Posted: May 7th, 2022

the Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century American Poetry

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The paper should be 2-3 pages long, use MLA citation formatting, and include a works cited list.
This paper prompt assumes you have the Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century American Poetry. If, for some reason, you don’t have that book, please let me know, and we can arrange an alternative source for you to work with.
For this paper, we are dealing with some of the most influential of the modernist poets in the American tradition. Modernism is one of those words that historians of literature use to break up historical periods according to perceived similarities. So, where Walt Whitman was something like an American Romantic, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Langston Hughes can all be considered Modernists. To the extent that these poets have things in common, those things include a handful of stylistic similarities, perhaps best captured by Williams’s imperative for “no ideas but in things” and Pound’s “imagism,” which has been described this way: “Rather than describing something—an object or situation—and then generalizing about it, imagist poets attempted to present the object directly, avoiding the ornate diction and complex but predictable verse forms of traditional poetry. Any significance to be derived from the image had to appear inherent in its spare, clean presentation.” So, modernism, as exemplified by our poets, values imagery and directness in language over complex diction and abstraction.
As the quotation above suggests, another element of modernism is an experimental use of form, where meter and rhyme are used occasionally, or loosely, primarily for local expressive effects. You can see this especially in the work of Williams, where, in poems such as “The Red Wheelbarrow,” the visual patterning of form is evoked without the consistent use of meter or rhyme. Or again in the opening of Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which starts out with three lines in a loose trochaic meter (trochee: ′ ·) and with what seems like will be rhymed couplets (I / sky), only to collapse into the line, “Like a patient etherized upon a table” (Penguin Anthology, pg. 76, lines 1-3). Eliot here uses and then departs from poetic form to create an effect: from the seeming regularity and “beauty” (a lovely walk at sunset) of the invitation of the opening lines, into the malaise that marks the spiritual state of the rest of the poem.
One more element that our Modernists are fond of using is the dramatic monologue, which is found in poems such as Pound’s “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” and Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” The dramatic monologue is a rhetorical tool that was popularized by the late 19C English poet, Robert Browning, although, in English, it owes its origins to the soliloquies found in Shakespeare’s plays, and behind that to the monologues found in Chaucer and Ovid. As in a Shakespearean soliloquy, in a dramatic monologue, the speaker thinks out loud, possibly to him or herself, or possibly to a sympathetic listener, but either way with the assurance that what the speaker says is truly his or her innermost thoughts, unadulterated by a desire to mislead or deceive. Eliot is making a nod at this kind of truth-telling in his epigraph to “Prufrock” from Dante’s Inferno, where Dante’s character, Guido da Montefeltro, consigned to eternity in hell, thinks he can speak the truth to Dante because, after all, nobody ever returns from hell (he’s wrong: Dante returns from hell).
The dramatic monologue allows the poet to create fictional personae—characters who can speak from their own perspective, much as a Shakespearean character does in a soliloquy—so that we, the reader, can be privy to the unfolding thoughts of a unique individual.
If you choose the dramatic monologue keep the tooic name, but if you choose modernism elements then change the topic.
Paper Prompt: Choose one of the following elements discussed above and analyze it in the poem of your choice from The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century American Poetry:
-simple diction
-imagery
-poetic form (meter, rhyme)
-dramatic monologue
How is the poet using your chosen element in the poem or poems you discuss? Be sure to offer a clear claim as your thesis, as well as supporting claims, detailed evidence, and analysis in the supporting paragraphs.
Some suggested poets (although you can choose anyone you think looks interesting):
-Robert Frost
-Wallace Stevens
-Marianne Moore
-Langston Hughes
-Countee Cullen
-Elizabeth Bishop
-Robert Hayden
-Adrienne Rich
-Rita Dove
-Natasha Trethewey
-Kevin Young

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