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American Modernism.

It appeared in the first decade of the XX when the group of poets appeared in the USA who tried to bring modernists’ ideas. The most active of these poets were Ezra Pound & Thomas Eliot. American modernism doesn’t mean geographical terms. Many American writers created their works in
Europe (mainly in Paris). Ezra Pound said: “Paris is a lab of ideas”.
Modernists:

Ezra Pound

Gertrude Stein

John Dos Passos

Ernest Hemingway

Partially William Faulkner

Francis Scott Fitzgerald

Ezra Pound (1885 – 1972)

A famous poet, publicist & translator. He studied in the University of
Pennsylvania (studied Roman languages). But he had a very brief career as a teacher & in 1908 he left for Europe. He walked all the way from Gibraltar to Venice where the first collection of his poems appeared – “A Hume
Spento”. During 2 years from 1908 he gained his popularity. His collections were:

“Canzoni” – songs

“Ripostes” – leisure

“Lustra” – light
The poems impressed the readers by the original form, new expressiveness & metrical faction. He is the founder of imagist’s school (opposed traditional Victorian verse). The poets’ aim was to be precise & clear in word usage. They did not accept thematic limitations, were responsible for exploding the traditional form, tried to find form to substitute it. There was a trend in imagism – wordism – the model for the XXth century poetry.
Its features:

V Mechanistism

V Technisism

V Specific rhyme
Much attention was paid to the metaphorical images. These ideas influenced young poets like Robert Frost, Thomas Eliot, and W. Butler.

Pound edited magazine “Little Review” where new names & works were introduced. It is believed that he revolutionized English versification. He tried to capture the intonation of monological speech. His poems have a peculiar form of masques. His poetry is dressed in the bright clothes of
Latin, Greek, Japanese, Anglo-Saxon, etc poets.

Translations are the best part of his legacy. They were also thoroughly polished masques. He developed interest Japanese poetry. He liked the
Japanese way of presenting the most abstract idea through a concrete image.
So he introduced idiomatic poetry when any nation could be rendered through the combination of concrete images. This principle was employed in “The
Cantos” epic poem, which he started in 1925 & continued almost up to the end of his life. He called it “неисчерпаемый свод стихотворных форм”. The synthesis of his ideas of works, autobiography, aesthetic & poetic principles & reflection of the urgent & poetic issues. “The Cantos” are uneven in quality. Some fragments are difficult to understand. To facilitate the process of reading “The Index of Cantos” was published. In
1925 Pound moved to Italy & became interested in politics & economics. He devoted much time & effort to discuss economics & politics.

“The ABC of ECONOMICS”

“What Is Money For?”
He supported the fascist regime. After the war he was arrested & charged in prison, but was considered to have mental disease & spent 22 years in mental hospital. In late 50’s he was let free & went to Italy where he died. But he continued to write even in hospital. “The Cantos of Pizza” is a very painful reevaluation of the things passed. The famous critic Malison said: “He chose a wrong position above the society & that’s the problem”.
He was the poet who transformed the form of English verse – thus his achievement was great.

Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)

Gertrude Stein is remembered because of her influence on the writers to come, not for her works. She doesn’t enter anthologies of English or
American literature. She was born in USA, her childhood was spent in
Europe. She studied psychology in Harvard. Her teacher was William James.
She conducted several experiments on automatic writing but she was interested only from psychological point of view. However, she did not become a psychologist yet this influenced her writing. In 1903’s she left for Paris & remained there almost all her life. In 1909 she published the novel “The Three Lives”. It consists of three parts describing the lives of three women. The work was unnoticed in that time. But that time she got acquainted with famous artists: Picasso, Matisse. New tendencies in painting (cubism, abstractionism) impressed her very much.

Abstraction tendencies dominated in her artistic works. She claimed that only Spanish & American writers were able to realize abstract notions in literature. This abstraction must be expressed by the deformity of the form. She was the only representative of literary abstractionism. Her desire was to get rid of the content of words (of the meaning) so that she could be able to concentrate on the plastic properties of the language & its syntax. She was going to capture inner & outer reality in the most precise & objective form.

Literature must not awake any associations: associative emotions are invalid. Everything that is the result of emotions cannot be the gist of literary work, cannot be material for prose & poetry. They must consist in the precise rendering of internal & external reality. The words must express the reality directly, she tried to devoid them of any meaning. But she forgot that the painter & the writer use different media for their arts. But if colours have no meaning the words obviously possess it. She wanted to create pure literature by using pure words, no one else tried to do that before. She emptied the words of the thought & created almost her private language & that was the extreme. It showed how far one could go in violating the language.

Another novelty – the new concept of time. She tried a new method of narration – “continuous present”. Instead of the narration she creates a composition where a story is presented as if happening at the present moment, not as a consequent unfolding of the theme as we perceive reading.
She did acknowledge that such a category as time in literature would transform into continuous perception of the present moment. So she tried to put this theory into practice in her book “The Making of Americans”.

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