” while evoking that past which is always present with us. His style observes the conventions of a new prose, no more strict or unnatural than the conventions of poetry, and similarly intended to engage the imaginative participation of the reader and to provide a language more subjective and flexible than ordinary prose.
He has a psychological approach of projecting events through the memory or consciousness of the character in the form of “interior monologue”
He is still heralded as the greatest imaginative writers of the Western world during his half century