Modern American Poetry

(^264) Edward Hirsch
“Narcissus as Narcissus,” Tate argues that “the poem is ‘about’ solipsism, a
philosophical doctrine which says that we create the world in the act of
perceiving it, or about Narcissism, or any other ismthat denotes the failure
of the human personality to function objectively in nature and society.”^31 As
the poem develops, it becomes a drama of “the cut-offness of the modern
‘intellectual man’ from the world.” The situation of the speaker is
symptomatic of the crisis of his region—the crisis of the Old and the New
South after World War I. In its diagnosis of that historical situation, the
“Ode” is an Agrarian poem. It universalizes from the situation of the South
in the middle and late twenties to the larger condition of the modern world.
In the twenties William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore helped
to continue to create and define a Modernist poetry of the New World, a
local, homemade American poetic. Their “experiments in composition” are
akin to the typographical innovations of E.E. Cummings and the verbal
portraits of Gertrude Stein as well as to the more minor free-verse
experiments of Mina Loy, Alfred Kreymborg, and Walter Arensberg. Their
urgent struggle to create an indigenous American poetry parallels the
innovative prose experiments of the expatriates Hemingway and Fitzgerald
in the twenties. They had an even stronger and more direct connection to
the visual artists who clustered around the photographer Alfred Stieglitz’s
gallery, “291” (Marianne Moore called it “an American Acropolis”),
especially John Marin, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, Charles Demuth, and
Charles Sheeler. Along with the cultural journalists Waldo Frank (Our
America,1919) and Paul Rosenfeld (Port of New York,1924), these artists
emphasized immediate visual experience and the need for establishing
American values in art. Out of this milieu, surrounded by the call for the
emancipation of American art and literature, Moore and Williams created a
body of early work (Observationsand Spring and Allare its masterpieces) that
stands as a direct alternative to Continental American Modernism.
Williams’s response to The Waste Landis the most extreme example of
the way two strains of American poetry diverged in the twenties. Williams
wanted a poetry that was forward-looking and experimental, self-consciously
rooted in American soil. Years later he recalled how he felt when The Waste
Landfirst appeared:
It wiped out our world as if an atom bomb had been dropped
upon it and our brave sallies into the unknown were turned to
dust.
To me especially it struck like a sardonic bullet. I felt at once
that it had set me back twenty years, and I’m sure it did. Critically