Gertrude Stein once said:
“One must not forget that the reality of the twentieth century is not the reality of the nineteenth century, not at all”
– (812).
Her reminder was one of significance to the modernist period of literature. American artists and writers of the early-twentieth-century found themselves in a completely different world than the one that preceded theirs: World War One left Europe decimated; an influenza pandemic in 1918 left anywhere between 10 to 20 million people dead worldwide; and urban life became popularized with bohemian communities that formed in places such as Greenwich Village and Chicago (Belasco and Johnson 491-494; vol. 2). Yet, American literature had not awoken from its slumber as the techniques of realist writers continued to be misapplied to a time they were irrelevant to. Becoming increasingly aware of the world they inhabited, writers and poets thus unleashed a plurality of new styles onto the literary landscape. Ezra Pound introduced imagism, William Carlos Williams objectivism, and Ernest Hemingway proto-minimalism. All of these new styles sought to capture the America of the twentieth century that writers had been ignoring (see bottom of page for more information).
However, just as some romantics took the search for the American voice to an individual level, writers and poets like Robert Frost took the innovation of their era to explore themselves. Frost, who is known as the most “quintessentially American” modernist, would often carefully remove or add syllables to traditional meters in his poetry, which, thematically, tended to focus on the struggle of being a living human being. He did just this in his poem “Desert Places,” which follows a narrator running through an open field on a snowy night. It goes:
”The woods around it have it–it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.
And lonely as it is that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less–
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express”– (Frost 5-12).
When compared to Whitman, Frost’s exploration of the self reaches much darker conclusions. His narrator is manic, depressed, and very confused; his surroundings are cold and layered with snow so thick that animals cannot escape from their dens. Additionally, Frost’s subtle experimentation with meter in this poem—seen in the missing or added syllables of each line—appears timid next to Whitman’s use of free verse in “Song of Myself,” which is revelatory of an individual that is willing and confident enough to express themself openly.
The difference between the two is in large part due to the fact that they were attempting to achieve similar goals with their poetry but in different times. They both brought the larger goal of wanting to define the America of their time to wanting to define the individual and themselves. Whitman was able to do this in a time of optimism and patriotism. But for Frost, his present was one that was preceded by the horrors of World War One and a devastating influenza pandemic, thus turning his conclusion of the self into one that is darker, filled with anxiety, and self-conscious.
The following slideshow details modernists’ experiments with new styles that sought to capture the America of their epoch.