Modern American Poetry

(^256) Edward Hirsch
After the war a deep change took place in black consciousness around
the country. The writers of the Harlem Renaissance were inflamed with a
fresh faith in blackness and a fervent racial pride, the symbol and gospel of
the New Negro. Harlem emerged as the new cultural center of black life.
The lyric outpouring and achievement of the bright firmament of Claude
McCay, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, and Langston Hughes essentially
grew out of the radical evolution and change in American black life between
the war years and the Depression. In the twenties the writers of the Harlem
Renaissance self-consciously forged a distinct black aesthetic—reinventing
and rediscovering traditional folk forms and, simultaneously, inventing a new
formal expression of black life. As Langston Hughes asserted in 1926, “We
younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-
skinned selves without fear or shame.”^8 The collective work of the Harlem
Renaissance poets forever redefined black life in literature. It marked a major
watershed in black and, consequently, in American literary history.^9
The more expansive and liberated aspects of American culture in the
twenties can be symbolized not only by a changing black consciousness, but
also by political developments such as the national woman’s suffrage
movement (women at last received the right to vote in 1920) and, in social
terms, what came to be called the Jazz Age, an era of flappers and flaming
youth, changing sexual mores and moral standards, a new bohemianism.
Edna St. Vincent Millay and E.E. Cummings were the poets who seemed to
express this bohemian aspect of the era most effectively and representatively
in their work. Despite their different poetic modes and sensibilities, both
Millay and Cummings were romantic individualists who had gravitated to
Greenwich Village as the unquestioned center of bohemia. (So, too,
Gertrude Stein and the young men she called “the lost generation” helped
establish Paris as the center of romantic expatriatism in the twenties.) Millay
and Cummings were writing in revolt against social and sexual puritanism,
an outdated moral code. “Let’s live suddenly without thinking,” Cummings
asserted in one poem. As Millay wrote in what was perhaps the most widely
quoted quatrain of the decade:
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light.^10
Millay and Cummings were poets of extravagant feeling writing on behalf of
a changing system of manners. Their work reflected a new ethic. Thus, for