A History of American Literature

Making It New: 1900–1945 367 Making it new in poetry Of all the writers of this period, none revealed a greater commitment to th ...

368 Making It New: 1900–1945 of rhythm. From first to last, Pound was blessed with the gift of what he called “melopoeia,” “wher ...

Making It New: 1900–1945 369 with a growing distinctiveness of voice and a greater alertness to the problems of modern culture. ...

370 Making It New: 1900–1945 Writing in the aftermath of the Great War (which is very much a presence in the poem), Pound analyz ...

Making It New: 1900–1945 371 epic: a language experiment more radical than anything Whitman ever dreamed of, the Cantos set with ...

372 Making It New: 1900–1945 “Burnt Norton” (1935), the first of the Four Quartets, for example, there are these lines: “Go said ...

Making It New: 1900–1945 373 and voice are, in this sense, unlocated: the “one-night cheap hotels / And sawdust restaurants” tha ...

374 Making It New: 1900–1945 sequence, a radical juxtaposition of different perspectives and languages, to solicit an active res ...

Making It New: 1900–1945 375 You say I am repeating Something I have said before. I shall say it again. Shall I say it again? In ...

376 Making It New: 1900–1945 a mix of cultures. Curiously, Eliot was never more of an American than when he was reinventing hims ...

Making It New: 1900–1945 377 urgent and intimate, as if the poet were speaking under the pressure of immediate experience. And, ...

378 Making It New: 1900–1945 poems beyond the moment, eliciting and perhaps quietly stating principles that had only been implic ...

Making It New: 1900–1945 379 Paterson. Like so many American epics, Paterson is unfinished: Book One was published in 1946, and ...

380 Making It New: 1900–1945 is a poem set firmly within the twin traditions of American epic and Imagist method. “Unless there ...

Making It New: 1900–1945 381 circumstances. Our consciousnesses are not simply blank pieces of paper on which the world writes i ...

382 Making It New: 1900–1945 meaning, is the offspring of this marriage (Notes, I, iii). And what Stevens called “poverty” or “t ...

Making It New: 1900–1945 383 woman whose mind is the scene, which has as its focus the choice between two alternatives. One alte ...

384 Making It New: 1900–1945 of their creator in being tentative, provisional, and unfinished. In some respects, Stevens’s poems ...

Making It New: 1900–1945 385 seems unique, with its own particular rhythms and adjustments – its own special way of turning the ...

386 Making It New: 1900–1945 The peculiar quality of lines like these, poised between the controlled and the spontaneous, largel ...