Masters and Williams I
Most people think of a poem as an effort, a struggle to read, a wrestling with difficulty.
For those who love to read, to lift up a piece of prose— a novel, biography, essay or documentary account— is about as effortless as lifting the telephone to engage in conversation, or shifting our attention to a radio or television program. But to turn our attention to a poem, to supply the focus required for its apprehension, is to undertake an at least slightly pained shifting of awareness, a difficulty.
It is an effort we are loath to make, although repeated experience may persuade us it can be worthwhile...this at least partly accounts for the savagery of our reactions when we're offered a piece of verse that disappoints us in some way— especially when the author could appear to be bluffing or irresponsibly clueless.
Certain kinds of artistically ambitious poetry however, although clearly composed in a form of verse (formatted in lines and stanzas, rather than sentences and paragraphs), are only minimally more difficult to apprehend than prose for regular readers. And, save when the audience has been shamed away by disapproving critics, these approaches to poetry are apt to be enormously popular.
George Gray
I have studied many times
The marble which was chiseled for me—
A boat with a furled sail at rest in a harbor.
In truth it pictures not my destination
But my life.
For love was offered me and I shrank from its disillusionment;
Sorrow knocked at my door, but I was afraid;
Ambition called to me, but I dreaded the chances.
Yet all the while I hungered for meaning in my life.
And now I know that we must lift the sail
And catch the winds of destiny
Wherever they drive the boat.
To put meaning in one's life may end in madness,
But life without meaning is the torture
Of restlessness and vague desire—
It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.
Anne Rutledge
Out of me unworthy and unknown
The vibrations of deathless music;
"With malice toward none, with charity for all."
Out of me the forgiveness of millions toward millions,
And the beneficent face of a nation
Shining with justice and truth.
I am Anne Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds,
Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln,
Wedded to him, not through union,
But through separation.
Bloom forever, O Republic,
From the dust of my bosom!
Edgar Lee Masters (Spoon River Anthology)
This is free-verse...it doesn’t scan. But it was enormously popular with the reading public just before the arrival of Modernism. That public had been prepared to some extant by Whitman and Sandburg— but it’s a somewhat different sort of thing...more literary and writerly, less bombastic. It reminds you of those passages in novels, essays and short stories where the author “rises to poetry”— the parts you might declaim and memorise...read again and again.
Masters style was so much a part of the climate that it had a continuing influence on Early Modernism via the Symbolist free-verse of Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens, the Imagism of Amy Lowell and Hilda Doolittle, and the experimental prose of John Dos Passos (as well as the more mainstream, but still heavily-mannered, style of Hemingway).
The Late Victorian Era saw a struggle between the aesthetics of Realism, Cynicism and Naturalism on the one hand, and Aestheticism, Symbolism and Decadence on the other. The Modern arrived somewhat undefined. Continental Europe, after a glorious sunset of Symbolism with Rilke, Valery, Lorca, Montale and Trakl...went on a binge of Avant-gardeisme from which the literary culture has yet to recover. England hunkered down for a long sleep in neo-formalism. America’s modernism was defined in rather toney terms by T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (eventually succeeded by the rather dull 50’s Formalists). But a kind of old-fasioned Realist aesthetic found a place within Modernism to survive...in William Carlos Williams.
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