Abstract
Walt Whitman’s confident, declamatory style makes him precursor of a line in modern American poetry that runs through Ezra Pound (1885–1972) and Carl Sandburg to the Allen Ginsberg (b. 1926) of Howl (1956) and other ‘Beat Generation’ poets of the 1950s. In the formal proportions of his verse, its promotion of himself and its ebullient optimism, Whitman is a foil to the reserve of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (1821–73), the miniaturist poetry of Emily Dickinson (1830–86), and the dark prophecies of Henry Adams. If by ‘modern’ is meant a historical period lasting from about 1910 to 1940, Emily Dickinson’s withdrawal and her highly individual use of imagery, off-rhyme and unconventional syntax give a foretaste of modernist emphases on impersonality and language. Henry Adams evinces a modernist sense of the massive, alienating power of science.
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Further reading
JOHN M. BRADBURY, The Fugitives: A Critical Account (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1958).
ALAN DOWNER, Fifty Years of American Drama, 1900–1950 (Chicago: Regnery, 1951).
IRVIN EHRENPREIS (ed.), American Poetry, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 7 (London: Edward Arnold, 1965).
LESLIE FIEDLER, Waiting for the End: The American Literary Scene from Hemingway to Baldwin (New York: Stein and Day, 1964; repr. Penguin, 1967).
FREDERICK J. HOFFMAN, The Twenties: American Writing in the Postwar Decade, new revised edn (New York: Collier, 1962).
ALFRED KAZIN, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1942).
HUGH KENNER, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971).
J. HILLIS MILLER, Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth Century Writers (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Up, 1965). Chapters on T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Wiliams.
LOUIS D. RUBIN, jun., and ROBERT D. JACOBS (eds), Southern Renascence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1953).
TOM SCANLAN, Family, Drama, and American Dreams (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1978).
ROBERT PENN WARREN, Selected Essays [Faulkner, Hemingway, Frost, et al.] (New York: Random House, 1958; repr. Vintage Books, 1966).
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© 1983 Marshall Walker
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Walker, M. (1983). Modernisms. In: The Literature of the United States of America. Macmillan History of Literature. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16983-2_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16983-2_7
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