A History of American Literature

Making It New: 1900–1945 347 impression that nothing more is really being said. Perhaps there is indeed “nothing more to say.” N ...

348 Making It New: 1900–1945 manner of implication. In effect, the reader is often asked to conjecture, just as so many of Robin ...

Making It New: 1900–1945 349 In his later years, Robinson tended to concentrate on the more positive implications of impulses li ...

350 Making It New: 1900–1945 own continued will to survive, Robinson argues, and to perpetuate the race, suggests that we have s ...

Making It New: 1900–1945 351 “I’ve wanted to write down certain brute throat noises,” Frost said, “so that no one could miss the ...

352 Making It New: 1900–1945 repetition gives it particular resonance. This could, after all, be a metaphorical reference to the ...

Making It New: 1900–1945 353 Another, simpler way of describing the circuitous, serpentine character of Frost’s work is to say t ...

354 Making It New: 1900–1945 And then – the watcher at his pulse took fright. No one believed. They listened at his heart. Littl ...

Making It New: 1900–1945 355 and wonder. Robinson Jeffers was born in Pittsburgh and studied in Europe. After he married, howeve ...

356 Making It New: 1900–1945 past and his attachment to place. With Jeffers, though, the past that signified was not immediate, ...

Making It New: 1900–1945 357 After this moment of brooding excitement, the poem quickly rises to a strange, mystical experience ...

358 Making It New: 1900–1945 “small dark head” to a “small round stone.” But, at first, there is a gulf if only because the head ...

Making It New: 1900–1945 359 bridge erected over a vacuum. He recalls his audience to the thought that all human ceremonies are ...

360 Making It New: 1900–1945 ending, was not so much the movement itself as the beliefs it articulated. It provided a focus: not ...

Making It New: 1900–1945 361 predetermined verse forms. Having done this, his or her aim should be to produce movements and melo ...

362 Making It New: 1900–1945 since they represent a far more open, and frequently moving, attempt to discover what H.D. called “ ...

Making It New: 1900–1945 363 And the point in the spectrum where all lights become one, is white and white is not no-color as we ...

364 Making It New: 1900–1945 testify, the opposite is true. A poem like “Ferry,” for instance, uses a vivid verbal structure to ...

Making It New: 1900–1945 365 A poem like “Bad Times,” for which the first of only five lines also supplies the title, is exempla ...

366 Making It New: 1900–1945 spent most of her life in rural surroundings, in the region of the lakes in Wisconsin. Like him, ho ...