Chapter 3 The Modern Period
I. Background
In the early 20th century, nothing had more important and long-lasting effect on America than the two great world wars. America entered the era of big industry and big technology, a mechanized age that deprived individuals of their sense of identity. The war affected young writers' attitude toward life, society, and writing. Also during the interval between the two wars, some significant events exerted great influence on American literature.
II. Modern period characters
First, many young American writers and artists lived abroad for months and years.
Second, Marxism and Freudianism were widely studied. They changed people's view of society and themselves. Third, up to this point, the typical American writer had been native-born, white, more or less rich, Protestant and Anglo-Saxon. After the war, the voices of new groups of Americans were heard. They were poor, or immigrants, or Jews, or blacks. There was the new literature coming out of the South and the literature written by women with awakened self-consciousness.
Fourth, during this period there occurred in America an intense reexamination of the structure of literature and of the nature of the critical activity itself.
During the first decades of the 20th century, modernism became an international tendency against positivism and representational an in art and literature.
a. compared with earlier writings, especially those of the 19th century, modern American writings are notable for what they omit---the explanations, interpretations, connections, and summaries. A typical modern work will seem to begin arbitrarily, to advance without explanation, and to end without resolution.
b. Modernistic techniques and manifestos were initiated by poets first and later entered and transformed fiction in this period as well like the poets, prose writers strove for directness,compression, and vividness and were sparing of words.
III. Main writers:
I. Robert Lee Frost(1874-1963)
In 1912, Robert Frost took his family to England. There he met Ezra Pound who had a very good opinion about his poems and helped him to find British publishers.A Boy's Will(1913) and North of Boston(1914) were published and highly acclaimed in England.
Most of his major poetry was written before 1930, although he continued writing all the way through the 1950s and into the early 1960s. His major books include Mountain interval (1916), New Hampshire(1923), West-Running Brook (1928), A Further Range (1936), A Witness Tree (1942), A Mosque of Reason (1945), A Masque of Mercy(1947), A Steeple Bush(1947), Complete Poems(1949), and In the Clearing(1962). Although recognition came late to him at the age of forty, Robert Frost was the most popular American poet from 1914 to his death.
a. During the course of his career, he changed from a national critic to a national hero.
b. His verse at first was terrifying, showing a dark side of human life, human society, and the problems which confronted his own life.
c. By the end of his life, his poems were filled with more sunshine. He was more pleasant. This is an important change because America needed such a poet that it could admire, especially because the other modernist poets during this time were obscure. They were intellectuals. They could not be understood by the average person. Robert Frost could be understood by the average person and his poetry is full of life, truth, and wisdom.
Frost's achievement was fantastic. He won the Pulitzer Prize four times, received honorary degrees from
