Topic > Pound, Ginsberg, and Olson: Modern and Postmodern Poetry

With the advent of both modernism and postmodernism, the twentieth century was a time when poetic expression was extremely diverse. Especially in the post-World War II period, poets sought to broaden the scope of their art; they experimented with minimalism, for example, and strove to accentuate the realism that poetry was capable of conveying. Later, with the postmodernist movement, the struggle to represent things in entirely new ways emerged in ideas as diverse as Expressionism, which placed a strong emphasis on emotion and subjectivity, and Imagism, whose focus was crisp language and the objective presentation of ideas. Images. This panoply of ideas has produced a veritable spectrum of poetry, and there are three poets in particular who can be considered among the most influential: Ezra Pound, Allen Ginsberg, and Charles Olson. In this essay their work will be analyzed and the voices of their poems will be compared and contrasted. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Perhaps it is prudent to start with Ezra Pound, as he is credited with developing Imagism, a poetic movement focused on the sparing use of language and conveying a clear, crisp image. This movement played an important role in the development of poetry as a whole, and Pound's influence was dominant for many years. A good example of Pound's Imagism is his poem "In A Station of the Metro"; it is only fourteen words long, yet it is often considered as thought-provoking as any longer work. The poetic voice in it is extremely taciturn, but conveys a number of different things with just a few words. Typically, the first task when analyzing the poetic voice of a piece is to find the speaker and the addressee, which is not easy in Pound's poetry. Rather than being deliberately subjective or objective (e.g., using pronouns), who is speaking is not made explicitly clear; Considered separately from the title, the poem conveys only a brief image. Taking the title into account, however, opens the poem up to interpretation by establishing the location – a subway station – which invites the reader to see the speaker as a person within the station itself. The addressee is another tricky issue, as once again the poem avoids any concrete specifics that might help the reader define it, and the title doesn't help either. It can be argued, therefore, that "In A Station of the Metro" represents a speaker within the crowd, having a fleeting visionary experience described in extremely economical language. Understanding this essential style is important to becoming aware of the purpose of the poem and, by extension, the rest of Pound's work. He himself commented on his intent in an essay entitled “Vorticism,” published in Fortnightly Review in September 1914: seeing picturesque people in the Paris subway, he attempted to describe the sensation he felt and wrote of trying to find “words that seemed. .. worthy, or lovely as that sudden emotion” (Chilton & Gilbertson, 1990, p. 228). The poem exemplifies Imagism in that it is extremely dense, describes a very clear and precise image (the "wet, black branch"), and has no wasted words. In fact, the speaker's use of the word “apparition” considerably broadens the interpretative scope, since it allows the faces themselves to be, possibly, imaginary. Furthermore, “the appearance” seems to serve as the subject of the sentence, to which the subsequent post-comma metaphor may apply. In short, the speaker in this poem deliberately uses an ambiguity to disguise the"true" meaning, allowing for significant variation in interpretation, and much of it is suggested simply by the use of a single word. "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley", a later poem by Pound, is very different in length and style. The speaker of this poem is a controversial issue, as not all of the poems' different stanzas are contiguous and some may be considered to be spoken by different voices than the mass; as such, "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" is as much a collection of poems as it is a single long poem. For example, in poem IV of the second part, the speaker modulates from the third person to the first person (even if written as represented speech). In the first part, the poem establishes itself as a narrative poem, describing the difficulties Mauberley has in producing new and exciting poetry in a world that requires mass production and reproducibility – as evidenced by the lines “The age required an image/ Of its accelerated grimace ” (21/22) and “The era especially called for a plaster mold/ Made without loss of time” (29/30). Mauberley's work is characterized by “tearing the lilies from the acorn” (7). This is a powerful metaphor, as acorns can symbolize life and potential (the potential to become a giant oak, which can live for hundreds of years), and lilies – although beautiful flowers – are short-lived. Therefore, Mauberley is not only attempting to extort beauty from the unbeautiful, but is also sacrificing the potential for immediate beauty. Perhaps surprisingly for modernist poetry, "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" is full of classical references, which were used liberally from the Renaissance onwards; this has a number of effects on the reader, including underscoring the speaker's statement that Mauberley was "out of tune with his time" (1), and succinctly adding layers of meaning. For example, the speaker simply uses the word “Capaneus” (8), and in doing so conveys the arrogance and arrogance of the Greek mythological warrior. This is entirely consistent with Pound's early work and the general ethos of saying more with fewer words. What's really interesting about "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" is that the speaker is often taken to represent Pound himself; in "The Modulating Voice of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley", William V. Spanos states that "Ezra Pound [is] the speaker of the entire sequence and, equating him throughout with Mauberley, reads the poem as Pound's confession of artistic failure" (Spanos, 1965, p.73). There is also a stylistic technique in poetry in which the speaker repeats a previous line, but enclosed in quotation marks, something that is aptly described by Spanos as “an ironic reductive implication” (Spanos, 1965, p.88). Two examples are the repetition of the phrase "age required" and the similar treatment of the line "Her real Penelope was Flaubert" (13), repeated in the second part, line 5. This technique has the effect of mocking or trivializing, the previous line, and it's another example of making profound statements in as few words as possible. This modus operandi, however, was not favored by all 20th century poets; where Pound was testing the limits of conciseness and reticence, others such as Allen Ginsberg were experimenting with stream-of-consciousness writing, which often preferred to provide too much information. A classic example is Ginsberg's Howl, a poem divided into three parts (although this essay will focus entirely on the first part). Although it is told in a much more loquacious manner than Pound's work, their poetic voices share some characteristics: for example, they both use extremely dense and referential texts. In Howl, however, the entire first section is one continuous sentence, containing only commas until the end of the section, where a period exists. The rhythm isextremely fast and pushes the reader to rush through the text. Furthermore, Howl speakers seem to consistently employ vague word associations and speak almost entirely in metaphor; a salient example might be "teahead shopping districts joyride flashing neon traffic light" (23), and line six is ​​similar, reading "poverty and tatters and empty eyes and high" (6). This adjective-rich structure repeats throughout the poem and likely echoes the way the brain works, making connections and having these loosely associated things arise one after another. It also mirrors the way a stressed drug addict might speak, adding another layer of meaning to the lyrics. Furthermore, the narration is in the first person – “I have seen the best minds of my generation…” (1) – increasing the reader's involvement and making it seem as if he himself is having these thoughts. There is also an interesting disconnect here between the speaker's claim to have seen the destruction of the best minds of his generation and the actual conduct of the people he is talking about; a factor that contributes in some way to defining the speaker of the poem. They are described as "angel-headed" (4), an unquestionably positive association, but also "huddling in rooms unshaven and in underwear" (14), "dragging the nigger streets" (2), and getting “caught… with a belt of marijuana” (16). These are just three examples, but the poem contains many other references to actions and facts that would have been unthinkable to the public at the time, such as homosexual sex and , of course, drug abuse. The effect of attributing these things to the “best minds” the speaker knows could have been to legitimize these practices; however, the description of hopeless addiction and empty sexual encounters contradicts it this, leaving only one explanation: that the speaker overlooks these factors when deciding exactly who to admire, perhaps because he has personally had these experiences. In the preface to Howl and Other Poems, William Carlos Williams states that he believes this: “it is the poet Allen Ginsberg who has. went through, in his own body, the terrifying experiences described by life in these pages” (Williams, 2006, p.8). In any case, this conclusion says a lot about the speaker, who clearly separates actions from thoughts, and the brutal, punishing honesty of the poem makes it seem more real, as if it were spoken without an audience. This is one of the ways in which “Howl” is considered poetry, rather than prose; in Reading Poetry: An Introduction by Tom Furniss and Michael Bath, it is stated that “poetry should be the poet's private meditation, produced spontaneously and without any awareness or design upon a listener or reader” (Furniss & Bath, 2007, p .219). While this, of course, is not always true, it emphasizes and emphasizes the speaker's honesty, allowing the reader to trust him more implicitly. One of the poems for which this is not true is "I, Maximus of Gloucester, To You" by Charles Olson. For the purposes of analysis, this poem will be treated as one long, continuous poem and each individual short poem will be indicated with a number. Again, Furniss and Bath's claim that poetry has “no consciousness” of an audience is patently false for this poem; in fact, the poem presupposes an audience to the extent that the audience (“you”) is mentioned in the title. As such, it lacks Howl's raw emotional honesty, tempering its truthfulness (somewhat) with kindness as the poet is not alone in the poetic space in which he writes (or speaks). The title specifies Maximus as the speaker of the poem, although it does not identify an addressee. In Career Moves: Olson, Creeley, Zukofsky, Berrigan, and the American Avant-Garde, Libbie Rifkin addresses.