Helmet of Fire: American Poetry in the 1920s 255central summary text of generational despair over the decline of the West. In
Archibald MacLeish’s words, “The Waste Landprovided the vocabulary of our
understanding.”^5 Eliot himself repeatedly insisted that he never intended the
poem to express what I.A. Richards called “the disillusionment of a
generation,” but nonetheless that was how it was understood by a large
number of young writers. Almost immediately it became the central
canonical text of the decade and, indeed, of Modernism itself, the single
postwar poem to which all other poets responded in one way or another.
Whereas most young American writers found in the poem a symbol
answerable to their own pessimistic sense and even diagnosis of
contemporary life, others like William Carlos Williams and Hart Crane
disliked the negativism of the poem and felt betrayed by it. They believed it
moved American poetry powerfully in the wrong direction, that the death of
the old order could be a prelude to the birth of a new one, the beginning of
what Crane in “The Wine Menagerie” calls “new thresholds, new
anatomies!” But whatever their response to Eliot’s radical poetic
methodology, his strategy of juxtaposition and collage, his gloomy prognosis
and nearly pathological anatomizing of the death of modern civilization, and
whatever their political slant or persuasion, for all but the most naïve of
writers the war and its aftermath problematized and finally punctured
forever the American myth of progress and improvement. What Van Wyck
Brooks called “the confident years” (1885–1915) were over.
The twenties was the decade when, as Frederick Hoffman pointed out,
“All forms of rebellion, protest, satire and experiment ... were admitted.”^6 It
was also an era when the most puritanical and the most expansive and
liberated aspects of American culture came into dramatic conflict and
confrontation. The repressive aspects of American culture can be symbolized
by the Prohibition amendment (which took effect on 1 January 1920 and
wasn’t repealed until 1933) and the Red Scare (the intolerant, paranoid form
of patriotism which peaked with the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti in one of
the most celebrated legal cases of the decade). Beginning with the general
strike in Seattle, the country was also torn apart by some three thousand
labor strikes which were broken one after the other, leaving a heritage of
failure for organized labor in the twenties. So, too, there was a tremendous
black migration to Northern cities after the war, a strong reaction of
repressive violence by many whites and, consequently, for a complex of
reasons, there were race riots in some twenty-five cities during the “red
summer” of 1919. At the same time the great northern migration also helped
to lay the foundations for the creative ferment which would become the
Harlem Renaissance.^7