ELIT 48C Class #20

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

AGENDA

• The Chair Poet• Imagist Poetry• “The Red Wheelbarrow” • “To Elsie”

• Author Introduction:• Wallace Stevens

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 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.

LECTUREImagism

Crooked, crawling tide with long wet fingersClutching 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

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.

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.

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.

III. 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

Amy Lowell on ImagismWhen 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.

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

American ImagistsEzra PoundH.DAmy LowellJohn Gould FletcherWilliam Carlos Williams

English ImagistsRichard AldingtonJames JoyceF. S. FlintD. 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.

DISCUSSION

“The Red Wheelbarrow”“To Elsie”

William Carlos Williams “No ideas but in things”

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much dependsupon

a red wheel barrow

glazed with rain water

beside the white chickens

The Paraphrase

QHQ “The Red Wheelbarrow”

1. Q: What is the image that William Carlos Willams is trying to present in “The Red Wheelbarrow”?

2. Q: For what is the red wheelbarrow a metaphor?3. Q: Is the red wheelbarrow a metaphor for our dependency

of technology in our society?4. Q: How does William Carlos Williams use his love of imagism

in “The Red Wheelbarrow” to convey the meaning of the poem?

5. Q: Why doesn’t “The Red Wheelbarrow” contain any capital letters or punctuation?

QHQ1. 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?

To

ElsieThe PARAPHRASE

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? • Q: How is Elsie—the Williams’ nursemaid—a product

of the American Dream?

3. Q: Is the narrator content with the new modern life coming at its place?

AUTHOR INTRODUCTIONWallace Stevens

• 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

HOMEWORK

• Read: Wallace Stevens• “The Snow Man” 283 (1923)• “The Emperor of Ice Cream” 284 (1923)

• Post #19: • Paraphrase either poem. Be original!• Or discuss the modernist aspects of one or both of

these poems.• Or do a brief “new critical” reading of one poem.

• Post #20: • QHQ either “The Snow Man” or“The Emperor of Ice Cream”