Modern American Poetry

Gertrude Stein

From the time she moved to France in 1903 until her death in 1946, American writer Gertrude
Stein was a central figure in the Parisian art world. An advocate of the avant garde, Stein
helped shape an artistic movement that demanded a novel form of expression and a conscious
break with the past. (there is this breaking up with the past and this is quite conscious and
there is this novel form of expression) The Paris salon she shared with Alice B. Toklas, her
lifelong companion and secretary, became a gathering place for the “new moderns,” as the
talented young artists supporting this movement came to be called. Among those whose
careers she helped launch were painters like Pablo Picasso. What these creators achieved in
the visual arts, Stein attempted in her writing. A bold experimenter and self-proclaimed
genius, she rejected the linear, time-oriented writing characteristic of the 19th century for a
spatial, process-oriented, specifically 20th-century literature. The results were dense poems
and fictions, often devoid of plot or dialogue, which yielded memorable phrases (“Rose is a
rose is a rose”) but were not commercially successful books. In fact, her only bestseller, The
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, a memoir of Stein’s life written in the person of Toklas,
was a standard narrative, conventionally composed.

Though commercial publishers slighted her experimental writings and critics dismissed them
as incomprehensible, Stein’s theories did interest some of the most talented writers of the day.
During the years between World War I and World War II, a steady stream of expatriate
American and English writers, whom Stein dubbed “the Lost Generation,” found their way to
her soirees. Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Sherwood Anderson were among
those exposed to her literary quest for what she called an “exact description of inner and outer
reality.” Whether or not Stein influenced these and other major modern writers—including
James Joyce, whose masterpiece of modernist writing, Ulysses, was composed after his
exposure to Stein—remains an issue of some contention. Critics do agree, however, that
whatever her influence, her own work, and particularly her experimental writing, is largely
neglected. As Edmund Wilson wrote in Axel’s Castle: “Most of us balk at her soporific
rigmaroles, her echolaliac incantations, her half-witted-sounding catalogues of numbers; most
of us read her less and less. Yet, remembering especially her early work, we are still always
aware of her presence in the background of contemporary literature.”

If Stein’s importance as a literary figure has largely been relegated to a secondary role, her
influence as a personality should not be underestimated. She was an imposing figure,
possessed of a remarkable self-confidence and a commanding manner. When couples came to
visit her salon, Stein typically entertained the men, while shuttling the wives off to sit with
Toklas. Writing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, James R. Mellow suggested that
Stein’s unconventional lifestyle and “her openness to vanguard trends may have been
encouraged by her erratic family life.”

Stein moved frequently and was exposed to three different languages before mastering one.
When she was six months old, her parents took her and her two older brothers, Michael and
Leo, abroad for a five-year European sojourn. Upon their return, they settled in Oakland,
California, where Stein grew up. At 18, she followed her brother Leo to Baltimore, and while
he attended Harvard, she enrolled in the Harvard Annex (renamed Radcliffe College before
she graduated). At this time Stein’s primary interest was the study of psychology under noted
psychologist William James. With his encouragement, she published two research papers in
the Harvard Psychological Review and enrolled in the Johns Hopkins Medical School. After
failing several courses, Stein quit the program without earning a degree. Instead she followed
Leo first to London, and then to Paris, where he had settled early in 1903 to pursue a career as
an artist. “Paris was the place,” Stein is quoted in Gilbert A. Harrison’s Gertrude Stein’s
America, “that suited us who were to create the twentieth century art and literature.”

As soon as she arrived, Stein submerged herself in the bohemian community of the avant
garde, described by her brother Leo as an “atmosphere of propaganda.” With guidance from
her eldest brother Michael—an art collector who lived just a few blocks away—Stein began
to amass a modern art collection of her own. She also, at age 29, dedicated herself in earnest
to her writing.

Stein published her first—and some say her best—book in 1909. Three Lives is comprised of
three short tales, each of which investigates the essential nature of its main character. Of
these, “Melanctha,” the portrait of a young mixed-race girl who suffers an unhappy affair with
a black doctor, has been particularly singled out for praise. A reworking of an
autobiographical story Stein wrote about an unhappy affair, the story “attempts to trace the
curve of a passion, its rise, its climax, its collapse, with all the shifts and modulations between
dissension and reconciliation along the way,” wrote Mark Schorer in The World We Imagine.

The dialogue and other facets of the story reflect the influence of Stein’s psychological
training under James. “The identity of her characters as it is revealed in unconscious habits
and rhythms of speech, the classification of all possible character types, and the problem of
laying out as a continuous present knowledge that had accumulated over a period of time”—
all are Jamesian questions that surface in the tale, according to Meredith Yearsley in the
Dictionary of Literary Biography. Since few—if any—writers had ever isolated these themes
in this particular manner, the work remains significant. “Both for historical reasons and for
intrinsic merit, ‘Melanctha’ must be ranked as one of the three or four thoroughly original
short stories which have been produced in this century,” Oscar Cargill concluded in his
Intellectual America.

As she developed her craft, Stein became more “experimental” in her writing. Since her
works were not published in the order in which they were composed, it is difficult to chart the
progression of her experiments, but critics marked The Making of Americans: Being a
History of a Family’s Progress (written between 1906-1908 and published in 1925) as a
milestone. A 900-page novel without dialogue or action, the book held no commercial interest
and went unpublished for 17 years. It began as a chronicle of a representative family and
evolved into a history of the entire human race, reflecting both Stein’s interest in psychology
and her obsession with the process of experience. Not trusting narration to convey the
complexity of human behavior, Stein employed description to achieve what she called “a
continuous present.” She compared the technique to a motion picture camera, which freezes
action into separate frames. Though no two frames are exactly alike, when viewed in
sequence they present a flowing continuity.

Katherine Anne Porter, writing a critique of The Making of Americans, compared the
experience of reading the book to walking into “a great spiral, a slow, ever-widening,
unmeasured spiral unrolling itself horizontally. The people in this world appear to be
motionless at every stage of their progress, each one is simultaneously being born, arriving at
all ages and dying. You perceive that it is a world without mobility, everything takes place,
has taken place, will take place; therefore nothing takes place, all at once.” Porter maintained
that such writing was not based upon moral or intellectual judgments but simply upon Stein’s
observations of “acts, words, appearances giving her view; limited, personal in the extreme,
prejudiced without qualification, based on assumptions founded in the void of pure unreason.”
In his I Hear America, Vernon Loggins described Stein’s language as “thought in the nude—
not thought dressed up in the clothes of time-worn rhetoric.” Mark Schorer also noted her
process-oriented approach: “Her model now is Picasso in his cubist phase and her ambition a
literary plasticity divorced from narrative sequence and consequence and hence from literary
meaning. She was trying to transform literature from a temporal into a purely spatial art, to
use words for their own sake alone.”

Stein carried this technique even further in Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms. Published
at her own expense, the book contains passages of automatic writing and is configured as a
series of paragraphs about objects. Devoid of logic, narration, and conventional grammar, it
resembles a verbal collage. “Tender Buttons is to writing … exactly, what cubism is to art,”
wrote W.G. Rogers in When This You See Remember Me: Gertrude Stein in Person. “Both
book and picture appeared in, belong to, can’t be removed from our time. That particular
quality in them which is usually ridiculed, the disparate, the dispersed, the getting onto a
horse and riding off in all directions, the atomization of their respective materials, the
distorted vision, all that was not imagined but rather drawn out of their unique age. If the
twentieth century makes sense, so do Stein and Picasso.” Despite its inaccessibility, Rogers
called Tender Buttons “essential, for here is the kind of Stein that launched a thousand jibes;
this represents the big break with the sort of books to which we had been accustomed, and
once you have succumbed to it, you can take anything, you have become a Stein reader.”

Stein explains the theory behind her techniques in Composition as Explanation. But even
those critics who understood her approach were largely skeptical of her ability to reduce
language to abstraction and still use it in a way that had meaning to anyone beyond herself.
As Alfred Kazin noted in the Reporter, “she let the stream of her thoughts flow as if a book
were only a receptacle for her mind. … But the trouble with these pure thinkers in art,
criticism, and psychology is that the mind is always an instrument, not its own clear-cut
subject matter.” When Stein did embrace conventional subjects, as she did in her memoir, The
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, she was a resounding success.

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas recounts Stein’s experiences in the colorful art world
of Paris between the world wars. It was written by Stein from Toklas’s point of view, a
technique that “enables Miss Stein to write about herself while pretending she is someone
dearly devoted to herself,” said New Outlook contributor Robert Cantwell. Notwithstanding
the enormous egotism behind the endeavor, readers flocked to the publication (which was to
be Stein’s only bestseller), fascinated by the vivid portrait of a genuinely creative world. As
Ralph Thompson noted in Current History, “The style is artful, consciously naive, at times
pompous, but it is never boring or obscure, and is often highly amusing. The Autobiography
of Alice B. Toklas should convince even the most skeptical that Miss Stein is gifted and has
something to say.”

In addition to writing books, Stein also contributed librettos to several operas by Virgil
Thompson, notably Four Saints in Three Acts and The Mother of Us All. The year after her
autobiography appeared, Stein returned to the United States to celebrate the successful staging
of Four Saints at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, and to conduct a lecture
tour. Though she had been absent for 30 years, Stein was treated royally and her return was
front page news in the major daily papers. She described her six-month visit in a second
memoir, Everybody’s Autobiography. Her tour completed, Stein returned to France where she
remained for the rest of her life, though she moved from Paris to a village near the Swiss
border during World War II. Many of her later writings took the war as a subject, notably
Brewsie and Willie, which sought to capture the life of common American soldiers through
their speech.

A History of Having a Great Many Times Not Continued to Be Friends: The Correspondence
between Mabel Dodge and Gertrude Stein, 1911-1934 follows the relationship of the two
women, who met only a few times, through their letters, collected by editor Patricia R.
Everett. The pair met in Paris in 1911, and when Stein did spend time with Dodge at her
Italian villa, she was inspired to write Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia, which
New York Times Book Review contributor Julie Martin called “an impressionistic linking of
vivid images suggesting the physical, emotional, and sexual goings-on at the villa, in
particular Dodge’s late-night trysts with her son’s young tutor.” Martin noted that Dodge’s
memoirs hint at “some highly charged flirting” between Dodge and Stein. Dodge married four
times and, in addition to Stein, she hosted Bernard Berenson in Europe, as well as Alfred
Stieglitz, Lincoln Steffens, Carl Van Vechten, and her former lover John Reed, in New York.
When she moved to Taos, New Mexico, her guests included psychoanalyst Carl Jung, and
writers Thornton Wilder, Willa Cather, and Frieda and D.H. Lawrence.

When Dodge moved to New York, she was instrumental in bringing modern art to the
American public. She offered for sale at her 1913 exhibition an issue of the magazine Art and
Decoration, which contained an article in which Dodge compared Stein’s writing to Picasso’s
cubism. Some, including Dodge, have speculated that their friendship cooled because of
jealousy on the part of Toklas, but differences of opinion on how to promote Stein’s writing in
the United States may have had more to do with their deteriorating relationship. Dodge did
not approve of Stein’s choice of publishers, calling the house “absolutely third rate.” Their
correspondence slowed, and Stein ignored Dodge’s invitation to her marriage to Native
American Tony Luhan, whose culture Dodge had adopted after her move to Taos. The women
last had contact in 1934.
Two collections of Stein’s work were published as Gertrude Stein: Writings 1903-1932 and
Gertrude Stein: Writings 1932-1946. Richard Howard wrote in the New York Times Book
Review that “‘America is my country and Paris is my hometown,’ Stein used to say, and this
great haul of her works in every imaginable genre (and some unimaginable) certainly
constitutes the indemnification of an exile and the reward of a homecoming.”

In the 1980s, a cabinet in Yale University’s Beinecke Library was unlocked, making public
for the first time a collection of Stein’s papers, including 300 love notes written by Stein and
Toklas. Editor Kay Turner collected the best of these and published them as Baby Precious
Always Shines: Selected Love Notes between Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Most of
the notes were written by Stein for Toklas, whom she called “Baby Precious,” who in turn
called Stein “Mr. Cuddle-Wuddle.” The notes reveal nearly 40 years of poetic declarations of
affection, and details of their intimacy. A Kirkus Reviews contributor wrote that “the
collection makes a convincing case for Toklas’s assertion that ‘notes are a very beautiful form
of literature,’ personal, provocative, and tender.”

In her 1934 lecture, ‘Portraits and Repetition’, Stein looks back at her work and concludes ‘As
I say a motor car goes on, but my business my ultimate business as an artist was not with
where the car goes as it goes but with the movement inside that is the essence of its going’
(Writings 1932-1946 305). Stein’s work, characterised here, sees the world from the inside of
our seeing. She is not interested in the results achieved by the application of conceptual
frameworks; she is not interested in where one might get to by using these concepts. Rather,
she is interested in the act of conceptualisation itself. The ‘essence’, however, is not an object
to be grasped. For Stein, conceptualisation is a movement, a process which regulates our
engagement with the world. In order to grasp this ‘movement’, the work of art must itself
move.

Stein’s work of the 1920s begins to examine, from within, the essence of the conceptual
processes through which the world is understood. In this examination, through texts of
indeterminate genres, Stein embodies the complexities and contradictions of those
conceptualisations in their innermost structures.

One of the most striking examples of this is Stein’s 1925 text ‘Business in Baltimore’. As Ulla
Dydo points out, as the site of the family business, run by the Stein men, ‘Baltimore spells
business and business spells money’ (A Stein Reader 479). The text is a representation of the
male-dominated business world as a system which accounts for and creates an understanding
of all aspects of life: time, space, matter, individuals, relationships. The paragraph of
repetitive variations on ‘Business in Baltimore makes a wedding at first’ suggests generations
of family connections engendered by and engendering business. The structures of intimate
social relationships are governed by a business model of consolidation and production. At
times the text is overwhelmed by the repetition of the title ‘Business in Baltimore’, with
minute shifts and variations in the use of conjunctions, determiners and verb tenses, each of
which prescribes another area of control. As the text progresses it becomes more repetitive,
more insistent and less varied, almost as if Stein is being drawn in to the ‘essence’ of the
system, finding its rhythm and its core components. The effect is of a web, a skein, a field of
meaning which covers all possibilities. Stein is feeling what it is like to inhabit this
worldview: the continuum of space and time is signified by this accounting more and more
insistently as the text progresses, for example in the repetitive return to the question ‘How
many’. The processes of counting and accumulation come to overtly dominate the text as it
becomes more explicitly a map of meaning in which these are the only points of reference.

This is in contrast to the opening section of the text, which, in its relative variety and
complexity seems to reflect Stein’s entry into this world as an outsider. The process of being
drawn in to this world view begins in the opening lines. Stein’s first response to her arrival, to
her surroundings, to seeing her nephew Julian, is presented in short lines which suggest the
hesitancy of an uncertain response:

Nor narrow, long.

Julian is two.

How many and well.

And days and sank.

Thanks to having.

In the following line, these words are repeated in reverse order and without line breaks:
‘Business in Baltimore thanks to having and days and sank how many and well Julian is two
not narrow, long’. She is hastened into the experience. Her words are echoed in a rush which
does not allow for hesitancy and uncertainty. This certainty is emphasised in the shift from the
indeterminate ‘nor’, which opens the poem and holds ‘narrow’ and ‘long’ in an equivocal
relationship, to the determining ‘not’ which becomes a categorising choice between these two
possibilities in the final phrase. Stein is entering this world and its conceptual framework, its
categories – as is the reader.

Towards the end of the text this totalising categorisation becomes more and more insistent.
Stein has written it through to its innermost structure and reduces it to its essential features.
She has found not ‘where the car goes’ but the ‘essence of its going’: the base processes
which determine this map of meaning. These processes, reduced and denuded, Stein presents
in the final section of the text as the repetition of the words ‘yes’, ‘and’, ‘better’, ‘best’,
‘more’ and ‘most’. It is a model of meaning whose points of reference are acceptance (‘yes’),
continuation (‘and’), competition (‘better’, ‘best’) and accumulation (‘more’, ‘most’). The
predominance of the phrase ‘and yes’ foregrounds the process of agreement, affirmation,
acceptance which is also accumulative. This system refuses nothing, subsumes everything.

In the book Paris, France, published in 1940, Stein comes to some conclusions about art in the
20th century:

‘The twentieth century was not interested in emotions it was interested in conceptions and so
there was the twentieth century painting. These conceptions all have to do with the world
being round and everybody knowing all about it and there being illimitable space and
everybody knowing all about it and if anybody knows all about the world being round and all
about illimitable space the first thing they do is to paint their conceptions of these things and
that the twentieth century painting did’ (61-62).

Here she explicitly claims the concept as the preoccupation of modern art. Throughout her
life, Stein had drawn parallels between her own work and visual art, first with Cezanne’s
fields of surface planes, then with Picasso’s cubist facets. This movement toward a
preoccupation with the concept is also true of Stein’s writing.

In the final stages, ‘Business in Baltimore’ begins to acquire the properties associated with
conceptual art. It is the idea of the work which is important. What kind of reading does the
concluding paragraph of this text require? Once you have got the idea of what she is doing,
there is no need to read it. In seeking and finding the ontological rhythm of this worldview,
Stein ends up with the embodiment of an idea. As in Sol LeWitt’s 1967 formulation of
conceptual art, ‘The idea becomes a machine that makes the art’ (‘Paragraphs on Conceptual
Art’ 82). The logical conclusion of literary modernism is conceptual poetry. And that is what
was buried in 1928.

New

BY GERTRUDE STEIN

We knew.

Anne to come.

Anne to come.

Be new.

Be new too.

Anne to come

Anne to come

Be new

Be new too.

And anew.

Anne to come.

Anne anew.

Anne do come.

Anne do come too, to come and to come not to come and as to

and new, and new too.

 Anne do come.

Anne knew.

Anne to come. (devamı da var)

What does she do here? What is your experience reading this poem?

The reason why she is repeating these words because she wants to emphasize the meaning. (?)

Short words, quite precise, quite economic with the words she is using but she keeps
repeating. She is experimenting here, she is trying to visualize smth maybe, drawing Picture.

Lorine Niedicker

Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970) was an American poet often identified with the Objectivists.

She was born in a remote part of Wisconsin on the Black Hawk Island of the turbulent Rock
River near Fort Atkinson, where she lived most of her life in rural isolation. Her father was a
commercial fisherman who rented hunting and fishing cabins. She grew up surrounded by the
sights and sounds of the river until she moved to Fort Atkinson to attend school. The
environment of birds, trees, water and marsh would inform her later poetry. On graduating
from high school in 1922, she went to Beloit College to study literature but left after two
years because her father was no longer able to pay her tuition and because her mother, who
was deeply depressed by her husband’s flagrant affair with a neighbour, had become totally
deaf and needed her daughter to return home to help take care of her. A brief marriage to a
local man, Frank Hartwig, ended in divorce. She worked, first at the public library, then at a
radio station, and from 1944 to 1950 as a proofreader for Hoard’s Dairyman, a job made
difficult by her extremely poor eyesight. In 1951 her mother died, both deaf and blind; her
father died three years later, leaving her with two houses that had to be foreclosed and very
little money. From 1957 to 1962 she was employed by the Fort Atkinson Memorial Hospital
as a cleaning woman, sterilizing the dishes and utensils in the kitchen and scrubbing the
cafeteria floors. Every day she walked the five miles or so to the hospital and back again to
her one-and-a-half room cabin without plumbing on the riverbank. Her isolation from other
writers and the austere beauty of her natural surroundings had a notable impact on her work.
She chose to write in seclusion, and many of her closest relatives and neighbours were
unaware that she was a poet.

In 1931 she read the Objectivist issue of Poetry. She sent her poems to Louis Zukofsky, who
had edited the issue. This was the beginning of what proved to be an important relationship
for her development as a poet. Zukofsky suggested sending them to Poetry, where they were
accepted for publication. Niedecker then found herself in direct contact with the American
poetic avant-garde. Near the end of 1933, Niedecker visited Zukofsky in New York City for
the first time and became pregnant with his child. He insisted that she have an abortion, which
she did, although they remained friends and continued to carry on a mutually beneficial
correspondence following Niedecker’s return to Fort Atkinson.
In 1963 at the age of fifty-nine, she married Albert Millen, an industrial painter at Ladish
Drop Forge on Milwaukee’s south side, a man who had no idea she wrote poetry and who
spent a good deal of time at the local tavern. But he also took her on trips to South Dakota and
around Lake Superior and seems to have been the companion she needed at this stage of her
life. When Millen retired in 1968, the couple moved back to Blackhawk Island, taking up
residence in a small cottage Lorine had built on property she inherited from her father. She
was looking forward to a period of less housework and more time to write when in 1970 she
had a stroke and died.

“CONDENSERY” AND “REFLECTIONS” – THE POETRY OF LORINE NIEDECKER

Concerned with the distillation of images and thoughts into concise expression, Niedecker
described her work as a “condensery,” and several critics have compared her poetry to the
delicate yet concrete verse of Chinese and Japanese writers.

Her early work was influenced by Imagist and Objectivist poets, including Ezra Pound and,
especially, Louis Zukofsky. The influence of the Objectivist and Imagist schools gradually
became less pronounced in her poems as she developed her own idiosyncratic voice and style.
Niedecker wrote most often about the world around her on Blackhawk Island—her neighbors
and family, history, and the local flora and fauna.

In 1967, she wrote “Much taken up with how to define a way of writing poetry which is not
Imagist nor Objectivist fundamentally nor Surrealism alone. ..ZI loosely call it ‘reflections’…
reflective. .. The basis is direct and clear – what has been seen or heard – but something gets
in, overlays all that to make a state of consciousness… The visual form is there in the
background and the words convey what the visual form gives off after it’s felt in the mind…
And (there is) awareness of everything influencing everything…”

Although Niedecker’s long correspondence with Louis Zukofsky, who frequently submitted
her poems to the journal, Origin, and contact with such respected writers as Cid Corman and
Basil Bunting, brought her some critical notice, her work was generally overlooked until late
in her life. When she died in 1970, the British poet and critic Basil Bunting eulogized her
warmly. “In England,” he wrote, “she was, in the estimation of many, the most interesting
woman poet America has yet produced.”

“A monster owl”

A monster owl

out on the fence

flew away. What

is it the sign

of? The sign of

an owl.
Now in one year

a book published

and plumbing—

took a lifetime

to weep

a deep

trickle

Easter

A robin stood by my porch

and side-eyed

raised up

a worm

You see here

the influence

of inference

Moon on rippled

stream

‘Except as

and unless’

My Life by Water

by Lorine Niedecker

My life

by water—

Hear
spring's

first frog

or board

out on the cold

ground

giving

Muskrats

gnawing

doors

to wild green

arts and letters

Rabbits

raided

my lettuce

One boat

two—

pointed toward

my shore

thru birdstart

wingdrip

weed-drift

of the soft

and serious—

Water

-I think the way she place the words is a bit different from other ordinary poems.-

-I think she wanted readers to imagine vividly, she used simple lines but complicated ones
when we look at the whole structure-
Robert Frost

For Robert Frost, one of the most distinguished of American poets, the 1930s were, in
addition to their political and economic volatility, a time of personal tragedy. His daughter,
wife, and son all died in succession between 1934 and 1944, events followed by the
institutionalization of another daughter (Faggen xiv). His only book of new verse in the
decade was A Further Range (1936), for which he won a Pulitzer.

The poems in the volume assert the poet's "complex and often seemingly contradictory"
politics which included a love of "the possibilities of individuality and freedom but
recongized the equally the limitations of environment; he regarded enforced egalitarianism
with contempt but looked suspiciously and often with fear at excesses of the self-obsessed"
(Faggen 5).

Above all in A Further Range Frost expresses a weariness with the demands of the chaotic
age and a seeming desire to disengage. As such, evidence of the Depression appears in
concert with expressions of disdain for any mass political solution.

Among the best examples of this sensibility are the poems "Not Quite Social" and "To a
Thinker". In the former, Frost expresses his desire to be "but loosely" tied to the world. He
denies that the society, the "city," has any greater claim on the individual than at any other
time in history. In the latter, "To a Thinker," Frost's disdain is explicit. The poem's speaker
addresses "a thinker" who sways back and forth intellectually, "weaving like a stabled horse,"
from one position to its opposite and back. The thinker endlessly pursues the political and
social fads of his day. Frost decries the behavior, the pursuit of the socially acceptable, more
than he does any particular attitude the thinker adopts, though the suggestion is that the
political movements of the time are faddish rather than long-term solutions.

Stylistically, the poems largely diverge from the long, blank verse dramatic monologues of
Frost's early career. They employ rhyme, often humorously, and shorter lyric forms.
Frequently the tone is light, as in "A Lone Striker," where a factory worker, shut out of work
for lateness, "strikes" not for political action, but to go off and wander in nature on "a path
that wanted walking" to a "spring that wanted drinking".

Frost employs his verse to deny the demands which the strident and demanding world makes
on the individual. Poetry becomes a prop against external demands, the proverbial "stay
against confusion," a means by which to preserve the human in the midst of the
encroachments of a time of social upheaval.

He was considered a quintessential New England poet, he had spent the first 11 years of his
life in San Francisco. Upon his father’s death, he and his family moved to Lawrence,
Massachusetts where Frost continued his schooling and later on started college. A modern
writer, Frost has been critiqued for being his subtle wit, broad humor and strength of content,
ensured his place in the eyes of almost no influence of any specific school. Eventually, Frost
mastered his art of poetry writing and hence, worked outside of movements and manifestos to
create his own niche in English literature.
After Apple Picking is based on the narrator being tired as he spent the day apple picking and
he is now tired of continuing this job. He has felt sleepy since morning. Even when he picks
up a piece of ice from the drinking trough and he looks at his apples through it, he cannot
escape the thought of his apples even in his sleep, as he narrates how he can imagine the
apples growing from the blossoms, failing off trees, and piling up in the cellar. He ends the
poem by questioning himself, if the sleep he is getting is a normal ‘human’s’ sleep or a deep
winter’s sleep like the Woodchuck when it hibernates.

After Apple Picking, is a great representation of Frost’s writing. He breaks in and out of
traditional structure. Almost half the poem, (25 lines), are written in standard iambic
pentameter, and the rest (17 lines) end with rhymed words. This drifting structure symbolizes
the switch between the consciously awakened state and a dream-like state, which the narrator
is constantly dwelling about.

This poem could simply be talking about an apple picker who is tried after a hard day of work
but cannot seem to escape the mental act of apple picking. He mentions how he can still feel
the ache in his foot as if he is standing on a ladder and vision all his apples. He also mentions
the apples that are fallen to the ground and are injured could still be consigned to the cider
press.

The narrator’s everyday act of picking apples also speaks to a more metaphorical discussion
of seasonal changes and death. Although we do not know where the poem is set, we do know
winter is coming near. Winter, symbolizing, death and decay: the grass is “hoary,” the surface
of the water in the trough is frozen enough to be used as a pane of glass, and the overall sense
of the decay that occurs in the “essence” of winter. The narrator does not know whether the
death that is coming will either be renewed by spring in a few months or if everything will be
trapped under the snow for the rest of the eternity.

Nature figures prominently in Frost’s poetry, and his poems usually include a moment of
interaction or encounter between a human speaker and a natural subject, like the apple, in this
case. A day of harvesting fruit leads to a new understanding of life’s final sleep, or death. The
ice melts, the apples get damaged as they fall to the ground, and he does not feel the need to
do what he loves anymore, therefore, the death of his passion to pick apples is also dying as
life as an apple=picker is too monotonous for his liking; “For I have had too much Of apple-
picking: I am overtired”. But there is no logical connection between being sick of picking
apples and simultaneously thinking about apples, as opposed to one who would run away
from all ties with something they have had an excess of. The narrator has lost his passion.

The falling of apples helps in biblical imagery. Just like the ‘forbidden fruit’, where the apples
are a symbol of earth and the speaker is feeling sympathy for them. The images of these
apples “trouble” him in some way.

The title of the poem provided the time in which the poem is set. The title is actually quite
helpful because, without it, we might think that the poem is set DURING the apple-picking.
As the speaker is about to fall asleep he imagines that he is back in the orchard, but his
refection is confused and disoriented. Apple-picking was a common job in autumn in New
England, therefore, Frost might be hinting toward how he doesn’t not like the monotonous
lives he and his people live.

After Apple-Picking

by Robert Frost

My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree

Toward heaven still,

And there's a barrel that I didn't fill

Beside it, and there may be two or three

Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.

But I am done with apple-picking now.

Essence of winter sleep is on the night,

The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.

I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight

I got from looking through a pane of glass

I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough

And held against the world of hoary grass.

It melted, and I let it fall and break.

But I was well

Upon my way to sleep before it fell,

And I could tell

What form my dreaming was about to take.

Magnified apples appear and disappear,

Stem end and blossom end,

And every fleck of russet showing clear.

My instep arch not only keeps the ache,

It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.

I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.

And I keep hearing from the cellar bin

The rumbling sound

Of load on load of apples coming in.

For I have had too much

Of apple-picking: I am overtired

Of the great harvest I myself desired.

There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,

Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.

For all

That struck the earth,

No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,

Went surely to the cider-apple heap

As of no worth.

One can see what will trouble

This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.

Were he not gone,

The woodchuck could say whether it's like his

Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,

Or just some human sleep.

Mending Wall

by Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun;

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

The work of hunters is another thing:

I have come after them and made repair

Where they have left not one stone on a stone,

But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,

To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,

No one has seen them made or heard them made,

But at spring mending-time we find them there.

I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line

And set the wall between us once again.

We keep the wall between us as we go.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

And some are loaves and some so nearly balls

We have to use a spell to make them balance:

‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’

We wear our fingers rough with handling them.

Oh, just another kind of out-door game,

One on a side. It comes to little more:

There where it is we do not need the wall:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it

Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offense.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,

But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather

He said it for himself. I see him there

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me,

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

He will not go behind his father’s saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

What is the purpose of the wall? It keeps border to separate people and give space to them.

What does the border tell us, is it a good thing or bad thing? -For the speaker, it is not
necessary but for his neighbour the opposite-

The speaker gives two reasons for the stones falling down, what are these two reasons? - one
of them is because natural reasons- - with the arrival of spring they start decaying-

When the speaker and his neigbour are decaying, in what exact time?

What is the neigbour’s motto? - good fences make good neighbours-

The speaker says “we do not need the wall” (line 23) because he has an apple orchard and the
neighbor has pine trees. There is no need to separate the two orchards because they do not
need to keep farm animals on one side or the other.

The speaker also feels offended by the wall. He says, “Before I built a wall I’d ask to know…
to whom I was like to give offense.” (lines 32-34) He feels that it is hard to like a wall, that
the natural human instinct is to try to climb over a wall or to knock it down.

Towards the end of the poem, the speaker describes his neighbor: “He moves in darkness as it
seems to me,/Not of woods only and the shade of trees…” (lines 41-42) In your own words,
what is the speaker’s perspective on his neighbor?
The speaker feels that his neighbor is ignorant or uneducated. The speaker thinks that his
neighbor just repeats his father’s saying without thinking about whether the saying really
applies to their situation.

The neighbor feels that “good fences make good neighbors.” It’s important to have a wall
between neighboring properties even if there is nothing to keep in or out.

The wall could represent the distance that human beings place between each other, often for
trivial reasons such as race, religion, or politics.

Perhaps he feels that a fence reminds neighbors of what does and doesn’t belong to them.
Having a fence keeps the physical, emotional, and financial boundaries clear between them.

Fences can keep people apart who might otherwise develop friendships. Sometimes, people
are afraid to become close to those who are different from them.

This quotation by Robert Frost does, in fact, reflect the same perspective as that of the speaker
in “Mending Wall” for several reasons. First of all, although the speaker in the poem opens by
saying, “something there is that doesn’t love a wall” (line 1), he is the one who initiates
mending it each spring. He says, “I let my neighbor know beyond the hill…” (line 12) This
indicates that, while the speaker isn’t a fan of the wall, he understands that the wall is
important to his neighbor. Therefore, he is ready to repair it. Secondly, the speaker gently
teases his neighbor about how the apple and pine trees don’t need to be separated by a wall.
Despite this fact, he respects his neighbor’s saying, “good fences make good neighbors.” (line
27) This saying is the reason why the wall was put up in the first place, or at least why the
neighbor feels it necessary to repair the wall each year. Finally, the speaker wonders if he
“could put a notion” in his neighbor’s head (line 29) by asking why the wall is needed.
Despite the speaker’s ongoing frustration with the existence of the wall, he respects his
neighbor’s desire to keep it up. In all of these ways, the speaker supports Robert Frost’s view:
“Don’t ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.” In this poem, the speaker
knows why the neighbor wants the wall up. Even though the speaker neither agrees nor
understands his neighbor’s view, the speaker is unprepared to take it down or fail to repair it
because he knows why the wall was put up.

Ezra Pound

In Ezra Pound’s short poem “In a Station of the Metro,” the image of “the apparition”draws
readers into an immediate disembodied encounter apart from normal experience. Yet,this
“apparition” exists in the daily real world of the subway. Pound’s juxtaposition of a
paranormal experience within a normal setting presents a contrast that stimulates a sense of
ambiguity and uncertainty throughout the poem and invites his readers to consider many
possible interpretations.

Pound sets the stage for the location of the “apparition” in the title of the poem: we enter“a
Station” of “the Metro.” Pound’s choice of the article “a” to modify “station” implies that we
might encounter the “apparition” in any station rather than in a particular station. He shields
us from the peculiarities of a specific space and enhances our felt-sense of the ethereal
scene.“The,” which is used to describe “Metro,” is also significant. Although Pound does not
elaborate that the poem’s “Metro” is located in a specific city, his use of “the” to modify
“Metro” suggests that it is, in fact, a particular metro. This grounds the poem in the specific
rather than the non-specific. While we are free to call on our individual understanding of how
we picture the “Metro,”we are also asked to relate to a specific subway, perhaps one we
encounter on a daily basis. We are situated in a familiar, particular place, “the Metro,” and an
unfamiliar location within that place, “a Station.” Thus, we both know our location and don’t
know our location simultaneously; he immediately draws the reader into an ambiguous state
of mind with the title alone.

This surreal experience continues in the first image of the poem. Pound’s use of “the” isonce
again significant. “The” describes a singular, unique “apparition.” Yet, the prepositional
phrase that describes “the apparition” is plural: “of these faces.” By using “these” to
define“faces,” Pound suggests that individual faces create one “apparition.” The poet invites
his audience to envision a sea of particular faces melding into a unified, non-particular ghost-
like mass. They don’t sense the individual, but they know they are looking at a group of
specific human beings who cram together in a space in order travel from one destination to
another. The prepositional phrase “in the crowd” used to define “faces” is also significant.
The “crowd” (singular) consists of many “faces” (plural). Once again, the audience moves
from potentially identifiable “faces” back to a singular, indistinguishable form of “the crowd”.
Pound’s movement from singular to plural and back to singular in describing “apparition,”
“faces” and “crowd” further engages his audience with the vagueness presented in this poem.
Are they seeing one image or many faces?

How someone might define the word “apparition” also contributes to the sense of uncertainty.
Is Pound suggesting that “apparition” means one incorporeal being, or does heintend for the
reader to interpret something that merely appears in one instant of time? Again, it is not clear.
If that “apparition” is a supernatural sight, then the first line in the poem suggests that the poet
transports the audience into another realm by implying that the conglomeration of many
people appears to be one disembodied, almost eerie form. If, on the other hand,
the“apparition” is something that appears, then perhaps the poet invites his readers to
questiontheir own center of focus as they go through their daily routines of life. When a
person enters the subway and sees a crowd of people hording onto a train, does he or she
focus on the mass as one unit and forget the particular individual, or do they remember the
individual beings makeup that crowd? Again, Pound presents ambiguities.

The last line of the poem also conveys a sense of inexact meaning as the poet contrasts a city-
life image of the subway with a natural image of “petals on a wet, black bough.”
“Petals”typically relate to a flower, while “bough” is usually associated with a tree. It is
strange to think flower petals placed on the bough of a tree. Yet, this image contributes to the
overall obscurity that was first suggested with the term “apparition.” The tree bough is black,
so the reader mustquestion: is the tree dead or is it only fallow for the winter? And they might
wonder if it simplyappears black because the way the light strikes its surface. After all, tree
branches are not usually black. It is a forceful image created by three, one-syllable words
“wet, black bough,”which ring out in unison when spoken. The use of alliteration in “black”
and “bough” further strengthens a sense that these petals, which are generally thought of as
colorful, do not belong on a “black bough.” How did the “petal” get there? Did it dislodge
from the stems, float on thewind, and come to rest on the tree? Or are the petals actually
petals; could they be“apparitions” created by the light reflecting off the wet surface of the
large branch? These are questions because there is no way to understand why petals would be
found on a wet tree branch. Again, the poet presents an ambiguous image.

However, because Pound chooses to compare an image of a crowd of people in a subway

station to an image of a petal-covered tree branch, he encourages his readers to grapple with
uncertainties and to imagine the many possible interpretations; he prompts our participation.
He could be suggesting that just as it is unnatural for flower petals to rest on thewet bough of
a dead or fallow tree, it is equally unnatural for individual humans to cram into a
claustrophobic space onto a city metro. Or he could be asking his readers to ponder the
impossibility of individuality within the context of mass-populated city life. He might also be
asking them to consider if they, like the petals, have been removed from their natural home.
They might wonder whether they, like the petals, have sailed adrift from their humanity only
tofinally rest in the swarming city Metro that is dead like the “black, wet bough.” Most
importantly, however, he could be bidding them to contemplate the function of poetry and the
role of the poet within the context of modern life. Pound seizes an image of a congested
subway station in a city and transforms it into an impression of a natural setting. This
juxtaposition of two very dissimilar images invites people to participate, to question and to
reflect on meaning, thus engaging them in a conversation with both the poet and the images
he presents. In a strange way, Pound might be inviting all of us to live with the question
without requiring a definite, immediate answer, to embrace the ambiguity, until finally this
dialog births a response thatenables us to embrace the poet’s power of unique vision that
transforms the world heencounters. Perhaps in this small poem, the poet intimates something
about the power ofimaginative transformation in the context of an uncertain and perplexing,
busy world.

In a Station of the Metro

by Ezra Pound

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

Petals on a wet, black bough.