3 - Lyric modernism: Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane

Summary

This chapter focuses on the work of two poets – Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane – who exemplify the mode of what I am calling “lyric modernism.” The title of the chapter brings together two concepts that we might normally consider to be polar opposites: “lyricism” and “modernism.” Both Stevens and Crane were centrally important figures in the development of American poetic modernism; yet at the same time they were poets working within the tradition of post-Romantic lyric poetry in a way that experimental modernists like Pound, Eliot, and William Carlos Williams were not. Stevens and Crane represent, in very different ways, the twentieth-century synthesis of post-Romantic lyricism and modernist innovation.

Modernist poetry, as we have seen in the work of Pound and Eliot, involved a rejection of the inherited models of traditional English poetry. The nineteenth-century lyric, the modernists felt, had too often relied on the beauty and melodiousness of its language rather than on the depth or complexity of its thought. With the Imagist movement of the 1910s, poets began to move away from a reliance on musicality and sonic richness and toward a greater precision and directness of language. Further, the Romantic and post-Romantic lyric was chiefly concerned with the expression of the poetic self, either celebrating that self (in relation to nature, a loved one, or some other aspect of the world), or questioning the isolation, victimization, or failure of that self.