Helmet of Fire: American Poetry in the 1920s 271Frost’s well-known lyric “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” in
which the speaker turns away from the lure of the woods’ annihilating beauty
and back to the world of human bonds and contracts. This is Frost’s
characteristic move, the mind pressing back against the desolations of reality.
The self is most exposed and present in Frost’s middle work when he is
testing its limits (as in “To Earthward”) or playing with its various
perceptions (as in “The Freedom of the Moon”). Ultimately, he refuses to
give the mind up to its own transcendental urges.^53
In addition to the international Modernism of Pound and Eliot and the
indigenous Modernism of Moore and Williams, the romanticism of Wallace
Stevens, Hart Crane, and, to a much lesser degree, Archibald MacLeish
stands as a third powerful tradition to emerge in American poetry in the
twenties. In radically different ways, Stevens and Crane reconciled the
demands of being both Modernist and Romantic poets. In the process they
re-created an American visionary poetic, and their work directly relates to
and extends the Anglo-American Romantic tradition—the work of Blake,
Wordworth, Keats, and Shelley in England, and Emerson, Whitman,
Melville, and Dickinson in America. Stevens’s claim that “the whole effort of
the imagination is toward the production of the romantic” and even that “the
imagination is the romantic” is one of the motivating premises of their
explicitly Modernist poetic.^54 Stevens and Crane questioned and refigured
the problem and validity of belief in a faithless age. They are post-Symbolist
poets of great verbal energy and extravagance, an exultant language and
lavish music, who sought “a new order of consciousness” (Crane) and “a new
knowledge of reality” (Stevens). Theirs is the psychology of American
Adamic poets in a relativist time, alone before the brute forces of nature,
trusting their own inner experiences, accepting the burden of examining
their own individual states of consciousness and reporting on the evidence.
Their poems attempt to move beyond the isolating negations of The Waste
Land,to pass beyond the poetics of irony and alienation and, through the
saving compensatory powers of the imagination, to reconcile self and world,
imagination and reality. In his last major poem, “The Broken Tower,” Crane
writes: “And so it was I entered the broken world / To trace the visionary
company of love.”^55 These lines encapsulate the central redemptive struggle
of the late-Romantic poet in a Modernist era.
Stevens entered the broken world with the fundamental premise of
Modernism—that God and the gods are dead. The poems in Harmonium
(1923, 1931) begin with the idea of the death of the gods and meditate on the
unsponsored world we live in without them. A relentless skepticism became