Helmet of Fire: American Poetry in the 1920s 257the younger generation the Jazz Age—which was also an Age of Dismay—
was a liberating time. F. Scott Fitzgerald referred to it as “the greatest,
gaudiest spree in history.”^11
It was also during the twenties that the reigning ethic of middle-class
America became a kind of rampant consumerism. Wilsonian idealism died,
and under the leadership of Harding and Coolidge the route to normalcy
became the road to a new commercialism and economic prosperity
accompanied by an acquisitive spirit of materialism. Most writers reacted
violently against America’s materialistic ethics and, in alienated distrust,
American poetry turned increasingly inward and away from social action.
At the beginning of the decade, it was still possible for critics to argue
that modern American poetry scarcely existed. In “The Literary Life,” his
contribution to Civilization in the United States,Van Wyck Brooks surveyed
the history of American literature as a “very weak and sickly plant” that
couldn’t be expected to flourish in the decaying soil of American civilization.
Critics everywhere were willing to echo Brooks’s opinion that, in comparison
to contemporary European literature, American literature “is indeed one
long list of spiritual casualties. For it is not that the talent is wanting, but that
somehow that talent fails to fulfill itself.”^12 Ten years later that opinion was
scarcely possible. The twenties witnessed what R.P. Blackmur called an
extraordinary “explosion of talent” that did, in fact, fulfill itself. A renaissance
took place which established American poetry once and for all, at home and
abroad, at the center of twentieth-century poetry. By the end of the decade
American poetry had been recast and re-created as High Modernism. One
result was a literary canon practically unsurpassed in American poetry.
T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound together created an American version of
continental Modernism. Their work of the late teens and early twenties has
a closer affinity to Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticist paintings and James Joyce’s
Ulyssesthan it does to the New World imperatives and ingenuities of William
Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore, Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens. By
1920 the two expatriate American poets who had done so much to extricate
twentieth-century poetry from the vagaries of late-Victorian verse were
intent on reestablishing the connection between a fragmentary and chaotic
present and a harmonious European past. In his seminal essay, “Tradition
and the Individual Talent” (1919), Eliot argues that the contemporary poet
needs to write with a strong historical sense “not only of the pastness of the
past, but of its presence,” with the feeling “that the whole of the literature of
Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own
country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.”
Eliot’s idea of historical continuity and coherence, his idealized version