L.S. Dembo, in “Louis Zukofsky: Objectivist Poetics and the Quest for Form,” provides an explanation of the objectivists during the modernist period and how their poetic philosophies was also a “quest for form.” Dembo opens with a brief summary on the Objectivists poets, focusing mainly on Louis Zukofsky and his place within, or at the […]
An uncanny re-imagining of an excerpt of Reznikoff’s “Holocaust”
I was struck by the inspiration of court records behind Reznikoff’s poetry; ones that depict a “unique, often violent history of American social life” (Modern American Poetry, 436). And certainly, his work does not shy away from portraying lives of poor immigrants in an harsh light. Reznikoff’s brief law and legal publishing career prologued his writing. He also initially wrote […]
Zukofsky and Trostsky: The Poetics of Uneven Development
Ruth Jennison’s article “Combining Uneven Developments: Louis Zukofsky and the Political Economy of Revolutionary Modernism” attempts, in her words, to “explore the ways in which Objectivist poetry elaborates in aesthetic terms the economic and social concepts of twentieth- and twenty-first century political economists of uneven development” (146). Her primary argument is that, through paratactic aesthetic […]
The Rise and Fall of The Harlem Renaissance
The literary and artistic influencers of the Harlem Renaissance were facing a similar theme to one that was central to the greater modernist art movement. Many of the modernists explored life through the lens of greater global reach, and the frequent melding of cultures the world round. The Great Migration that resulted in the Harlem […]
Sterling A. Brown’s “Legend” and Empowerment of the Young Black Man
Sterling A. Brown’s “Legend” is the final selection we read from his work in the Oxford Book of American Poetry. Published in 1980, this is a poem written after his career as a professor, and near the end of his life. In it, the reader meets three characters: the old black man, the old white […]
Three Young Men Sitting in a Bar in Harlem
Three Young Men Sitting in a Bar in Harlem Due to my unfamiliarity with our blog system, I am attaching my second blog post, a poem, as a PDF so that I don’t lose its formatting. I found myself very conflicted when reading our poems and academic material for this week; I am taking […]
Langston Hughes: The Racial Mountain and the Racial River
Within Langston Hughes’s essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Hughes confronts the divisive question of Negro artists’ aesthetics during the Harlem Renaissance. There were two main camps in terms of content and portrayal of the Negro. Hughes was in the faction that believed the artist had the right to depict Negroes in both […]
On “Poetry”
Marianne Moore’s “Poetry” reads like an essay and addresses the otherness of the genre, as well as the inability to clearly define what its role is as art, culture, and social criticism. The opening lines distinguish this poem as a sort of confession – and a personal one at that – at the pains of engaging poetry. […]
Cultural Influences of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”
Admittedly, “The Waste Land” has always intimidated me for a lot of reasons. I don’t have the proper educational background to understand all of T.S. Eliot’s references. Or, I am not “good at reading poetry”. The endnotes are tedious and exhausting to piece together, it’s a chore to understand. Whichever reason I choose on a […]
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”– Eliot’s Poetic Reflection on an “Etherised” Generation
T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is a poem reflective of the generation’s anxiety and indecisiveness. The speaker’s anxieties and the poem’s attachment to modernity is present throughout the text. The speaker and his reaction to modern life represent what Eliot observed in his society– an “etherised” generation incapable of finding meaning in […]