Thursday, October 28 - midcentury modernism, in brief but dramatic contrast with what comes next

sketch of a happy family gathering safely in a fall-out shelter, circa 1950: In an essay called "The Invisible Avant-Garde," John Ashbery remembers that in 1950 "to experiment was to have the feeling that one was poised on some outermost brink." The fifties was a period of confidence and even complacency - a rejection of the restlessness that had given forth modernism. [Citation: "The Invisible Avant-Garde," in Avant-Garde Art ed. Thomas Hess and Ashbery (1967), p. 183.]

• audio: introduction "midcentury modernism" and the "new formalist" poets of the cold-war period, a brief excerpt from James Breslin's From Modern to Contemporary read by Shawn Walker
• audio: mp3 version of the presentation listed just above
• a few notes on The New Criticism circa 1960
• a few items from the notebooks of poet Winfield Townley Scott
• Richard Wilbur, biographical profile
• Richard Wilbur, "Still, Citizen Sparrow" (1950)
• Richard Wilbur, "The Death of a Toad" (1950)
• Richard Wilbur, "Cottage Street, 1953"
• Richard Wilbur introduces "Cottage Street, 1953": video
• Richard Wilbur reads "Cottage Street, 1953": video
• Robert Frost in Newsweek, 1956
• paper option #11 In Wilbur's "Cottage Street" Sylvia Plath's poems are characterized, in the final line, as "free and helpless and unjust." Does the speaker mean for these qualities to be negative? On the whole yes? Or on the whole no? In answering this question--in creating your interpretive position--be sure to answer some or all of these questions also: Is the speaker (a poet himself) an anti-modernist poet (do we have any evidence to know this in the poem)? What is the speaker's feeling for Edna Ward? Does the speaker use the phrase "grace and courage" unironically to describe Mrs. Ward? Why is Mrs. Ward's "refusal" "large" and is that meant to be a virtue? Why is the speaker-poet a life-guard meant to save the younger poet Sylvia Plath? To what extent is this a poem about the course (or direction, or development) of modern poetry?
• Sylvia Plath, biographical profile
• "Sylvia Plath, Forever an Icon" (New York Times, November 9, 2000)
• video: Al Filreis and Shawn Walker on Wilbur's "Cottage Street, 1953," with reference to the appearance of the young but "doomed" Sylvia Plath in the poem ()
• William Jay Smith, "Epigrams"
• on Smith's epigram "Poet"
• John Frederick Nims' "vituperative political style" (1956)
• John Frederick Nims, "The Academy Disporting" (c. 1959)
• X. J. Kennedy, "Nude Descending a Staircase" (1959-60)
• X. J. Kennedy on The New American Poetry anthology
• Alison Lurie, "Trees, Being Neighbors" (1947)
• Adrienne Rich, biographical profile
• Adrienne Rich, "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers"
• anti-modernism from the right: Donald Davidson, from "Grammar and Rhetoric: The Teacher's Problem" (1953)
• poem about baseball praised as Poundian by Babette Deutsch in 1956: Robert Fitzgerald's "Cobb Would Have Caught It"

  ...and now a hint at what comes next...

• audio: Allen Ginsberg, "Put Down Your Cigarette Rag (Don't Smoke)"
• audio: Ginsberg, "Put Down Your Cigarette Rag (Don't Smoke" (mp3 version)
• concrete poetry of the sixties (a sampling of two)

  
  supplemental/optional readings:

• Al Filreis on midcentury modernism and cultural cold-war anxieties
• Marjorie Perloff's essay, "Poetry 1956: A Step Away from Them"
• a personal post-mortem on teaching "The Death of a Toad" in English 88, with a point about irony in language
• Allen Ginsberg as last seen before his death (with reference to a performance of "Put Down Your Cigarette Rag")