Modernist Poetry
Poets of the 1910s and 1920s who broke with Victorian verse, in free verse or in strange new uses of the old forms.
- You get Prufrock measuring out life in coffee spoons, the yellow fog, the shored fragments of The Waste Land. Difficult, yes, and worth the difficulty; read aloud, these poems lodge in the ear for good.
- Yeats is worth living with slowly, a few poems at a night: you get the young dreamer of Innisfree, then watch him harden into the old man of Sailing to Byzantium, and the lines stick in your head whether you invite them or not. Skip it if you need plainspoken poetry.
- Williams pares American speech to the bone: the red wheelbarrow glazed with rain, weeds by the contagious hospital, poems the size of a glance. If poetry has felt overstuffed to you, these small exact things can retrain your eye.
- Loy is difficult on purpose: Songs to Joannes strips romance down to nerves and anatomy, and her satires bite the Futurist men she ran with. Jagged, cerebral, far ahead of her scene; she makes you work and pays you back.
- Pessoa writes as four different poets, invented people with their own biographies, and each one feels real: Caeiro the shepherd who distrusts thinking, Campos howling in the Tobacco Shop. If you like poetry that argues with itself about who's even speaking, this gets under your skin.
- Hughes gets blues and jazz onto the page: The Weary Blues, The Negro Speaks of Rivers, lines that look simple and land hard. If poetry usually feels like homework, his voice reads like someone talking straight to you.
1915: the dead of one Illinois town speak their own epitaphs, in free verse.