Modern American Poetry

(^254) Edward Hirsch
inherited a fallen world, a world changed by the experience and knowledge
of trench warfare, the blood-drenched reality of murderous carnage, what
Ezra Pound’s seminal postwar poem, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” (1920), calls
“wastage as never before” and
disillusions as never told in the old days,
hysterias, trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies.^2
Pound’s poem inaugurates the decade and sums up the Modernist poets’
sense of a “botched civilization,” their communal belief in the dramatic
failure of modern life. In a crucial way the war years delivered the final death-
blows to the nineteenth century.
Experience seemed more chaotic and disjunctive for most writers;
consciousness, language, and writing itself seemed more problematic than in
previous times.^3 These changes help to account for the grave crisis in poetry
in the late teens and early twenties, the final overhaul of the genteel and fin
de siècle tradition in American letters, the complex and sometimes
adversarial relationship between writers and readers as well as for the
notorious difficulty of much modern poetry which was fueled by, and indeed
assaulted its audience with, images of fragmentation, discontinuity, and
collapse, what in “Mauberley” is called “consciousness disjunct.” In 1921,
T.S. Eliot, who was deep in the throes of The Waste Landat the time, put the
case for the fragmented and “difficult” text succinctly in what turned out to
be one of the key critical essays of the decade, “The Metaphysical Poets”:
“We can only say that it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it
exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great
variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a
refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must
become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in
order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.”^4
There was an explosive sense of tension and energy at the end of the
war. The war years created a bottled-up and nearly hysterical intensity that
for most writers soon yielded to a mood of postwar disillusionment and
despair, a feeling of large moral and cultural decay. That pessimism was
perhaps most total and vehement in the work of Robinson Jeffers, who, in
the six books he published in the twenties, universalized it into a critique of
all human behavior, civilization itself. In a more representative way, The
Waste Land(1922)—with its sense of the unreal city and the walking dead,
hysterical voices and fragmented experiences—was unquestionably the