Regionalism in Modern American Poetry

Project Description:

Often, Modernism is perceived as a transnational, cosmopolitan literary movement. While that is true, it’s interesting to examine Modernity not on a continental scale, but through the more marginal perspectives: work that doesn’t seek to engage with the urban center, but focuses on one particular region. Examining the tensions between class, race, or between the rural and the urban lends a specific understanding of how different societies were reacting to Modernity, resulting in a more nuanced view of the Modern period as a whole. To provide a visual means of interpreting Regionalism, I created a map that places some Regional poets, such as Robert Frost and Jean Toomer, in their respective regions, and offers some broad information as to their life and careers.

Overview of Regionalism:

Regional literature refers to fiction or poetry that seeks to embody and convey the landscapes, culture and dialectic features that characterize a particular region. In America, examples of common regions include the South, the Midwest or the Southwest. Regionalism as an artistic movement is thought to have reached its peak, both in the visual and literary arts, following World War I. However, traces of Regionalism are present throughout the Modernist period, far prior to 20’s. Artists participating in the movement viewed the region as a “‘means toward a richer, freer, and more humane way of life,’ represented by the diverse cultures maintained by groups of individuals removed from the modern metropolitan centers” (University of Texas). Ultimately, Regionalists hoped to establish a “utopian balance among small cities, a revitalized rural economy, and rich wilderness areas” (University of Texas). Regionalism exists in many capacities in Modern poetry. However, it is most apparently a pointed response against the emerging urban, mass-culture of the time, as well as a method of anchorage in the chaotic and fragmented Modern world.

Regional literature during the Modern period is directly correlated to the continuing emergence of mass-culture. Modern Regionalists were consciously revolting “against the over centralization of cultural production in New York and Hollywood” (Dorman 8). On a more general level, Regionalists sought to pose the local as a virtuous alternative to “an invading metropolitan flood spewing outward from the cities, especially the industrial cities of the Northeast” (Dorman 8). A re-focusing on regional traditions looked back to what Modern urban-industrial America was erasing, such as a sense of roots, local traditions and community, qualities perceived necessary to lead towards a more utopian society. Regionalist artists believed globalization and standardization to be creating to a dangerously homogenous culture, and it was thought that  “fidelity to ‘local customs’ and an assertion of the ‘value of ordinary rural lives’” were the last defense of cultural individuality (Storey 197).  However, as these artists examined their locales in depth, they did not encounter havens of utopian antiquity. Rather, a picture emerged “not of folk virtues and decentralized symbiotic communities, but of widespread poverty, class animosities, environmental desolation, and racial oppression” (Dorman 8). For example, Jean Toomer’s very southern Cane engages with the rural beauty of Georgia, but also depicts the grueling labor conditions and inequalities experienced by Southern blacks. Carl Sandberg’s Chicago Poems portray heated class tensions, even as they celebrate the progress of the Midwest. In this sense, regional poetry’s end result was less an escape from the problems of the center, and more a foray into the unique issues of one locale.

As many Modernist poets sought the solutions to their various problems within the chaotic, urban poetry scenes of metropolises such as London or New York, Regionalist poets turned back towards the routines of folk and rural traditions in an attempt to ground their poetic explorations in the familiar and stable landscapes of a particular place. This has much to do with the aforementioned aversion towards mass, urban environments, but is also a response to the concept of a volatile Modern world, a “divergent version of and alternative to the modernist sensibility of the fragmented individual and culture” (Wright 215-216). The Modernist movement is characterized by numerous coping mechanisms and quests to reconstruct and integrate a culture broken apart by the traumas of war or the fast- paced changes of an increasingly industrial world. Some Modernists, like the famous expatriates Pound and Eliot, “found their alternatives in classicism and the avant-garde,” while the “makers of the Harlem Renaissance took theirs from African primitivism and the life of the urban ‘New Negro’” (Dorman 2). The Regionalist artists of the Modern period found their inspiration, alternatives and “models and visions of integrated cultures, out in the provinces, among the American folk” (Dorman 3). Rejecting the cerebral, intellectual philosophy of High Modernism in favor of a regional, folk aesthetic was an active choice to anchor the poet’s “struggle for effective agency, for self-consciously making art against both fragmentation and commodification, within a ‘quite specific’ landscape” (Wright 219). For Regionalists, this was only possible when distanced from the “totalizing systems of modernization” (Wright 219). In the end, Regional literature may not have resulted in an alleviation of the pressures of the Modern world, but did reach some sense of stability in its exploration of both the downfalls and possibilities of the time through the perspectives of the local.

Although region, localities, and the search for stability are subject matters timelessly worth of exploration, Regionalism plays an important role in Modern Poetry. It is its own outlet and poetic method, just as effective to the creative process of poets like Frost or Jeffers as ideas such as Classicism or Imagism were to major figures of the movement like Ezra Pound or T.S. Eliot. As more and more people migrated to the urban centers of the nation, the importance of these diminishing rural and suburban areas struck the Regionalist poets as worthy of representation and expression. Exploring these regions in all their beauty and flaws provided the Regionalist poets with an escape from some of the plaguing issues of Modernity, even as it forced them to confront others. As a result, it is an important lens with which to approach the dynamic landscape of Modern poetry.

Bibliography:

Dorman, Robert L., and Charles Reagan Wilson. The New Regionalism : Essays And Commentaries. Jackson, Miss: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 7 Apr. 2014.

“Regionalism: Reacting to the Modern.” Utexas.edu. University of Texas, Austin, n.d. Web. 15 Apr. 2014.

Storey, Mark. “Country Matters: Rural Fiction, Urban Modernity, and the Problem of American Regionalism.” Nineteenth Century Literature 65.2 (2010): 192-213.JSTOR. Web. 14 Apr. 2014.

Wright, David. “Modernism And Region: Illinois Poetry And The Modern.” Midwest Quarterly: A Journal Of Contemporary Thought 39.2 (1998): 215-227. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 8 Apr. 2014.

The information on the map comes from the following sources:

“Robert Frost.” Poetryfoundation.org. The Poetry Foundation, n.d. Web. 14 Apr. 2014.

“Robinson Jeffers.” Poetryfoundation.org. The Poetry Foundation, n.d. Web. 14 Apr. 2014.

Rosenthal, M.L. “Williams’ Life and Career.” Modern American Poetry. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2000. Web. 14 Apr. 2014.