A History of American Literature

Making It New: 1900–1945 345

storytellers who followed him, was a fundamental breakaway from plot into mood

and meaning. Individually, the stories in Winesburg, Ohio break with the tradition of

tightly plotted, linear narrative, in order to tell and retell moments glowing with

possible significance. Collectively, they work as a cycle, a group of tales that, to use

Anderson’s phrase, “belong together” thanks to their intimations, their latent

meaning. Anderson was never to write so well again as he did in his book about

Winesburg, although there were some fine collections of stories like The Triumph of

the Egg (1921) and Death in the Woods (1933), and novels that made a considerable

impact at the time of publication, such as Many Marriages (1923) and Dark Laughter

(1925). But with that book, and many of his other tales, he made a difference to

American writing: he showed both how minimalist and how meaningful a style

could be, and how stories could brim with quietly revealed meaning.

Poetry and the search for form

The twentieth century was to witness an explosion of poetry in America. The

modernist experiment was to be sustained through such poetic movements as

Imagism, Vorticism, and Objectivism. The traditionalist search for a past and

precedent was to be maintained, not just by the Fugitive group, but in other ventures

into formalism. There was to be a fresh outburst of poetry of politics or prophecy,

poetry with a mystical aim, and poetry of minimalist experiment and pragmatic

measure. African-American and Native American poets, in particular, were to tap

the rhythmic sources of their culture. And very many poets, identified with no

particular movement, were to maneuver their way between the different positions

and pressures that characterized American poetry at this time, in search of that

quality of prime importance to the American poet: a distinctive individual voice.

Bridging the gap between all these later tendencies and the verse, innovative or

otherwise, of an earlier period are several poets whose work reflects the search for

form, and forms of belief, that characterizes so much of the writing around the turn

of the twentieth century. With poets like Edwin Arlington Robinson (1865–1935),

Robert Frost (1874–1963), and Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962), in particular, the

reader is confronted with work that negotiates between the solidity and the

subversion of the moral self and poetic structure, the pursuit of form, discipline and

the impulse toward fragmentation, doubt. Distinctions of this kind are always

slippery. Frost, after all, was born only five years before Wallace Stevens, Jeffers just

two years before Ezra Pound. But change assumes a different pace with different

places and temperaments; no cultural transformation is monolithic; and it is surely

the case that Robinson, Frost, and Jeffers adopted more of the older habits of thought

and writerly practices than many of those roughly contemporary with them. Their

work, with its intense seriousness of moral purpose and questioning, rather than

collapsing traditional measures, shades into the old modes of writing just as much

as into the new.

Nothing perhaps illustrates the transitional status of Edwin Arlington Robinson

more than his own description of himself as someone “content with the old- fashioned

GGray_c04.indd 345ray_c 04 .indd 345 8 8/1/2011 7:53:49 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 49 AM