Introduction to Modern Literature PDF

# Introduction The most important feature of modernity is the connection of universalism and subjectivity. The wider-ranging the projects of modern literature and philosophy, the greater the role of subjective consciousness. Either standing in the center of the world or displaced from it by analyti...

# Introduction The most important feature of modernity is the connection of universalism and subjectivity. The wider-ranging the projects of modern literature and philosophy, the greater the role of subjective consciousness. Either standing in the center of the world or displaced from it by analytical observation of reality, by the fragmentation of the individual or by social experience, by experiments in language and poetic form, the individual self of the author, reader, or hero remains in focus for most modern writers. This is true even for the seemingly detached approaches of “realistic” fiction. Modern literature and art, in general, are sometimes mistakenly called anti-traditional. This error originated in a superficial understanding of the modern revolt against romantic clichés. For instance, Walt Whitman’s attacks on the faint imitations of the Byronic hero, or on the code of chivalry in the South, are accompanied by rather traditional attitudes to Jeffersonian ideals of democracy. Emily Dickinson’s experimental poems depend on the tradition of church hymns and Puritan spirituality. All this implies that the boundary between Romanticism and modern art is difficult to trace. Nonetheless, we can get a clearer idea of it by observing structural changes in the modern vision of the world which had started already in Romanticism. While some romantics (for instance Poe and, in some interpretations, Emerson) believed that subjective consciousness had full meaning only in relation to some absolute whole (the Over-Soul or the universe), for modern writers this universal totality was no longer self-evident. It was either to be reproduced in poetry dealing with the commonest things and thoughts or to be ironically distanced (together with the self), thus opening the way for poetry based on subtle nuances of meaning. These approaches and their differences are evident in Whitman’s and Dickinson’s poetry: - A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; - How could I answer the child?... I do not know what it is any more than he. - I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. - Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, - A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped. ## Walt Whitman - Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was born of British and Dutch ancestry at a Long Island farm. - In his youth he was interested in the life of the local fishermen, and in the growth of a new urban community in Brooklyn, where his father had begun to work as a carpenter. - He had little regular school education and soon started to work as an office boy. Later he became a journalist and worked for the *Brooklyn Eagle* and then for a number of local papers. - Before his twenty-third year he was appointed editor of *Manhattan Daily called Aurora*. - At that time he was an active member of the Democratic Party. - After 1848 Whitman became convinced that the Mexican War had been the beginning of “the irrepressible conflict”, threatening the stability of the whole country. This awareness also influenced the experimental poem he had been writing since 1847 and made him think of addressing all Americans. - During the long years of work on the poem Whitman gave up his journalistic career and went to live with his parents in Brooklyn. He earned his living as a part-time carpenter. The first edition of *Leaves of Grass* appeared in 1855 and became a landmark in the development of American poetry, as well as of modern art in general. This was mainly because of Whitman’s pioneering use of free verse, which does not have a metric pattern (regularly repeated sequences of stressed and unstressed syllables), but is accentuated by irregular rhythmic impulses and modulated by the different length of lines. Whitman’s free verse is rooted in the tradition of biblical (or “cadenced”) verse of the Psalms, and the Song of Solomon. In dealing with *Leaves of Grass* we should first try to understand the meaning of the word self, especially in the longest and most important poem “Song of Myself.” In his late essay “A Backward Glance o'er Travell’d Roads” (1888) Whitman wrote: 'Leaves of Grass’ [...] has mainly been [...] an attempt, to put a Person, a human being (myself, in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century, in America), freely, fully and truly on record. I could not find any similar personal record in current literature that satisfied me [...] No one will get at my verses who insists upon viewing them as a literary performance [...], or as aiming mainly toward art or aestheticism. I say no land or people or circumstances ever existed so needing the race of singers and poems differing from all others, and rigidly their own, as the land and people and circumstances of our United States need such singers and poems to-day, and for the future. In other words, the self becomes a metaphor of a genuine American poem, expressing the “land, people, and circumstances of [...] United States.” If the poet is able to “assume” this persona (that is, speaking of himself like the continent, country, and its people, and also like the whole material and spiritual universe in historical time), all readers should be able to do the same. The symbolic figure of the self thus becomes the mediator between the author and his readers and a symbol of their creative potential. Since it is “assumed,” it can never be identified only with the author, or with the reader. In this way, the self of Whitman’s poetry aspires to become a new bond of diversified American society: - I celebrate myself, - And what I assume you shall assume, - For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. The self in Whitman’s poems is never abstract: it integrates the most diverse features, material and spiritual, good and bad, moral and immoral, masculine and feminine, heterosexual and homosexual in a surge of “unspeakable passionate love”: - I am the poet of the Body, - And I am the poet of the Soul, - The pleasures of heaven are with me, and the pains of hell are with me, - The first I graft and increase upon myself. [...] the latter I translate into a new tongue. - I am the poet of the woman the same as the man - And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man [...] From the symbolic figure of the self there is a very short way to another dominant feature of the poem: the image of grass. The connection of the two motifs is evident in section 17 of “Song of Myself”: - These are the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me, - If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing or next to nothing, - If they do not enclose everything they are next to nothing, - If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing, - If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing. - This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and water is, - This is the common air that bathes the globe. The concreteness of the self and the everydayness of Whitman's poem are symbolized by the motif of the grass. Poetry can never belong to individuals. It is a bond (“yours as much as mine”), it writes and deciphers the “riddle” of existence. It is close as well as distant like grass and the elements giving life. In this way, the romantic universal ideal (the world created by imagination) is transformed in Whitman’s work. However, Whitman’s poetry is not so simple and concrete as it may appear from the above lines. It is also poetry of different cultures. The approach to them is similar to that of the Transcendentalists. Like Emerson, Whitman is interested in Asian myths and religions: in the poem “Facing West from California’s Shores” he sees his poetry as a part of the general movement of cultures which started in India several thousands of years ago, and, though it progressed almost round the globe, it has not yet found its meaning. This also indicates that Whitman redefines the American otherness so far based on the ideas of the *Declaration of Independence*, which determined American nationality in connection with nature and human freedom, and in opposition to British tradition and historical claims. Whitman’s poetry no longer seeks these values. It sees American culture as part of the great cycle of all cultures which moves further and further “from the God, the sage, and the hero”, and from the earthly paradises (“from the flowery peninsulas and spice islands”). In later poems, however, Whitman finds something “more” in this circular movement, as in the last section of “Passage to India”: - Passage to more than India! - O secret of the earth and sky! - Of you O waters of the sea! O winding creeks and rivers! - Of you O woods and fields! of you strong mountains of my native land! Thus, the greatest discovery of modern poetry is not the excitement of technical civilization (which we find in other of Whitman’s poems, for instance in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” and which influenced early modernistic “civilization poetry,” e.g., the works of the Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren, or S. K. Neumann) but the everyday world of common things, both small as the leaves of grass and grandiose as the Sierras. As the poem “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” shows that death is also as much a part of this world of common things as a “song of the sea.” *Leaves of Grass* remained Whitman's only collection of poems. All later productions were included in this volume and the book grew almost until the last moments of Whitman's life. Only the *Deathbed Edition* from 1892 became Whitman's *Collected Works*. Among later additions, *Drum Taps* is the most significant. The poems were written during the Civil War and based on Whitman's experience from military camps and army hospitals (where he served as a wound-dresser), and on his acquaintance with President Lincoln, whose death he mourned in the elegy *“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd.”* Apart from newspaper articles, letters, and prefaces Whitman wrote little prose. Besides his memoirs in the form of a private journal published in 1883 under the title *Specimen Days*, one of his best known works is *Democratic Vistas* (1870), originally a series of three essays written for the literary magazine *The Galaxy*. The third essay about the “vistas” for American literature betrays Whitman's isolation on the contemporary literary scene which was dominated by “a parcel of dandies and ennuyees, dapper little gentlemen from abroad, who flood us with their thin sentiment of parlors, parasols, piano-songs, tinkling rhymes, the five-hundreth importation [...] ” In spite of a wide reading public and efficient printing technologies, U.S. literature was not sufficiently protected by copyright law from being flooded by second- and third-rate productions of British writers. In this situation Whitman felt that American literature was still waiting for the “fresh local courage, sanity, of our own [...] stalwart Western men [...] Southerners”. Whitman probably had not read Bret Harte’s stories in *Overland Monthly* (a journal published in San Francisco from 1868), and was hardly interested in Mark Twain's “jumping frogs” or “innocents abroad.” ## Emily Dickinson - Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her father, a successful lawyer and congressman, was a trustee and the treasurer of Amherst College. - She was mostly self-educated: except for a short time at Amherst College and in the female seminary she never attended any school. - Even her reading was not extensive in comparison to other writers: she read some Victorians (the Brontës, the Brownings, Tennyson, and George Eliot), the Transcendentalists (Emerson and Thoreau), and she learned the most from John Keats's poetry. - Nor did she travel widely: she never left Amherst except for short visits to Washington, Philadelphia, and Boston. She never married but was quite influenced by the thoughts of men who were her lovers or friends. When she was young, a law student at Amherst College and free thinker Benjamin Franklin Newton (1821-1853) introduced her to a new world of ideas. When he died of tuberculosis, Reverend Charles Wadsworth (1814-1882) of Philadelphia became her “dearest earthly fiend,” spiritual guide and most probably the addressee or theme of many of her love poems. Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911), a minister, soldier, militant abolitionist, and also a literary critic, encouraged her to write poetry, and became the editor of the first collection of her poems (published posthumously). In later years she was courted by Judge Otis P. Lord (1812-1884), Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. Her secluded life and unwillingness to marry resulted from an effort to keep her inner self inviolate. She wanted to avoid sharing the drabness of everyday married life, as well as the hopes of the eternal life with any of the men she knew. In the poem that she wrote to Reverend Wadsworth, the figure of a husband melts with the figure of God, ironically connecting the trivialities of married life (broken porcelain which can no longer be on display) and the emptiness of death (“Shelf” is both in the cupboard and in the mortuary where dead bodies are laid) and of eternal Life. - I cannot live with You - It would be Life- - And Life is over there - Behind the Shelf - The Sexton keeps the Key to- - Putting up - Our Life His Porcelain- - Like a Cup- - Discarded of the Housewife- - Quaint-or Broke- - A newer Sevres pleases- - Old Ones crack. Dickinson started to write poetry in the early 1850s developing traditional formal models-church hymns and folk ballads. Therefore most of her poems have short stanzas of three to six lines. Some lines are not rhymed at all, and some end with half-rhymes, consonances, or assonances (back/look, resume/June). These half-rhymes often become ironical figures, both distancing the existential seriousness of Dickinson’s message: - I like a look of Agony, - Because I know it’s true- - Men do not sham Convulsion, - Nor simulate, a Throe- and the conventional themes and diction of church hymns: - Oh Sacrament of summer days, - Oh Last Communion in the Haze- - Permit a child to join. - The sacred emblems to partake- - The consecrated bread to take - And thine immortal wine! In the latter poem, “the child” who cannot take part in the Communion is symbolic of both the naive, unmediated approach to the world of the senses, and, at the same time, of the separation of the poet's self from the people, and her closeness to nature which is the source of eternal life including, however, the death of an individual. These are the roots of Dickinson’s reflexive lyrical poetry which, in spite of the proclaimed naive attitude to the world of the senses, deeply transforms the perception of reality. The sensuous facts are no longer important: they provide a mere point of departure to a complex and surprising play of metaphors which tell us of the illusory nature of the world of the senses and of its dependence on the “mistakes” of language, that is on catachreses (specific metaphors linking semantically or stylistically incompatible words) - These are the days when skies resume - The old old sophistries of June- - A blue and gold mistake The figure of catachresis points back to sophisticated paradoxes of the metaphysical poetry of John Donne, but for Dickinson the secret of human being consists more in the ironic play of language than in the anatomy of human reason and senses. Her lyric confirms the independence of the poetic reality from the empirical world. In this she differs from some modernists, who-as for instance T. S. Eliot-look more to the metaphysical poets, and anticipates the poetry of others (Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams), who were more interested in how language creates meaning and what it means for us. The great themes of Dickinson’s poetry are the parallels between nature and death (against which sometimes love and faith stand), and the lapse of time (“evanescence”). All this means that standing outside of any of these elements and refusing to identify with traditional values, she can focus on her subjectivity which is not circumscribed either by the world of the senses or by history and its epochs but by language and the pleasures of writing (of being on the boundary of worlds, of time and eternity): - Next time, to stay! - Next time, the things to see - By Ear unheard, - Unscrutinized by Eye- - Next time, to tarry, - While the Ages steal- - Slow tramp the Centuries, - And the Cycles wheel! Though Dickinson’s imagery and language are mostly disharmonious (this impression is reinforced by unusual punctuation which does not indicate syntactic structures but marks the pauses in speech) her poems nevertheless create harmony out of disharmonious figures, images and tones: - Of Bronze-and Blaze- - The North-Tonight- - So adequate it forms- - So preconcerted with itself- - So distant to alarms The harmony is “preconcerted” with itself, i.e., it has not been instrumented by any metaphysical power). It resembles the song of Orpheus which stands in sharp contrast to the sermons of Christianity. In her lifetime, Dickinson published only seven of her poems. The first edition of her poetry, containing 116 poems, appeared under a simple title, *Poems*, in 1890. It was the work of her friend T. W. Higginson and of her acquaintance from Amherst, Mabel Loomis Todd (1856-1932), who was in possession of a substantial part of the manuscripts. Another part belonged first to Emily’s sister Lavinia (1833-1899) and then to her niece Martha Dickinson-Bianchi (1866-1943), who published a selection of Emily Dickinson’s work under the title *The Single Hound: Poems of Emily Dickinson* (1914). Appearing at the dawn of Modernism, the book made Dickinson an influential poet with the new generation, including Ezra Pound (1885-1972), and especially Marianne Moore (1887-1972). Gradually, Martha Dickinson published about seven-hundred poems in five collections. The publication of the poems owned by Mabel Todd had waited until 1945 because of the legal battle for the Dickinson property including Emily’s poems. Only then did Mabel Todd’s daughter Millicent Todd Bingham (1880-1968) publish a substantial selection of 668 poems entitled *The Bolts of Melody*, and the preparations of the critical edition of complete poems could begin. In 1955 T. H. Johnson brought to light the whole corpus of 1775 poems. Though they were written in the provincial world of a former Puritan town, they have much more to say to the people of the twentieth or twenty-first centuries used to the global space created by technological civilization. For Whitman and Dickinson, as for Emerson, there was no intrinsic “truth,” “goodness,” “beauty,” or “harmony” in anything; if harmony existed, it could do so only as a result of necessarily provisional construction by a temporary, fleeting “harmonizing” consciousness. As words and metaphors were renewed, old lines blurred and dissolved, and previously-separated entities ran together to form new agglomerations. “[T]he poet turns the world to glass […] and sees the flowing or metamorphosis; perceives that thought is multiform. […] Mountains and oceans we think we understand […] until they are melted […], and come out men, and then, melted again, come out words” (Emerson 1990: 205; “The Poet”). In Dickinson’s poem, human brain is transformed in a similar way: - The Brain-is wider than the Sky- - For-put them side by side- - The one the other will contain - With ease-and You-beside- - The Brain is deeper than the sea— - For-hold them-Blue to Blue- - The one the other will absorb- - As Sponges-Buckets-do- - The Brain is just the weight of God- - For-Heft them-Pound for Pound- - And they will differ-if they do- - As Syllable from Sound-