Modern American Poetry

(^396) Anita Patterson
Boogie” is that they do not offer a clearly recognizable, accurate record of
experience that calls attention to their embeddedness in history. Such
summary judgment has hampered further exploration of how Hughes’s jazz
poetics contributed to twentieth-century realism or to the development of
the modernist lyric.
This essay situates Hughes’s jazz poetics within the arc of his entire
career to show how modernist experiments in poems like “Dream Boogie”
are in keeping with his earlier attempts at lyric realism. I will focus on two
main ideas. The first is that Hughes’s poems challenge the critical distinction
between “realism” and the “avant-garde”: even his simplest, most
documentary, and most historically engaged poems evince a
characteristically modernist preoccupation with the figurative implications of
form. Second, Hughes’s realist approach to the lyric offers a fresh perspective
on some central tendencies in transatlantic modernism: his repudiation of
racial separatism, his interest in the relationship between poetry and
American music, and his experiments with a jazz poetics are, in many ways,
comparable to the critique of romantic cultural nationalism undertaken by
Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, T.S. Eliot, and other modernists writing in the
aftermath of the Great War. The convergence between Hughes’s techniques
and those of the American avant-garde highlights the importance of
metonymic style, and of the historical knowledge that underlies the impulse
toward formal experiment and improvisation, as a relatively neglected
feature of the modernist lyric.
It is by now almost a commonplace to say that Hughes revised and
extended the populist angle of vision explored in the previous decade by
Edwin Arlington Robinson, Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, and others. But
we have yet to understand the series of formal experiments he executed
within the lyric that show his engagement with questions shared by his high
modernist contemporaries.
REALISM ANDFORM INHUGHES’SPOETRY
As a rubric, realism has been subject to heated debate and casual dismissal in
the history of American criticism. “American realism virtually has no school;
its most dominating and influential advocate, William Dean Howells, often
seems to ride along in a strange vacuum, nearly unheeded in his continual
insistence on the proprieties of the everyday, stable characterization, and
moral certainty, while almost every other important author of the period
simply refused, on these terms, to become a realist.”^3 Whereas in Europe the
great period of realism occurred throughout the second half of the