YHC: ENGL 2220

April 8, 2010

Each author has a different object of focus, and their own ways of giving value to the object.  That is how a story is told, be it fiction or nonfiction, a poem or a five-hundred page novel. All authors place value in the art of life that surrounds them individually and they wish to convey these different images of life through many artistic forms. During the Modernist Movement in America many authors sought out new ways of writing and all experimented with the new techniques in order to express how they felt or what they see around them.  Authors wanted to express themselves through new found individuality and a sense of distrust of an absolute truth taught by man created institutions.  These expressions and techniques can range from Robert Frost’s use of Naturalism to explain his idea of the world having a grand design in even the smallest of objects, to Ezra Pound using imagism to instill a sense of love into a mundane object, to Claude McKay using his insight of the Harlem Renaissance to give face to a dancer when all other people only see her for her body.

In the poem “Design” by the naturalist Robert Frost, Frost wants to open up a new world to his reader by showing how the small things in nature can explain the larger picture of life.  He wants to use his artistry of writing to give the vision of nothing in the world happens without a reason.  Frost uses naturalism in his writing to detach himself from the subject focus and think of the flower, moth, and spider in a philosophical manner.  Frost set himself apart so that he could really see the object in front of him: “…a white heal-all, holding up a moth/… A snow-drop spider…” (Frost 1346).  He uses this technique to show that when we stand back do we realize the true rarity of simple everyday situations without the intervention of some designer; hence there must be some power, greater than life, which is making these situations happen.  Through this poem Frost also states the coldness of the world, another modernist writing tool, by saying that we have this creator but he/she/it doesn’t seem to care that an innocent creature, the moth, just died because of the placement of a deadly force, the spider.  He is basically saying that God, the master designer, will not help his creations even though He put them here in the first place: “…What brought the kindred spider to that height,/Then steered the white moth thither in the night?…”; it is not a coincidence that we are all on this Earth. (Frost 1346) Frost gives the off the mood of being alienation from God and breaks away from the social norm by giving this objection to the typical religious belief of a benevolent creator.  Frost also uses the iceberg effect in a limited way by not giving the reader all of the pieces to his word puzzle; he leaves out just enough to make the reader look for the reasoning behind a poem that seems almost too simple.  By looking at the diction and with objects of focus Frost purposely puts together certain images that are rare to find jointly in nature to give the disillusionment of there being no design to the world, and thusl stating that for every design there is a creator who is in control.  That feeling of no control causes the feeling of frustration and spiritual loneliness that many people feel when they realize the smallness of their lives when compared to the big picture.  By taking this approach in writing Frost helped kick off the Modernist Movement, and helped set a new standard of writing for a new generation of writers and readers.

In the imagist poem “In a Station at the Metro” by Ezra Pound, Pound becomes famous with his simple and clear diction.  Pound only used fourteen words to describe the feeling of being lost in a sea of “apparition of…faces in the crowd”; whereas, ironically, most poets would use the fourteen line sonnet to describe the same feeling of alienation in the metro station (Frost 1402).  By using these fourteen words, instead of fourteen lines, Pound is rejecting the outdated system of old rules by initiating new ones (i.e. instead of using lines, only use simple, clear words).  An imagist poem is a highly regarded technique that is meant to give a big picture with hardly any words; and Pound few words in this poem were mainly to describe the ghostly faces in the crowd at the station which gives an allusion of a mythical past that seems just barely tangible.  The images in this poem really do not fit well together in the last line: “…Petals on a wet, black bough.” (Pound 1402)  Taking a dainty word like “petals” and placing it next to “black bough” shows that Pound was placing beauty in something that many people would find unsightly.  Simply everything about this poem is the placement of the words, and not the words themselves.  By using placement of words to convey meaning instead of the words just meaning what they do Pound is separating his meaning from the overall context of his poem so the reader has to look at the poem as a whole and not at the words.  Pound then uses naturalism to separate himself from the “apparition” so that he can find the beauty in that “black bough” of a metro station.  Pound also, like Frost, uses the iceberg principle by giving the reader only the “tip of the iceberg”; allotting the reader room to put together the undertow of information given to them throughout the story.

For the Harlem poet Claude McKay and his poem “Harlem Dancer”, McKay got to use many other literary techniques that his white comrades in writing could not use.  Being part of the Harlem Renaissance McKay got to experience the heart and soul of jazz music and the poetry that was being written based on the music’s tempo.  He got to the heart of the African American movement in his poem of the “Harlem Dancer”; in this poem McKay wanted to express his sadness when he sees his people’s art being used as just a form of entertainment and not being seen for the deeper meaning that the artist intend it for.  The image is set up to show the majority of people only come for the show and not the artist who worked feverishly in order to make that show happen.  McKay used his personal experience of being both African American and Caucasian to use double consciousness to understand both his black brothers and his white comrades who both come to “devour” this performer.  McKay is also very overt in his writing and just says things as he sees and feels them instead of being overly symbolic.  He also was very realistic in this poem, and he gives a very real image of a Harlem dancer/singer performance and the audience’s reactions to her.  He described this dancer as a “falsely smiling face, / I knew her self was not in that place.” (McKay 1848)  McKay really illustrates how despairing this girl’s life is since she is an artist who is not taken seriously for her craft, and, though she is kept around for now because she “looks” good, she does not have a set future so she takes the jobs that she can get.  This poem is intriguing because the description of the girl’s face looking as though she “herself was not in that place” pulls the reader in even deeper into the story, even though it is the last line, because the reader wonders where this girl’s mind goes when she is singing; making this visual another iceberg technique since the reader only gets the tip of the story.

All of these authors have different topics of interest that they wish to speak about but they used some of the same literary tools to convey their overall meaning.  Each author would set himself apart from the subject, either by use of naturalism or realism, of their writing in order to better understand their subject.  To choose between the two tools means to either strike up a philosophical reasoning of human behavior, i.e. naturalism, or to use the tools of reportage and accurately represent the life of the person who is being studied. Also there is that modernist skill of using the iceberg effect in order to show that not everything that is seen on the surface is truth, and we must dig deeper to find the individuals’ heart and soul in the work.  The iceberg effect also never leaves the reader with any clear cut answers to the questions being addressed in some poems, or some poets just give enough information for the reader to draw out of the piece what they will.  Though many modernists had the same tools to use for their works, some poets would expand the movement and add in different elements that their life experience gave them to work with. Like McKay, many African American writers got to use a sense of double conscience in their works because they have experience working with people of different races and understand how to communicate with the different groups of people effectively.   However white authors also got out of their mold by experimenting with imagism poetry like Pound.  Though he only experimented with this technique for little of his overall work, he showed that it does not take a sonnet to say something that only needs a few words, and even then the writer doesn’t have to be blunt with his words.  Overall all of these poets had their own style of writing, even though some used some of the same tools for different subjects of writing, which was the greatest ideal that came out of the Modernist Movement.

Work Cited:

Frost, Robert. “Design”. The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Sixth Ed, Volume D, Modern Period 1910-1945. Lauter, Paul. New York. Wadsworth: Cengage Learning, 2010. pg 1346.

McKay, Claude. “The Harlem Dancer”. The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Sixth Ed, Volume D, Modern Period 1910-1945. Lauter, Paul. New York. Wadsworth: Cengage Learning, 2010. pg 1848.

Pound, Ezra. “In A Station at the Metro”. The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Sixth Ed, Volume D, Modern Period 1910-1945. Lauter, Paul. New York. Wadsworth: Cengage Learning, 2010. Pg 1402.