17. The founders of American modern poetry E.L. Masters, R. Jeffers, C. Sandburg.

EDGAR LEE MASTERS (1868 – 1950)

Life:

He was born in Texas and reared in southern Illinois.He attended Knox Collage, studied law and became attorney. He gave up law practice and devoted himself entirely to literature.

He moved to New York, for 20 years he occupied a suite at the famed Hotel Chelsea, heaven of many writers of the 20’s and 30’s. He is buried in Petersburg, next to his beloved grandparents Squire Davie Masters and Lucinda Masters.

The epitaph of Master’s tomb

“Tomorrow is My Birthday”

“Spoon River Anthology” (1915)

It was literary sensation.

It was written in the form of epitaphs – poignant summaries of the lives of persons supposedly buried in the country cemetery (nearly 250 characters). The poems are in free verse, the lines conveying a unit of thought (conversational speech, more shaped then common speech).

Most of the speakers reveal brief and bitter tales of twisted and wasted lives.

But some, like Lucinda Matlock, speak with courage, conviction, optimism.

Speakers of Spoon River

The speakers are inhabitants (both real are imagined) of Spoon River, an area near Lewinstown and Petersburg, Illinois, where Masters spent his childhood.

Some characters under disguise names, lately dead or still living in the region, scandalous behavior of some of them (judges, bankers, doctor, editors, churchmen, artists, night watch, atheist, hat maker, gambler, a Negro, Anne Rutledge, first love of A. Lincoln, etc.).

All are dead, “sleeping on the hill”. They died accidentally, violent or unnoticed death.

The discover and confess the real motives of their lives, the secret steps that stumbled them to failure or raised them to illusionary triumphs.

They talk about meaningless marriages, accidents and disease, economic exportation, incapability, damaged lives.

Death and darkness grant them the revelatory eyes for recognition of their own souls.

Masters in “Spoon River Anthology”

Masters clearly defends the characters – not against their sins, petty or great, for these they readily confess themselves – but against the punishments and inequalities life fixes upon us all.

The epitaphs are ironic an extremely objective.

Flaws of “Spoon River Anthology”

It is bigger, more inclusive than need to be.

The graveyard is overpopulated.

Some headstones seem repetitious.

There is stiffness of some verses.

The poems resemble a statement-like recitations and seem formal.

The poems are sometimes unintentionally ludicrous (provoking laughter, ridiculous, comic).

ROBINSON JEFFERS (1887 – 1962)
His father was a professor of Old Testament, literature and theology, his mother – a church organist. He was born in Pittsburgh. At the age of 15 Jeffers was fluent in Greek, Latin, French, Italian, German (educated in boarding schools in Europe). Robinson was also highly educated in the USA, studied medicine and forestry. He lived on the coast of California, where he built a granite house and a tower on cliffs facing the sea.

His Poetry:

Flagons and Apples (1912)

Californians (1916)

Tamar and Other Poems (1924)

Hungerfield and Other Poems (1954), moving eulogy to Una Call Kuster with her in California, his muse and partner.

Beauty of his descriptions of the natural world – early environmentalist, perhaps the first to grasp the devastating extent of changes of human technologies and populations had on the rest of earth biological life.

Some pessimisms of human culture: human culture is destructive and out of control.

He wanted us to rediscover our relationship with the foundations of nature.

He insisted that human kind should acknowledge the superior value of the instinctive life.

“Inhumanism”

Jeffers’s assertion that mankind was too egocentric, too unmoved by the “astonishing beauty of things”.

“The Double Axe” – defined “inhumanism” criticized the Allie’s role in WW II – putting Roosevelt and Churchill on the same moral level as Hitler and Mussolini.

“Divinely Superfluous Beauty”

Vision of the spontaneous energy running through all things.

Wish to be indentified with this energy, to become one with what is “divinely superfluous”, “The incredible beauty of joy. Stars with the fire the joining of lips.”

“The Burial Place”

Union between himself and nature complete ………………………………..

“put me in a beautiful place far off from men ……………………………….. cemetery I should be pleased to lie in one grave with’em” (the quick deer, the lonely puma).

The human animal is absurd and petty, everything appears small in contrast to the enigmatic beauty, the intrinsic perfection of nature. We have to return to earth, our origin.

Jeffers’s impact

Depends upon PERSPECTIVE.

Human life is seen from an immense distance, as it were placed within the larger dimensions of earth, sea, and sky.

Colloquial speech, first conflict, then union between human nature and nature

Recognition of the needs and limits of the human character.

CARL SANDBURG (1878 – 1967)

Life:

Sandburg was a son of poor Swedish immigrants. He had to quit school at 13 to begin working.

He roamed over Kansas, Nebraska and Colorado working as a truck handler, harvest hand, dishwasher, brick maker, porter, janitor, milkman, among other jobs.

He worked as a war correspondent during Spanish-American War.

He completed four years at Lombard College in Galesburg but did not graduate.

In 1908, he became a political organizer for the Social Democrats. He served as a secretary to the mayor of Milwaukee. He went back to newspaper work.

Poet, folksinger and journalist.

Poetry:

He spoke for the common man and woman.

The Chicago Poems (1916) followed by

Cornhuskers (1918) raised him to a position of leadership among the Chicago Renaissance group (T. Dreiser, V. Lindsay, S. Anderson)

He traveled about the US and collected folk songs which he published in The American Songbag containing 280 songs and ballads which he collected from convicts, cowboys and farmers.

He was an admirer of A. Lincoln and published a monumental biography of his hero. (The Prairie Years, two volumes, The War Years, four volumes).

Subjects of his poems

His poems celebrate:

work and the worker

men and women alike

arrogance, coarseness, and vitality of a young notion.

The People, Yes (1936)

“Chicago”

It is his best known poem.

It was first published in Poetry Magazine in 1914.

It is filled with vigorous imagery which bombards the senses of the reader.

“Happiness”

“Anna Imroth”

“Fog”