It is, however, a little trickier than the Beach Boys. For one thing, it’s modern, which means you’re up against alienation and artificiality. For another, it’s poetry, which means nobody’s just going to come out and say what’s on his mind. Put them together and you’ve got modern poetry. Read on and you’ve got modern poetry’s brightest lights and biggest guns, arranged in convenient categories for those pressed for time and/or an ordering principle of their own. THE FIVE BIG DEALS EZRA POUND (1885-1972)
Profile: Old Granddad … most influential figure (and most headline-making career) in modern poetry … made poets write modern, editors publish modern, and readers read modern … part archaeologist, part refugee, he scavenged past eras (medieval Provence, Confucian China) with a mind to overhauling his own … in so doing, masterminded a cultural revolution, complete with doctrines, ideology, and propaganda … though expatriated to London and Italy, remained at heart an American, rough-and-ready, even vulgar, as he put it, “a plymouth-rock conscience landed on a predilection for the arts” … responsive and rigorous: helped Eliot (whose The Waste Land he pared down to half its original length), Yeats, Joyce, Frost, and plenty of lesser poets and writers … reputation colored by his anti-Semitism, his hookup with Mussolini, the ensuing charges of treason brought by the U.S. government, and the years in a mental institution.
Motto: “Make it new.”
A colleague begs to differ: “Mr. Pound is a village explainer—excellent if you were a village, but, if you were not, not.”—Gertrude Stein
Favorite colors: Purple, ivory, jade.
Latest books read: Confucius, Stendhal, the songs of the troubadours, the memoirs of Thomas Jefferson.
The easy (and eminently quotable) Pound:
There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization,
Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid,
For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.
from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
The prestige Pound (for extra credit):
Zeus lies in Ceres’ bosom
Taishan is attended of loves
under Cythera, before sunrise
and he said: “Hay aquí mucho catolicismo—(sounded catolithismo)
y muy poco reliHión”
and he said: “Yo creo que los reyes desaparecen”
(Kings will, I think, disappear)
That was Padre José Elizondo
in 1906 and 1917
or about 1917
and Dolores said “Come pan, niño,” (eat bread, me lad)
Sargent had painted her
before he descended
(i.e., if he descended)
but in those days he did thumb sketches,
impressions of the Velásquez in the Museo del Prado
and books cost a peseta,
brass candlesticks in proportion,
hot wind came from the marshes
and death-chill from the mountains….
from Cantos, LXXXI (one of the Pisan Cantos, written after World War II while Pound was on display in a cage in Pisa) T. S. (THOMAS STERNS) ELIOT (1888-1965)
Profile: Tied with Yeats for most famous poet of the century … his masterpiece The Waste Land (1922), which gets at the fragmentation, horror, and ennui of modern times through a collage of literary, religious, and pop allusions … erudition for days: a page of Eliot’s poetry can consist of more footnotes and scholarly references than text … born in Missouri, educated at Harvard, but from the late 1910s (during which he worked as a bank clerk) on, lived in London and adopted the ways of an Englishman … tried in his early poetry to reunite wit and passion, which, in English poetry, had been going their separate ways since Donne and the Metaphysicals … his later poetry usually put down for its religiosity (Eliot had, in the meantime, found God); likewise, with the exception of Murder in the Cathedral, his plays … had a history of nervous breakdowns; some critics see his poetry in terms not of tradition and classicism, but of compulsion and craziness.
Motto: “Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”
A colleague begs to differ: “A subtle conformist,” according to William Carlos Williams, who called The Waste Land “the great catastrophe.”
Favorite colors: Eggplant, sable, mustard.
Latest books read: Dante, Hesiod, the Bhagavad Gita, Hesse’s A Glimpse into Chaos, St. Augustine, Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, Frazer’s The Golden Bough, Baudelaire, the Old Testament books of Ezekiel, Isaiah, and Ecclesiastes, Joyce’s Ulysses, Antony and Cleopatra, “The Rape of the Lock,” and that’s just this week.
The easy (and eminently quotable) Eliot: The opening lines of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the let-us-go-then-you-and-I, patient-etherised-upon-a-table, women-talking-of-Michelangelo lead-in to a poem that these days seems as faux-melodramatic and faggy—and as unforgettable—as a John Waters movie. (We’d have printed these lines for you here, but the Eliot estate has a thing about excerpting.)
The prestige Eliot (for extra credit): Something from the middle of the The Waste Land, just to show you’ve made it through the whole 434 lines. Try, for example, the second stanza of the third book (“The Fire Sermon”), in the course of which a rat scurries along a river bank, the narrator muses on the death of “the king my father,” Mrs. Sweeney and her daughter “wash their feet in soda water,” and Eliot’s own footnotes refer you to The Tempest, an Elizabethan poem called Parliament of Bees, the World War I ballad in which Mrs. Sweeney makes her first appearance (ditto her daughter), and a sonnet by Verlaine. WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS (1883-1963)
Profile: Uncle Bill … at the center of postwar poetry, the man whom younger poets used to look to for direction and inspiration … smack-dab in the American grain … determined to write poetry based on the language as spoken here, the language he heard “in the mouths of Polish mothers” … avoided traditional stanza, rhyme, and line patterns, preferring a jumble of images and rhythms … spent his entire life in New Jersey, a small-town doctor, specializing in pediatrics … played homebody to Pound’s and Eliot’s gadabouts, regular guy to their artistes—the former a lifelong friend, with whom he disagreed loudly and often … wanted to make “contact,” which he took to mean “man with nothing but the thing and the feeling of that thing” … not taken seriously by critics and intellectuals, who tended, until the Fifties, to treat him like a literary Grandma Moses … Paterson is his The Waste Land.