TRADITIONS OF MODERNISM AND THE 20TH CENTURY

While much early poetry dealt with the lives of heroes and gods in an elevated style, poets have also turned to the flawed lives of ordinary people, in particular bawdy or sexual scenes, since very early times. Fragments of poems by the Greek poet Archilocus speak graphically of erotic mishaps, the Romans Catullus and Propertius plumbed the depths of their decadent empire with frankness, the French criminal-poet François Villon heaped abuse on his enemies and jailers, while the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer recorded the lusty adventures of less-than-pious pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales.

Poetry in the last few centuries has turned increasingly to ordinary, day–to-day concerns, with a corresponding interest in bringing literary language closer to natural speech. English poet William Wordsworth, in his 1802 preface to the Lyrical Ballads, railed against artificial poetic diction and declared his intention to write “in a selection of language really used by men.” In part, he was reacting against the excessively stylized poems of 18th-century Augustan writers such as John Dryden and Alexander Pope. In his well-known “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” (1800), one of the “Lucy” poems, Wordsworth uses simple language to express his grief at the loss of a beloved young woman:

No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees,
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course
With rocks, and stones, and trees!




Similarly, in the 20th century, the celebration of the ordinary came in part from a reaction against outdated forms of expression. Early in the century, poets of the movement known as imagism–including Americans Ezra Pound, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Amy Lowell, and William Carlos Williams–turned from ideas to things, and the impersonal description of objects in the world, a style which could actually produce a profound emotional response in the reader. Williams went so far as to declare, “No ideas but in things.” Deeply influenced by Chinese and Japanese poets, he wrote poems in which the presence of an object took central place. In Chile, Pablo Neruda launched a related campaign; his series of Elemental Odes (1954) sing the praises of tomatoes, celery, and a watch. More recently, American poet Charles Simic began his career in the 1960s with a number of “thing” poems, including explorations of the mysterious lives of the knife, spoon, and fork. In a different take on the idea of the ordinary, American poets of the 1950s such as Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton, sometimes referred to as “confessional poets,” began to write openly of domestic problems, mental illness, divorce, and family strife. Canadian poets W.E.E. Ross and A.J.M. Smith used the lens of imagist techniques to look at the wilderness as if for the first time.