Modern American Poetry

253

All my beautiful safe world blew up....

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

The age demanded an image

Of its accelerated grimace....

—Ezra Pound, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”

The decade of the twenties rightfully begins in November 1918, at the
end of fifty-two slaughterous months that changed the world forever. It is
difficult to underestimate the impact of World War I on a generation that
had been trained and prepared for one kind of world—one that in retrospect
seems almost prelapsarian—and then discovered that it existed in another
kind of world altogether. By the time the war began in 1914, the Modernist
revolution was well underway, but the sordid experience and reality of
modern warfare propelled that revolution forward in an unprecedented and
violent way. Poets who wrote in the aftermath of the war could never again
forget its particular horrors, how the so-called civilized world put on a
modern helmet of fire. In this sense, as Francis Hope has stated, “All poetry
written since 1918 is war poetry.”^1 In particular, the poets who wrote
between 1918 and 1929 (the year of the stock market crash and the
beginning of the Great Depression that so radically altered American life)

EDWARD HIRSCH

Helmet of Fire:

American Poetry in the 1920s

FromA Profile of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. © 1991 by the Board of Trustees, Southern
Illinois University.