MODERNISMO:

American modernism is a trend of philosophical thought arising from the changes in culture
and society in the age of modernity. It is a break with the past and the concurrent search for
new forms of expression, so, it derives from a rejection of Enlightenment thinking, seeking to
better represent reality in a new, more industrialized world. This movement fostered a period
of experimentation in the arts from the late 19th to the mid-20th century, particularly in the
years following World War I, because, the enormity of the war had undermined humankind’s
faith in the foundations of Western society and culture, and postwar Modernist literature
reflected a sense of disillusionment and fragmentation. In this context, American modernism
marked the beginning of American art as distinct and autonomous from European taste, by
breaking artistic conventions that had been shaped after European traditions until then.
American modernism benefited from the diversity of immigrant cultures. Artists were inspired
by African, Caribbean, Asian and European folk cultures and embedded these exotic styles in
their works. One of the twentieth century’s defining features is radical artistic experiment. The
boundary-breaking art, literature, and music of the first decades of the century are the subject
of the topic “Modernist Experiment. In fact, literature, during this period, is characterized by
the search for an authentic response to a much-changed world. For example, one of the most
important writing in this period is “The waste Land” written by Eliot With, its fragmentary
images and obscure allusions, the poem is typical of Modernism in requiring the reader to take
an active role in interpreting the text. In this poem we can find the search for redemption and
renewal in a sterile and spiritually empty landscape.
In the visual arts the roots of Modernism are often traced back to painter Édouard Manet,
who, beginning in the 1860s, broke away from inherited notions of perspective, modeling, and
subject matter. The avant-garde movements that followed—including Impressionism, Post-
Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, Constructivism, de Stijl, and Abstract
Expressionism—are generally defined as Modernist. Over the span of these movements,
artists increasingly focused on the intrinsic qualities of their media—e.g., line, form, and
colour.
Among the leading aesthetic innovators of this era were the cubist Pablo Picasso and the
futurist Marinetti.
MODERNISMO CARATTERISTICHE: In literature, Literary Modernism has its origins in the late
19th and early 20th centuries, mainly in Europe and North America. Modernism’, in a broader
sense, is modern thought, character, or practice breaking away from the rules and traditions.
First of all, a new emphasis on impressionalism and subjectivism which focus on how we see
rather what we see.  In modern literary text emphasizes on colloquial language rather than
formal language. A new liking for fragmented forms, discontinuous narratives are obvious in
modernist literary texts. For example- Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, The Waste Land
by T.S. Eliot are superb example of fragmented forms.
Thus, modernism originated from the corruption, decadence and frustrations in the post-war
psyche of the western people marks off from the previous literary tradition that got reduced
to cold formalism and traditionalism.
MODERNITY: Modernity, the self-definition of a generation about its own
technological innovation, governance, and socioeconomics. More specifically, modernity was
associated with individual subjectivity, scientific explanation and rationalization. There is
little consensus as to when modernity began. In general, modernity was exemplified by the
period of  two world wars and succeeded by postmodernism.
MODERN: This term is used to underine the end of Medieval Era, its refers to make a
distinction between old and ancient era from the Roman Empire to our days.

MARINETTI:
Poet, novelist, dramatist, Marinetti was the leader of Italian Futurism, the main movement of
revolutionary avant-garde. Speed, words in freedom, war, and revolution are the words that
best represent the life of Marinetti, who was called “caffeina d’Europa” (caffeine of Europe),
because he was always ready to excite the Old Continent with some novelties In 1905 he
founded the magazine Poesia (Poetry), a tool for Italian Symbolism, which in 1909 served as
the official organ for a new poetic movement, Futurism.

MANIFESTO FUTURISMO:
is a manifesto written by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and published in 1909.
Marinetti expresses an artistic philosophy, Futurism, which was a rejection of the past, and a
celebration of speed, machinery, violence, youth and industry; it also advocated the
modernization of Italy.
The limits of Italian literature at the end of the 19th century, its lack of strong contents, its
quiet and passiveness are fought by futurists, and their reaction includes the use of excesses in
order to prove the existence of a dynamic surviving Italian intellectual class. In this period
futurists need to confirm that Italy is present, has an industry, has the power to take part in
the new experience, and will find the superior essence of progress in its major symbols: the car
and its speed. Also, during this movement there was an exaltation of the war that was defined
as the World's Only Hygiene, because it can destroy the old world, fundamental prerequisite
to be able to build a totally new one.
-A key focus of the Futurists was the depiction of movement, or dynamism. The group
developed a number of novel techniques to express speed and motion, including blurring,
repetition, and the use of lines of force. This last method was adapted from the work of
the Cubists and the inclusion of such lines became a feature of Futurist images. The main idea
in this movement was to change old conception of culture, inadequate and too slow for
modern civilization.-

LANGSTON HUGHES:
The Modernist Period in American Literature occupied the years shorty after the beginning of
the twentieth century. During this period, The African American cultural movement influenced
many black writers, one of them being Langston Hughes. He is usually considered to be one
the most prolific and most recognized black poets of the Harlem Renaissance. Many scholars
and critics refer to him as a “poet laureate of American African experience”. His poems picture
the daily life and struggles of the common Black people. Hughes uses poetry to convey the
messages of equality, racial justice, and democracy. He celebrates the history, folkways, and
real lives of his people. An important theme in his poems such as “The Negro Speaks of
Rivers”, “Mulatto” and “I too” is the BLACK PRIDE, so, encourages black people to celebrate
black culture and embrace their African heritage, Langston Hughes always urges his people to
love themselves no matter how other people treat them or think of them.  (In the United
States, it was a direct response to white racism especially during the Civil Rights Movement 20
century). He uses the language, themes, and forms of expressions that are clear and familiar
to his people.
- The poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” connects the African American race to ancient
rivers, Hughes stresses the historical existence of the African race and their movement
through time.-
-  “I Too”, “Mother to Son” etc. All these poems depict injustice suffered by Blacks and their
hope for social equality-
- The concept of the “American Dream” is an integral part of the American identity. It is the set
of ideals which gives equal opportunities to every American, without considering his race or
color-
- In Hughes’ poetry, he would try to bring out the sound, cadence, and the rhythms from blues
and jazz music. He would also use humor loneliness to imitate the sound of blues and jazz
music with words-

ELIOT:
T.S. Eliot, the 1948 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, American-English author, was one
of the most influential poets writing in English in the 20th century. Thomas Stearns Eliot was
born in St. Louis, Missouri,  on September 26, 1888. He lived in St. Louis during the first
eighteen years of his life and attended Harvard University. Then in London, Eliot came under
the influence of his contemporary Ezra Pound, who recognized his poetic genius at once, and
assisted in the publication of his work in a number of magazines, most notably "The Love Song
of J. Alfred Prufrock" in Poetry in 1915. His first book of poems, Prufrock and Other
Observations, was published in 1917, and immediately established him as a leading poet of the
avant-garde, but with the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, Eliot's reputation began to
grow. Also, it’s important to stress that like their 18th-century counterparts William
Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge who helped to launch the Romantic Age in English
literature (so the importance of imagination, the poet that has the ability to penetrate in the
heart of thing, the language should be simple) Eliot and Pound set about reforming poetic
diction. Whereas Wordsworth thought he was going back to the “real language of men,” Eliot
struggled to create new verse rhythms based on the rhythms of contemporary speech.
THE SCARED WOOD: is a book of critical essays written by T.S. Eliot and published in 1920. In
it, Eliot discusses several of the issues of Modernist writings of the period. The central essay
in The Sacred Wood is “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”  
‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ was first published in 1919 in the literary magazine The
Egoist. It was published in two parts, in the September and December issues. In this essay Eliot
introduces the idea of TRADITION. From the beginning Eliot makes it clear that he is using the
term tradition as an adjective to explain the relationship of a poem or a work to the works of
dead poets and artists. He regrets that in our appreciation of authors we hardly include their
connections with those living and dead and about our tendency to insist…those aspects” of a
writer’s work in which “he least resembles anyone else”. Thus, he critiques our appreciation of
the writer is derived from exhumation of the uniqueness of the work and argues that a poet or
artist should be valued in relation to the dead poets and artists. At the same time, it is
important to note that with the term “tradition” he does not refer to a legacy of writers which
can be handed down from a generation to another generation, but he argues that the writer
or the poet must develop a sense of the past, this does not mean that the past cannot be
altered but underlines how  the past [is] altered by the present as much as the present is
directed by the past. So, Eliot emphasizes both the way that tradition shapes the modern artist
and the way that a “really new” work of art makes us see that tradition anew.
In the second part of the essay Eliot talks about the poet’s responsibility. The poet is not
supposed to compose poetry which is full of his personal emotions so, he refuses the idea that
poetry is the expression of poet’s personality and regrets the Wordsworth’s view that poetry is
recollection of feeling, because according to Eliot “"it is a new thing resulting from the
concentration of a very great number of experiences . . . it is a concentration which does not
happen consciously or of deliberation. For him, the emotion of art is impersonal, and the
artist can achieve this impersonality only by and being conscious of the tradition.
THE LOVE SONG OF ALFRED PRUFROCK: T.S. Eliot started writing ‘Prufrock’ in 1910. It was
published in the 1915 issue of ‘Poetry: A Magazine of  Verse. He opens the poem with the
epigraph from Canto 27 of the Inferno, so from Divina Commedia. In this epigraph we find the
voice of Guido Montefeltro that answered at Dante, who wants to know why Guido ended up
so far down in Hell. But with his answer Guido shows himself as selfish because he is
concerned about his reputation. A choice of this epigraph suggests that "Prufrock" might not
be a poem about good people, but about bad ones pretending to be good and who is singing
his "love song," might be concerned about his reputation like Guido.
This poem is an investigation of the disturbed consciousness of the typical modern man who is
overeducated, powerful, anxious, and emotionally artificial. The poem is a variation of
the dramatic monologue, an exposition of the moods and conflicts of the mind of Prufrock. It
is an analysis of the mind of the lover who is unable to take a decision about making the
proposal to the lady he loves, he is unable to express his inner state so the poem highlights the
dilemma and indecisiveness as well as the squalor and barrenness of modern urban
civilization. Thus, we can note that Eliot's Love Song does not sing in praise of love. The title of
the poem is ironic. The point of calling this poem a Love Song lies in the irony that it will never
be sung; that Prufrock will never dare to voice what he feels".
STRUCTURE: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’  by T.S. Eliot is primarily written in free verse,
there is no consistent rhyme scheme and no regular pattern to the rhythm.
But there are substantial sections with rhyme:
for example lines 23-67 contain plenty rhyme - street/meet, create/plate, dare/stair/hair,
room/presume - and a good proportion of the rest of the poem has rhyme.

 THE WASTE LAND: At the time of the poem's composition, Eliot was ill, struggling to
recover from his nervous breakdown due to an unhappy marriage and during the
composition of this poem was crucial the support offered by POUND, who also revised
the poem. (Eliot dedicated the poem to Pound who he called the better craftsman).
Then, the Waste Land, was published in 1922 and is the most important poem of the
whole twentieth century. It is important to note that it was published when the
western world was in flux following the disaster of the first world war, in which tens of
millions were killed. T.S. Eliot's poem, with its shifting scenarios, multiple voices and
changes in form seemed to sum up the state of modern consciousness. Uncertainty
ruled. The old pre-industrial life had gone forever and in its place was the war machine.
Through this poem Eliot tried to answer at current questions in that period for example
“Where was the world going? What did the future hold? And where was God in all this
chaos and alienation?”. Due to this purpose, we find two important themes:
 Fertility - the wasted land must be renewed. Eliot took inspiration from ancient
vegetation rituals as described in the book From Ritual to Romance  which highlights
the progression from primitive pagan festivals through to spiritual quests for the Holy
Grail and the healing of the Fisher King.
 Healing - for the land, and humanity, to experience rebirth, man and woman must
come to terms with fear, sex and religion within their own relationships.
So, it is full of allusions to mythology, religion and the occult, combines the old with the
new, history with the present, mythology and real life, symbolism and psychic
fragmentation.  It directly influenced writers such as Ernest Hemingway(The Sun Also
Rises), F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby).
The poem begins with a section entitled "The Burial of the Dead." In it, the narrator --
perhaps a representation of Eliot himself -- describes the seasons. Spring brings "memory
and desire” and the narrator remembered the time spent in Munich but now he is now
surrounded by a desolate land full of "stony rubbish”. (April is cruel because life cannot
now emerge from the ruined soil.)
In the next section, "A Game of Chess”, we find a rich lady who complains about her
nerves and wonders what to do and two Cockney women gossip. So, it illustrates the life
during the modern age. At the same time, we can read this section through a biographical
interpretation. The woman on the “burnished throne” can be Eliot’s wife, Vivienne; some
of the details point to failed romance or failed marriage such as the paintings in the room
that illustrates the rape of Philomela, a scene pulled from Ovid’s Metamorphoses so, an
example of love cascading into brutality and violence. (The poet’s trick is to plumb the old
in order to find the new). Also, it is important to note that the title alludes to two plays by
English dramatist Thomas Middleton: A Game at Chess (1624) and Women Beware Women
(1657). Both focus on sexual intrigue. The next section is “THE FIRE SERMON” that is a
sermon about the dangers of lust.
In this section Eliot recalls Buddha’s Fire Sermon, in which Buddha warn against purely
physical urges. The image of fire, familiar in Christian art, is here specifically linked to the
animal drives that push men and women to commit sinful acts. So, in this section Eliot is
diagnosing his London and his world with a disease of the senses, through which sex has
replaced love and meaningless physical contact has subsumed real emotional connection.
Also, it is important to note that in this section the narrator assumes the role of the Fisher
King, alluding to Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance and its description of the Grail
legend. According to this study, of critical importance to the entirety of "The Waste Land,"
the Fisher King -– so named probably because of the importance of fish as Christian fertility
symbols -– grows ill or impotent. As a result,  a fruitful kingdom is reduced to a wasteland.
Only the Holy Grail can save the king and his land. As the impotent Fisher King, Eliot
describes the wasteland before him (after the War).  “Death by Water” is the shortest
section of the poem, Eliot describes the death of Phlebas, an example of the modern man
with no desire to follow spiritual values.   What the Thunder Said is the last section, the
first stanzas are set in a desolate and deserted place that seems a true waste land, through
this image Eliot emphasized the need of society for salvation. The title of this part has been
derived from an Indian legend, which says that all beings, the men, devils and as well as
gods, listen to what the thunder says in order to restore life to the “wasteland”. Thunder
plays an important role. When it speaks, Eliot describes it as God delivering three groups of
followers -– men, demons, and the gods -– the sound “Da”: Datta for humans which means
to give, dayadhvam for devils which means to have compassion and empathy for others,
and damyata for gods which means to control for they are wild and rebellious. Together,
God gives these three orders which add up to a consistent moral perspective, composure,
generosity, and empathy lying at the core, to reach inner peace. (In the end hope is finally
coming – re-emergence of water bringing with it the hope of rebirth by the thunder).
Why Is The Waste Land A Modernist Poem?
The Waste Land is a modernist poem because it broke new ground when it was first
published in 1922.
 Eliot's radical use of language, structure and content came together as never before. He
managed to combine both personal and impersonal elements within a five section.
The Waste Land does have occasional full end rhym. There is no set rhyme scheme, no
pattern to follow. 

GENERONTION: The text is a dramatic monologue and comes from the perspective of an

old man, Gerontion, who is located in an old house. Some scholars believe that he is an
older version of Eliot’s most famous creation, J. Alfred Prufrock. ‘Gerontion’ by T.S. Eliot is
a complex look at the poet’s own world, war, religion, and politics in and around the year
1919.

FRANCIS SCOTT FITZGERALD:

F. Scott Fitzgerald, in full Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born September 24, 1896, St.
Paul, Minnesota, U.S.—died December 21, 1940, Hollywood, California. Francis Scott
Fitzgerald (1896-1940) was the poet laureate of the “Jazz Age,” a term he popularized to
convey the way to live after the First World War.
So, Fitzgerald belongs to “LOST GENERATION” the generation of writers, artists, musicians,
and intellectuals that came of age during the First World War. The destruction of the war
stripped this generation of their illusions about democracy, peace, and prosperity, and
many expressed doubt and cynicism in their artistic works. The themes of moral
degeneracy, corruption, and decadence were prominent in many of their works. F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby is a classic of the genre.
He was born in Minnesota, attended the high school and then University, but he never
graduated. The most important event of his personal life was the meeting with Zelda
Sayre, a 17-years-old beauty from the South (Alabama). He fell in love with her, but could
marry her only when he was a successful writer. She loved society and they spent
enormous sums of money to give and attend parties, to go on holiday to fashionable
places, to travel, to have guests. This meant Fitzgerald had to write and publish as quickly
as he could. With the Great Depression, anyway, the old style of life came to an end. This
caused Zelda nervous breakdowns, which turned their marriage into an unhappy and
violent relationship. In 1934 she was finally diagnosed schizophrenia and sent to a mental
asylum. Fitzgerald started writing screenplays for films, but he also became an alcoholic
and died in 1940 of a heart attack, when he was 44.
About his works he finished four novels: This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned,
The Great Gatsby, and Tender Is the Night. A fifth, unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, was
published posthumously.
-JAZZ: Jazz music became wildly popular in the “Roaring Twenties, due to the
technological innovation like radio. Also, after Congress passed the Volstead Act in 1919,
which banned the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages, many Americans sought
refuge in speakeasies and other entertainment venues that hosted jazz bands. Luis
Armstrong is considered the master of Jazz.
Roaring Twenties is a period of economic growth and prosperity in the United States and
the achievement of material affluence became a goal for many US citizens as well as an
object of satire and ridicule for the writers and intellectuals of the Lost Generation, then
with The Wall Street Crash of 1929 this period finished.

THE GREAT GATSBY: was published in 1925

ANALISI: The Great Gatsby has been read as a pessimistic examination of the American
Dream. At its centre is a remarkable rags-to-riches story, of a boy from a poor farming
background who has built himself up to fabulous wealth. Jay Gatsby is someone who once
had nothing but who now entertains rich and celebrated people in his enormous house on
Long Island. His attempt to win Daisy Buchanan, a woman from a well-established family of
the American elite, ends in disaster and his death. This tension between “new money” and
“old money” is represented in the book by the contrast between West Egg and East Egg.
West Egg is full of people who have made their money in an age of unprecedented
 materialism. East Egg, in contrast, is a refined society populated by America’s “staid
nobility. In the end, it is East Egg the winner with Gatsby’s death.

The Great Gatsby is memorable for the rich symbolism:

The Green Light

Situated at the end of Daisy’s East Egg dock and barely visible from Gatsby’s West Egg
lawn, the green light represents Gatsby’s hopes and dreams for the future. Gatsby
associates it with Daisy. In its largest sense, then, the green light represents the American
Dream. The American Dream is the idea that someone from a lower-class background can
work hard and move up the social ladder because American society has historically had
more class mobility than other countries. The novel explores whether the promise of the
American Dream is actually true. On the surface, Gatsby appears to have achieved the
American Dream, because he has managed to move from a lower-class background into
the highest echelons of New York society. In reality, he still is unable to attain Daisy, who
represents a traditional elite background.  This not only implies that the American Dream is
ultimately unfulfilling, but it also suggests that despite the illusion of social mobility, people
from the lower classes will never be fully accepted by those who were born into wealth.
That the American Dream is as unattainable as the green light at the end of the dock is
evidenced by the aftermath of the car crash that serves as the climax of the novel. As a
result of the crash, the three characters from lower-class backgrounds (Gatsby, Myrtle, and
George) die, while the upper-class characters of Nick, Daisy, Tom, and Jordan survive. Tom
and Daisy, who were born into privilege, remain insulated from the negative consequences
of their actions. So, Fitzgerald underlines that although working-class people can circulate
with the upper classes, they will ultimately be expendable, while the upper classes will
maintain their own dominance. (The moral of The Great Gatsby is that the American
Dream is ultimately unattainable.)

The Valley of Ashes

First introduced in Chapter 2, the valley of ashes between West Egg and New York City
consists of a long stretch of desolate land created by the dumping of industrial ashes. It
represents the moral and social decay that results from the uninhibited pursuit of wealth, as
the rich indulge themselves with regard for nothing but their own pleasure. So, the ugly truth
behind the consumer culture like Gatsby.  Notably, Gatsby does not in the end escape from
this culture, in fact, it is George Wilson who comes to kill him, described as an “ashen” figure
the moment before he shoots Gatsby. 
The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are a pair of fading, painted on an old advertising billboard
over the valley of ashes. They may represent God staring down upon and judging American
society as a moral wasteland, but in the novel we have not a specific meaning so, he eyes also
come to represent the essential meaninglessness of the world and the arbitrariness of the
mental process by which people invest objects with meaning.
TRAMA: Nick Carraway, a young man from Minnesota, moves to New York in the summer of
1922 to learn about the bond business. He rents a house in the West Egg district of Long
Island, a wealthy but unfashionable area populated by the new rich, Nick’s next-door neighbor
in West Egg is a mysterious man named Jay Gatsby, who lives in a gigantic Gothic mansion and
throws extravagant parties every Saturday night. Nick is unlike the other inhabitants of West
Egg—he was educated at Yale and has social connections in East Egg. Nick drives out to East
Egg one evening for dinner with his cousin, Daisy Buchanan, and her husband, Tom. Here, Nick
discovers thanks to Jordan Baker, a beautiful, cynical young woman with whom Nick begins a
romantic relationship, that Tom has a lover, Myrtle Wilson, who lives in the valley of ashes.
Then, as the summer progresses, Nick eventually garners an invitation to one of Gatsby’s
legendary parties. During this party, Gatsby tells Jordan that he knew Daisy in Louisville in
1917 and is deeply in love with her. Gatsby’s extravagant lifestyle and wild parties are simply
an attempt to impress Daisy. Then Gatsby convinces Nick to organize a reunion between
himself and Daisy and after an initially awkward reunion, Gatsby and Daisy reestablish their
connection. After a short time, Tom grows increasingly suspicious of his wife’s relationship
with Gatsby and he announces to his wife that Gatsby is a criminal—his fortune comes from
bootlegging alcohol and other illegal activities. Then, Tom tells George that Gatsby was driving
the car that killed his wife Myrtle, so according to George, her lover. Thus, after that, George
shoots Gatsby and then himself.

PERSONAGGI:
Nick Carraway
The novel’s narrator, Nick is a young man from Minnesota who, after being educated at Yale
and fighting in World War I, goes to New York City to learn the bond business.  As Daisy
Buchanan’s cousin, he facilitates the rekindling of the romance between her and Gatsby. The
Great Gatsby is told entirely through Nick’s eyes;

Jay Gatsby
The title character and protagonist of the novel, Gatsby is a fabulously wealthy young man
living in a Gothic mansion in West Egg. He is famous for the lavish parties. Nick learns that
Gatsby was born James Gatz on a farm in North Dakota; working for a millionaire made him
dedicate his life to the achievement of wealth.  Nick also learns that Gatsby made his fortune
through criminal activity, as he was willing to do anything to gain the social position he
thought necessary to win Daisy. Nick views Gatsby as a deeply flawed man, dishonest and
vulgar, but his extraordinary optimism and power to transform his dreams into reality make
him “great”.

Daisy Buchanan
Nick’s cousin, and the woman Gatsby loves, at the same time, she fell in love with Gatsby and
promised to wait for him but  when a wealthy, powerful young man named Tom Buchanan
asked her to marry him, Daisy decided not to wait for Gatsby. So, she is cynical person and
behaves superficially.
Tom Buchanan : Daisy’s immensely wealthy husband. He is an arrogant, hypocritical bully.  His
social attitudes are laced with racism and sexism, has no moral qualms about his own extramarital
affair with Myrtle, but when he begins to suspect Daisy and Gatsby of having an affair, he becomes
outraged and forces a confrontation.
Meyer Wolfsheim
Gatsby’s friend, a prominent figure in organized crime. Before the events of the novel take
place, Wolfsheim helped Gatsby to make his fortune bootlegging illegal liquor. His continued
acquaintance with Gatsby suggests that Gatsby is still involved in illegal business.

Myrtle Wilson: the somewhat vulgar wife of a car mechanic who is unhappy in her marriage.
Myrtle is having an affair with Tom, whom she likes for his brutal masculinity and for his
money. Daisy runs Myrtle over by killing her with her car.

HERNEST HEMINGWAY:
Nobel Prize winner Ernest Hemingway is seen as one of the great American 20th century
novelists, and is known for works like 'A Farewell to Arms' and 'The Old Man and the Sea.'
Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Cicero (now in Oak Park), Illinois. In
1918, he served in World War I as an ambulance driver in the Italian Army. There he met a
nurse named Agnes von Kurowsky, who soon accepted his proposal of marriage, but later left
him for another man. This devastated the young writer but provided elements for his works "A
Very Short Story" and, more famously, A Farewell to Arms. Then, in Chicago Hemingway met
Hadley Richardson, the woman who would become his first wife. In Paris, with Stein as his
mentor, Hemingway made the acquaintance of many of the great writers and artists of his
generation, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Pablo Picasso and James Joyce. Soon after
the publication of The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway and Hadley divorced, due in part to his affair
with a woman named Pauline Pfeiffer, who would become Hemingway's second wife. When
the United States entered World War II in 1941, Hemingway served as a correspondent and
was present at several of the war's key moments, including the D-Day landing. Toward the end
of the war, Hemingway met another war correspondent, Mary Welsh, whom he would later
marry after divorcing Gellhorn. In 1951, Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea, which
would become perhaps his most famous book,
In 1954, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. But, during this period, Hemingway suffered
from depression and was treated for numerous conditions such as high blood pressure and
liver disease and on the morning of July 2, 1961, Hemingway committed suicide.

A Farewell to arms:
A Farewell to Arms, third novel by Ernest Hemingway, published in 1929. Its depiction of
the existential disillusionment of the “Lost Generation”,  is particularly notable for its
autobiographical elements.
TRAMA:  While working with the Italian ambulance service during World War I (1914–18), the
American lieutenant Frederic Henry meets the English nurse Catherine Barkley. Although she
still mourns the death of her fiancé, who was killed in the war, Catherine encourages Henry’s
advances. After Henry is badly wounded by a trench mortar shell near the Isonzo River in Italy,
he is brought to a hospital in Milan, where he is eventually joined by Catherine. During this
period they establish a relationship and  Catherine soon becomes pregnant by Henry. After the
hospital superintendent, Miss Van Campen, discovers that Henry has been hiding alcohol in his
hospital room, he is sent back to the front. After the disastrous Battle of Caporetto (1917), he
deserts the army, just barely escaping execution by Italian military police. Back in Milan and
escape with Catherina into neutral Switzerland. The couple pass several happy months in a
wooden house near Montreux. Late one night Catherine goes into labour. She and Henry take
a taxi to the hospital. A long and painful labour ensues, and Henry wonders if Catherine will
survive. Sadly, their son is stillborn. Soon after, Catherine begins to hemorrhage and dies with
Henry by her side. He tries to say goodbye but cannot. He returns to their hotel alone, in the
rain.

TEMI:
As the title of the novel makes clear, A Farewell to Arms concerns itself primarily with war. In
fact, the novel offers masterful descriptions of the conflict’s senseless brutality and violent
chaos. As the neat columns of men begin to crumble, so too do the soldiers’ nerves, minds,
and capacity for rational thought and moral judgment, for example Henry’s shooting of the
engineer for refusing to help free the car from the mud is in contrast with Henry’s coolly
character the murder of the engineer also seems justifiable because it is an inevitable by-
product of the spiraling violence and disorder of the war. It is important to note that just as
the innocent engineer’s death is an inevitability of war, so is war the inevitable outcome of a
cruel, senseless world. Hemingway suggests that war is nothing more than the dark,
murderous extension of a world that refuses to acknowledge, protect, or preserve true love.
Another important theme is the relationship between love and pain. Against the backdrop of
war, Hemingway offers a deep, mournful meditation on the nature of love. No sooner does
Catherine announce to Henry that she is in mourning for her dead fiancé than she begins a
game meant to seduce Henry. Her reasons for doing so are clear: she wants to distance herself
from the pain of her loss. Likewise, Henry intends to get as far away from talk of the war as
possible. In each other, Henry and Catherine find temporary solace from the things that plague
them. Then, the couple’s feelings for each other quickly pass from a game that distract them
to be very feelings, more important than abstract ideals such as honor, for this reason Henry
abandons the war. After, they are to achieve physical, emotional, and psychological healing in
the safe remove of the Swiss mountains but the tragedy of the novel rests in the fact that their
love, even when genuine, can never be more than temporary in this world.
Masculinity: In this novel we find a consistent celebration of a certain kind of man:
domineering, supremely competent, and swaggeringly virile.
Games and Divertissement: Henry and Catherine begin flirting with each other in order to
forget personal troubles. Ironically, Henry and Catherine’s relationship becomes the source of
suffering from which Henry needs diversion. Henry cannot stand to be away from Catherine.
Loyalty Versus Abandonment: The notions of loyalty and abandonment apply equally well to
love and war. The novel, however, suggests that loyalty is more a requirement of love and
friendship than of the grand political causes and abstract philosophies of battling nations,
indeed, Henry does not subscribe to the ideals that one typically imagines fuel soldiers in
combat, the promise of honor and the duties of patriotism mean little to Henry. Although he
shoots an uncooperative engineering sergeant for failing to comply with his orders, Henry’s
violence should be read as an inevitable outcome of a destructive war rather than as a
conscious decision to enforce a code of moral conduct. In fact, Henry abandons his as tenant.
While he does, at times, feel guilt over this course of action, he takes comfort in the
knowledge that he is most loyal where loyalty counts most: in his relationship with Catherine.
That these conflicting allegiances cannot be reconciled reflects the priorities of a specific
individual’s life.
- Rain is associated with death throughout the novel.
REALITY VS FANTASY:
Hemingway shows how the truths of reality always infiltrate and corrupt the distracting
fantasies that characters create to make themselves feel better.
In terms of war, Hemingway shows how ideals such as glory and honor quickly fade when one
is confronted with the stark or absurd realities of battle—for instance, when Henry is maimed
by a mortar shell while eating macaroni and cheese.

PERSONAGGI:
Rinaldi: A skilled surgeon, ladies' man, and Henry's best friend in the Italian Army. 
The Priest
A military clergyman from a peasant community in northern Italy. He and Henry have several
conversations about manhood, religion, and values.
Frederic Henry
An American who works for the Italian ambulance corps before the United States joins the
war. Various Italian characters also refer to him as "Tenente" (Lieutenant) or "Federico"
(Frederic). Henry also undergoes tremendous development through the course of the novel.
At the beginning of the novel, he has never experienced true loss, believes that war is dreadful
but necessary, has a lust for adventure, drinking, and women, and sees Catherine as just
another diversion. As the stakes of the war intensify, however, he becomes deeply pessimistic
about the war and realizes that his love for Catherine is the only thing he is willing to commit
himself to.
Catherine Barkley
An English nurse in Italy, she bears the spiritual scars of having lost her fiancé in the Battle of
the Somme. When she meets Henry, she is ready to throw herself into a new relationship in
order to escape the loss of the old one, enlisting Henry to pretend that they are deeply in love
almost as soon as they meet. Emotionally damaged, she can never bring herself to marry
Henry, but wants to be with him in an idealized union apart from the rest of the world.

WALT WHITMAN: considered one of America's most influential poets, Walt Whitman was
born on May 31, 1819, in West Hills, Long Island, New York. He grew up in a family of modest
means. During his life he worked as educator and journalist with a sharp pen and a set of
opinions that didn't always align with his bosses or his readers. He criticized who had radical
positions on women's property rights, immigration and labor issues. In the autumn of 1848
and started a new "free soil" newspaper called the Brooklyn Freeman, which eventually
became a daily despite initial challenges and he often worried about the impact of slavery on
the future of the country and its democracy. In the spring of 1855, he published a slim
collection of 12 unnamed poems with a preface titled Leaves of Grass. The following year,
Whitman published a revised edition of Leaves of Grass that featured 32 poems, including a
new piece, "Sun-Down Poem" (later renamed "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"), as well as Emerson's
letter to Whitman and the poet's long response to him.
About the title In the 19th-century printing, leaves are pages and grass is disposable printer's
materials. As both a printer and a poet, Whitman offers his "leaves" (pages) to his audience.
Walt Whitman wrote "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" before the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. In
accordance with his signature style, Whitman wrote "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" in free-verse. The
overarching theme of "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" is the shared human experience. Whitman draws
the reader's attention to the quiet details of his commute and makes them sound extraordinary.
Even though time may pass and society might change, natural wonders like the wind, the clouds,
the sun, the seagulls, and the water will always be markers of the journey between Manhattan
and Brooklyn. Whitman makes "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" universal by emphasizing the inherent
and enduring connection between man and nature.

HENRY JAMES:
Henry James was an American writer regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary
realism. Having spent several years in Britain, he often used to explore the theme of Americans
encountering Europe and Europeans in his writings. Known for his imaginative use of point of
view, interior monologue and unreliable narrators, he created highly developed characters in his
fiction and explored the themes of personal freedom, feminism, and morality. Henry James was
born on 15 April 1843 in New York City, born as the son of a lecturer and philosopher, he was
exposed to scientific and philosophical influences from an early age. On growing up he attended
Harvard Law School for a while but dropped out after realizing that he was not meant for a career
in law. He began writing and within years found considerable recognition for his thoughtfully
written works of fiction. James also contributed significantly to literary criticism and had been
nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature thrice.
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE:
Is short story published in 1903 in (The Better Sort). The main point in this short story is the
Marcher' story and the relationship with May, because the shares he great secret of his life, his
conviction that it is his destiny to suffer some catastrophic fate, this event, Marcher says, lies in
wait for him like the beast in the jungle that gives the story its name. In the end, with the death of
Mary we understand that the beast in the jungle is his own fears - the fear of the life he could live
if he just had the guts to do so, to be vulnerable and bold enough to go after what he wants. In
fact, in this short story, it is his lack of reciprocating May Bartram’s love that dooms him to “the
beast in the jungle”.
This short story is written in third person so James underlines the story’s theme of a life unlived by
generating distance from the characters, allowing the reader to objectively understand Marcher’s
thoughts.
JACK LONDON:
Jack London, pseudonym of John Griffith Chaney, was born January 12, 1876, San
Francisco, California. merican novelist and short-story writer whose best-known works—
among them The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906)—depict elemental struggles
for survival. During the 20th century he was one of the most extensively translated of
American authors. London grew up working-class. His father was never part of his life and he
grew up with his stepfather, whose surname, London, he took. At age 14 he quit school to
escape poverty and began to work on a sealing ship on the Pacific When he had made it home
regaled his mother his tales of what had happened to him. When she saw an announcement in
one of the local papers for a writing contest, she pushed her son to write down and submit his
story.
Armed with just an eighth-grade education, London won the contest. For London, the contest
was an eye-opening experience, and he decided to dedicate his life to writing short stories.
London found fame and some fortune at the age of 27 with his novel The Call of the
Wild (1903), which told the story of a dog that finds its place in the world as a sled dog in the
Yukon.
TO BUILD A FIRE: There are two versions of this story, one published in 1902 and the other in
1908. The story written in 1908 has become a classic, while the 1902 story is less known. Jack
London’s short story, “To Build a Fire,” is the tragic tale of a man who decides to travel alone
through the hostile environment of the Yukon in sub-freeing temperatures and falls victim to
the unrelenting and unforgiving power of nature.
Jack London’s To Build a Fire has been hailed as the exemplary naturalist short story. the 19th
century literary movement of Naturalism, this is a term coined by the French novelist Emile
Zola, Some of these features of this school included scientificity, an obsession
with understanding the mechanisms of natural events, prominence of the
narrative, amorality, detached observation, the primacy of the instinct, representation of
the working class and man’s treatment as a biological subject. In fact, the speaker
merely reports the action as a good naturalist speaker should. The protagonist of the
story hasn’t been given any name. He is just a specimen that is placed in the experimental
setup of a Naturalist story. His namelessness allows the narrator and the naratee to maintain
a detached distance of an observer and prevents either party from attaching any emotion to
the character. It must be noted that nature isn’t represented as being ruthless to the man. It
isn’t malevolent and doesn’t have anything personal against the man. Naturalism saw nature
as an indifferent, disinterested force.
In the end the force of nature kills the man because e man doesn’t bend which is and he
breaks while the dog knows its limits and knows how to bend when faced with overwhelming
force of nature.

WILLAM CARLOS WILLIAM:

On September 17, 1883, William Carlos Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey. He
began writing poetry while a student, at which time he made the decision to become both a
writer and a doctor. Then, he studied at University of Pennsylvania, where he met and
befriended Ezra Pound. Pound became a great influence on his writing, and in 1913 arranged
for the London publication of Williams's second collection, The Tempers. Returning to
Rutherford, he began a prolific career as a poet, novelist, essayist, and playwright. Following
Pound, he was one of the principal poets of the Imagist movement, though as time went on,
he began to increasingly disagree with the values put forth in the work of Pound and
especially Eliot, who he felt were too attached to European culture and traditions. Continuing
to experiment with new techniques of meter and lineation, Williams sought to invent an
entirely fresh—and singularly American—poetic, whose subject matter was centered on the
everyday circumstances of life and the lives of common people. He died in in New Jersey on
March 4, 1963.
 His major works include Kora in Hell (1920); Spring and All (1923); Pictures from Brueghel and
Other Poems (1962), which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize; the five-volume
epic Paterson  (1963, 1992); and Imaginations (1970).
Imagism was born in England and America in the early twentieth century. A reactionary
movement against romanticism, imagism emphasized simplicity, clarity of expression, and
precision through the use of exacting visual images. Ezra Pound is noted as the founder of
imagism. Imagism aimed to replace abstractions with concrete details that could be further
expounded upon through the use of figuration. In March 1913, Poetry published “A Few Don’ts
by an Imagiste.” In it, imagist poet F. S. Flint, quoting Pound, defined the tenets of imagist
poetry:
I. Direct treatment of the “thing," whether subjective or objective.
II. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
III. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in
sequence of the metronome.
SPRING AND ALL:
The speaker describes the lifeless appearance of plant life at the end of winter and anticipates
signs of the beginning of spring. The focus is on the internal, invisible changes that precede the
obvious characteristics of the season—Spring—and on the creative power of language and the
imagination—and All. Originally untitled, other than Roman numeral I, this key poem was
given the same title as the collection of prose and poetry in which it first appeared.
William Williams’s poem “Spring and All” entails his own image of what Spring really is. For
most people, Spring time is a time that new life is born and the weather is warmer. To
Williams, Spring is not an instant reveal of these changes to it’s beautiful state, but a slow and
gradual one. However, this is not a poem that simply celebrates the annual miracle of spring.
Williams firmly believed this new kind of poetry—which paid careful attention to the sensory
perceptions of the present location and moment rather than to allusions, references, and
abstract ideas—was transformative. The old ways of poetry were on the way out, and the
new, refreshing, and revitalizing were on the way in. The poem, using the death-to-life
imagery of springtime, affirms the inevitability of this life-giving change, maintaining that its
roots are already growing, gripping, and awakening even if the change is not wholly apparent
just yet. Indeed, this poem doesn’t have a regular meter, and the lines don’t rhyme, it contains
free verses.
THE RED WHEELBARROW:
"The Red Wheelbarrow" is an example of something called Imagist poetry, which focuses on
using language to convey vivid, precise images to the reader. While this style might make
Williams's poem seem pretty vague, the speaker's focus on the red wheelbarrow suggests that
the poem could very well be a sentimental meditation on the use of common objects. The
speaker is a farmer because he is talking about “chickens” and “wheelbarrow”. He doesn’t
seem to be talking to anyone; so this seems to be a typical poetic context of meditation. He is
looking at the wheelbarrow where few chickens seem to be huddling. It is morning, after a
rainy night, because the wheelbarrow is glazing. In this situation, the speaker has just noticed
the wheelbarrow and he suddenly realizes that it is an important thing on which “so much
depends”. This first stanza is meditative; because the farmer realizes that an ordinary object is
so important. Indeed, the wheelbarrow symbolizes several different things in the poem, for
example the wheelbarrow can be taken as a representation of farm life in general or the
wheelbarrow can also act as a representation for any and all everyday objects that the speaker
believes are deserving of appreciation. The wheelbarrow is a rather mundane item that people
may overlook, and by focusing so intently on it, the poem might be suggesting the value of
appreciating these simple items that make life easier. Also, the red wheelbarrow can also be
seen as a symbol for perception. The speaker spends the poem altering the reader's
perception of the wheelbarrow, which could suggest that the wheelbarrow is meant to
demonstrate how one can take a closer look at their surroundings and challenge their own
perspective.
RED: probably suggests things like blood, life, courage
The poet has separated the wheel and the barrow (the body). The barrow depends on the
wheel. The wheel could be the symbol of life, progress, passage of time and life.
The glazing wheelbarrow, bathed with the natural water of rain and the white chickens create
a simple but significant imagery that can be considered by a Christian reader as the white of
sacredness.
"Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" is a poem first published in Pictures from Brueghel and
Other Poems in 1962. The poem is a work of ekphrasis—writing about a piece of visual art—
and is part of a cycle of 10 poems inspired by the paintings of 16th-century artist Pieter
Bruegel (or Brueghel) the Elder. Both Bruegel's painting and this poem depict the death of
Icarus, the mythological figure who died after flying too close to the sun, after the wax holding
his artificial wings together melted, but the poem "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" is about
human nature of indifference. The poet takes the reference of mythological character Icarus to
talk about human tendency to indifference. When Icarus fell from the sky, it was spring and a
farmer was ploughing his field. Furthermore, the sun too had no pity upon Icarus. Nobody
liked to hear the splash of Icarus drowning. The poem establishes a theme of growing
selfishness and individualism among mankind. At present no one has time to think and worry
about others' problems. A human is generally defined as a social and cultural being. But under
the impact of commercialization and monetary value, a man has no time and interest to be
generous, kind and supportive. So, in the poem the fall of Icarus is the fall of humanity. The
poem "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" is a modern poem with some original and
experimental stylistic techniques. Indeed, The poem has a deliberately violated the themes of
language, grammar and structure. We see no punctuation marks throughout the poem and it
doesn’t follow any poetic principles of rhyme, rhythm and other musical elements.
THIS IS JUST TO SAY: was published in 1934, long after the Imagist movement ended (around
1917). However, William Carlos Williams was an important member of the Imagist movement,
and this poem beautifully exemplifies many of the core tenets of that particular poetic
approach. In particular, "This Is Just To Say" is a very simple poem about the ordinary act of
eating plums sneakily taken from an icebox, and it is this attempt to find beauty in such
simplicity that ultimately aligns so perfectly with the Imagist movement, which was centered
around the use of clear language and vivid, taught imagery. Because “This Is Just To Say” is
such a simple poem, it’s worth mentioning that William Carlos Williams was interested in
documenting everyday life in a straightforward but meaningful way. To that end, many of his
poems spotlight the beauty of life merely by focusing on commonplace things and holding
them up to readers for closer inspection. This artistic approach is perfectly exemplified by the
poem’s title, “This Is Just To Say”—a title that highlights the fact that the poem isn’t trying to
make any grand arguments or access any kind of deeper meaning. But, Williams wants to
encourage readers to appreciate small joys like eating the sweet stolen plums.

EZRA POUND: Poet Ezra Pound authored more than 70 books and promoted many other now-
famous writers, including James Joyce and T.S. Eliot. Pound was born in Idaho, (Norther near
Washington) on October 30, 1885.
Poet Ezra Pound studied literature and languages in college and in 1908 left for Europe, where
he published several successful books of poetry. His pro-Fascist broadcasts in Italy
during World War II led to his arrest and confinement until 1958. Pound advanced a "modern"
movement in English and American literature. In 1912, Pound helped create a movement that
he and others called "Imagism," which signaled a new literary direction for the poet. At the
core of Imagism, was a push to set a more direct course with language, shedding the
sentiment that had so wholly shaped Victorian and Romantic poetry.
TO WHISTLER, AMERICAN: In this poem Pound talks about Whistler and Lincon as people who
stand out with the rest of society. Lincon and Whistler are the proof that America has some
hope of becoming a great nation. Indeed, in this poem Pound refers to Whistler as the first
American painter, he is an inspiration to Pound to try to become as great as him.
IN A STATION OF THE METRO: "In a Station of the Metro" is a poem by American writer Ezra
Pound, originally published in 1913. Pound's two-line poem is a famous example of "imagism,"
a poetic form spear-headed by Pound that focuses above all on relating clear images through
precise, accessible language. In just 20 words (including the title!), this poem manages to
vividly evoke both a crowded subway station and petals on a tree branch. This poem is an
example of imagism because in the poem we do not find any verb, so nothing happens, Pound
captures a moment in time. In this case, we can say that the author has taken two
photographs and paired them side by side.  The real engine of this work is
the metaphor likening faces in crows to petals on a wet, black bough.
A PACT: In 1909, Pound wrote an essay titled "What I Feel About Walt Whitman," in which he
denounced the older poet's "crudity", so he did not hold a very high opinion of Whitman. But
in this poem he admitted that his previous behavior has been "pig-headed."  Now, he is a
"grown child," and his views have appropriately evolved.
At the end of the poem, even though Pound has accepted Whitman's influence, Pound
describes Whitman's purpose in the poetic world as lesser than his own. He insinuates that
Whitman paved the way simply by finding this new wood and offering it to the world; now it is
Pound's turn to craft the raw material into refined artistic masterpieces. ‘A Pact’  by Ezra
Pound is a nine-line poem that is contained within a single stanza of text. The lines, as was the
poet’s custom, do not follow a specific rhyme scheme or metrical pattern. As the leader of
the imagist movement, it was Pound’s belief that the best writing was that which got to the
heart of what the poet wanted to say.
The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter: This poem takes the form of a letter from a lonely wife
who has not seen her husband in five months. She tells us that met him during childhood. In
the next stanza, the wife describes marrying her husband at age fourteen. Then, her husband
(a merchant) departed for another village, which is where he has been for the past five
months. Pound was not the creator of this poem; he translated it from the original Chinese
version by Li Po ( a Chinese poet). The Chinese original likely had a specific form and
identifiable meter, but Pound did not know enough about Chinese poetry to preserve it in his
translation. Pound wrote his translation in free verse. The free verse makes the letter feel
more authentic, as if it is a real letter from a wife to her husband. The lack of prescribed meter
allows Pound to show directly the lineless of the wife without having to overcome the barrier
of an overly structured presentation.
Rivers are also an important symbol in this poem. Rivers constantly flow and change, just as
the relationship between the wife and her husband has evolved. A river forms the physical
barrier between them, as the husband traveled along it to another village. At the end of the
poem, the wife wonders whether or not another river will bring them back together.

CARL SANBURG: Carl Sandburg was an American poet, historian, novelist, and folklorist. Carl
Sandburg was born in Galesburg, Illinois, on January 6, 1878. From the age of 11, Sandburg
worked in various occupations. He then served eight months in Puerto Rico during the
Spanish-American war. After his return from the war, thanks to Professor Philip Green Wright
Sanburg published his first collection of poem called Reckless Ecstasy. Moving to Chicago in
1913, he became an editor of System, a business magazine, and later joined the staff of
the Chicago Daily News.
CIHICAGO: In the poem 'Chicago,' Carl Sandburg lists many of the qualities that the city of
Chicago has, both industrial and aesthetic. He admits that Chicago has its issues; people call
Chicago 'wicked,' 'cruel' and 'brutal,' and he admits that in some ways, it is. He acknowledges
that the issues of prostitution, murder, hunger and a legal system that does not always work
the way it should, exist in Chicago. At the same time, he talks about the great things about
Chicago He loves the majesty of building a city and he loves the work of the people who build
the neighborhoods and skyscrapers. Sandburg ends the poem by defining Chicago in two ways:
as a commercial power and as a young and proud city. "Chicago" is written in free verse. It
doesn't have a rhyme scheme or any sort of regular meter, and it's not written in a
recognizable form.
FOG: Fog is a short poem, six lines long, split into two stanzas. It is a free verse poem, having
no regular rhyme or set meter. In this poem Carl Sandburg describes the fog in cities and a
harbor. He gives a wonderful comparison between the fog and a kitten. When a kitten comes
around us, most of the time it just comes so slowly that you hardly notice, till you see it or feel
it. The same is the case with the fog. An arrival of fogs cannot be predicted.
(e's often compared to Walt Whitman because of the sort of ease and simplicity in his writing)

WALLACE STEVENS:
Wallace Stevens was considered as one of the most critical American Modernist poets of the
20th century. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania in 1879 and received education at
Harvard and afterwards in New York Law School. He spent a considerable time of his life as a
lawyer ignoring the literary world and did not grab extensive recognition and popularity until
his “Collected Poems” got published. Some of his most popular and best-known poems are
“Anecdote of the Jar”, “The Emperor of Ice-Cream”,  “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.
All these poems were published in the “Collected Poems”. For the same he received
prestigious Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1955.
THE SNOW MAN: it was first published in 1921. The poem reflects on how winter should be
celebrated with full spring. It also illustrates that we should keep our emotions aside to adore
the true beauty of nature. The poem is about the winter season. He suggests that we should
have a positive mind to appreciate the beauty of the nature. The poem revolves around the
winter season and there is no actual snowman in the poem. Rather, the poem presents an
actual man standing in the midst of snow and enjoying the beauties of the winter season.
Mostly, the winter season is associated with some bad experiences of life, but, in this poem,
the speaker wants us to liberate ourselves from the clutches of the unruly world and enjoy the
beauty of nature with a positive mind.
THE EMPEROR OF ICE-CREAM: The poem was published in 1923. This poem contains two
stanzas that show a clear scenarios. One illustrates the kitchen where is made the ice-cream
and another stanza illustrates a quieter room with the woman's cold, dead body. The poem
illustrates two things; the attitude of the people gathers around the dead body and the state
of old woman after death. Instead of being mournful, people are celebrating her death by
distributing ice cream. Also, the body of that lady is not wrapped in new clothes. Instead, an
old and used sheet is brought to cover her body. The speaker emphasizes the reality of
death while comparing it with ice cream, so the meaning is to enjoy life as you'd enjoy ice-
cream itself. Also, The title reflects that human beings are no more resistant to death than ice
cream is to the sun.
THE ANCDOTE OF THE JAR: This poem solves the riddle by recognizing the unique differences
between art and nature: art may sometimes be more beautiful than nature but it cannot be as
creative as the nature. In the poem "Anecdote of the Jar, " the narrator elucidates an account
of a jar which stands as a metaphor for art. The narrator places a round jar upon a hill in
Tennessee. The jar attracts the attention of the unruly wilderness (which is a metaphor for
common people) from its vantage point. So, “Anecdote of the Jar” explores the relationship
between humanity and the natural world, and in particular humanity’s desire to impose order
and structure on its environment. Read differently, the "dominion" of the jar perhaps
symbolizes the way that modern life stifles the kind of loose creativity represented by nature.
The fact that the jar is empty might suggest that humanity’s supposed orderly dominion over
nature is hollow, or a kind of illusion. To that end, though humankind can invent, design, and
make its own objects, the poem suggests that nature is still the ultimate creator. 
THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A BLACKBIRD: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’  by
Wallace Stevens is a thirteen stanza piece that has been divided up into short sections by the
poet. This poem was originally published in 1917 by Alfred Kreymborg in, Others:
An  Anthology  of the New  Verse. The poem was also included in Stevens’ first collection of
poetry, Harmonium.  The work was inspired by the form of a haiku, but none of the stanzas
follow that precise pattern. (haiku is a very short Japanese poetic form that captures). Also,
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,’ which was influenced by both imagism and cubism.
(Cubist painters were not bound to copying form, texture, colour, and space.) The thirteen
sections do not come together in a neat or singular statement, but rather present truth as a
mosaic, in which the blackbird acquires its various meanings based on how we perceive it.
As the title suggests, the poem is about different ways of seeing and perceiving the world—
with the blackbird being the specific point of focus.
The poem’s first section presents a natural scene in which the only moving thing is the eye of a
blackbird. Here, the poem is setting up different ways of looking at the world. In the second
section the speaker is "of three minds," which are compared to "three blackbirds," so that the
blackbirds come to represent the various possible decisions or feelings, here The speaker
could be any person whose mind is conflicted. ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a
Blackbird’  by Wallace Stevens uses the blackbird as a way to describe the relations between
humankind, nature, and emotions.
OF MODERN POETRY: ‘Of Modern Poetry’ by Wallace Stevens was published in his third
volume of poetry, “Parts of a World” published in 1942. The work was republished in 1951. “Of
Modern Poetry” could be considered as half a poem and half a theory, for Wallace Stevens
being a modernist poet tells us how to write poetry. Further, he wants Modern poetry to focus
on the acts of the mind itself and expects it to help people find satisfaction in their lives
itself. Stevens ‘of Modern Poetry’ does not follow any form, which indicates his theory of
modern poetry being free from the prefixed forms or structure. Being written in the form of
“free verse”, the poem neither has a rhyme scheme, nor a metrical structure.
In the first lines we can read that the poem should be poetry of and for the mind, the poetry
needs to be "living," evolving, and engaged with real people and events. Then, Stevens
compare poetry with theater, he argued that as an actor, poetry must speak into the "ear of
the mind, touching them profoundly with something they want to hear. The audience will
listen less to the "play," or poem, and more to themselves.
THE PLAIN SENSE OF THINGS: “The Plain Sense of Things” by Wallace Stevens delicately
explores a certain dualism that he finds in creativity by exploring the conflict between
creativity and the lack thereof. He speaks of the point where creativity ends, where it dries up
and becomes “inanimate”. He uses the period between fall and winter, when the leaves have
fallen and there is, as he explains, “A plain sense of things,” as a way to represent this
stagnation of creativity that he views as a necessity. In the fourth stanza the idea of the lack of
imagination as a sterile state of mind changes direction with the paradoxical line: "Yet the
absence of the imagination had itself to be imagined". The final two stanzas suggest the idea
that imagination rises from its absence, from a kind of nothingness, in order to be imagined.
This paradoxical relationship between imagination and lack of imagination refer to the concept
of existential codependency between binary oppositions.
In the first stanza we see that imagination is associated with life and energy, and the end of
imagination is associated with death. The leaves are images of something symbolic for the
productivity of imagination. The first three stanzas set the scene of decadence and sterility
and the final two stanzas suggest that the rise of imagination depends on this absence of
creativity. Therefore the poem turns out to be an outcome of a tension between these two
kinds of perception, and a synthesis of a dilemma that owes its existence to its absence.

MINA LOY:
Mina Loy was born in London on December 27, 1882. She studied art in England and Germany
and achieved some success as a painter. After several years, Loy moved to Florence, where she
spent time with the Futurists and with expatriate artists and writers, including Gertrude Stein.
She began publishing poetry in magazines during this period. When World War I began, she
served as a volunteer nurse in a hospital before moving to the United States in 1916. In New
York City. She was recognized for her feminism and her modern verse, and her poems,
especially her wartime work, often dealt with sex. Loy had many admirers, among them
William Carlos Williams.
In 1923 Loy returned to Paris, where she published Lunar, Baedecker. After this poetry
collection, she turned her attention to visual arts and prose. Also an artist, Loy has been
labelled a Futurist, Dadaist, Surrealist, feminist, conceptualist, modernist, and post-modernist.
Loy became reclusive in her later years, and lacked any interest in building a reputation for
herself. Mina Loy died September 25, 1966, in Aspen, Colorado.
PARTURITION:
In Parturition, a woman is in the process of giving birth. Giving birth is an act that is only
available to the female. Loy describes women as the "Superior Inferiority" because a woman's
role in society was viewed as inferior, yet she is superior because she is the only sex that can
keep life going. In her poem, she describes men as “irresponsible”, while women are shown as
the authors of life. In "Parturiion" Mina Loy reveals also the struggles behind childbirth,
comparing the process of contractions to scaling a mountain. She also uses this to show the
strength of women compared to that of men. Loy claims that women are superior because
they create life within themselves. Men, she claims, are irresponsible to the challenge. We
have to notice the lack of punctuaion and the way the lines are broken up. This is a great
example of a Modernist author experimenting with new forms. The lack of grammatical
accuracy is the new form here. The breaking up of lines here gives the poem a more realistic
feel, almost as if these were the subconscious thoughts of a women in childbirth recorded as
they happened. This stream of consciousness is another characteristic of modernist poetry.
Parturiion, published in 1914, was the first poem ever written about the physical experience of
giving birth from the parturient woman’s point of view, detailing an area of femaleness rarely
thought suitable for literature.
BRANCUSI’S GOLDEN BIRD:
“Brancusi’s Golden Bird” was written in the 1920’s. The poem was published in a controversial
American literary magazine The Litle Review. Golden Bird is a written, and abstract, poem that
describes the art of “Constantin Brancusi, a pioneer of abstract sculpture”. Brancusi was
French, but was born in Romania, and was knew for his modernist bird statues which became
a symbol of the artistic movement at the time. Reading Loy’s poem gives the reader the feeling
of look at an abstract sculpture; her lack of punctuation and use of extreme enjambment
personify the experience of enjoying one of Brancusi’s sculptures and of its creation. Although
lacking punctuation Loy does capitalize the first leter of every stanza except for stanza five.
This indicates that each stanza, except for five, can stand alone as one complete sentence or
thought. From the start, Loy uses interesting line breaks in her poem: “The toy/become the
aesthetic architype/As if”. The reader already has some feel for the poem from the title, but
Loy’s quick shits in line length pull the reader in as if you are hooked and your eyes are pulled
down the page. Then Loy, irst introduces the sculptures rather abstractly; conjuring images of
a God, particularly a Greco-Roman god because of her minioof the Alpha and Omega. Loy even
mentions the word form in the first stanza; this refers to both the sculpture and her poem. At
this point a reader could have an image of what Loy is describing, but this image would be
rather distorted and variable. In the third stanza Loy begins using bird imagery, with words and
phrases such as: “unwinged unplumed”, “of crest and claw”, and “the nucleus of light”. This
abstract imagery may conjure the image of birds or light in some readers. Stanzas four and ive
describe the raw power and effect of the art on its viewers and possibly the sculptures
themselves. Loy uses assonance and alliteration beautifully throughout these stanzas and uses
dashes in line twenty to emphasize the line. Stanza ive is the only stanza that is not a complete
thought or sentence but is rather a continuation of stanza four. It uses ire or light imagery to
create a kind of brightness for a moment in the poem. Loy uses words such as “incandescent”,
“lames”, and “relations” to achieve this. The sixth stanza is equally abstract, discussing the
light in stanza ive as somehow afecing the sculptures and art in their creation. Loy sees this
light as a signiicant part of the creation of a statue. Stanza seven is where the sculpture is
born. Here, Loy is describing Brancusi’s inishing of one of his bird statues. The last line of the
poem, “in gorgeous reticence”, beautifully refers to the sculpture’s pureness because of its
immaculate conception. Enjambment is used throughout the poem so the reader stumbles
down the page, this adds to the abstract feel of the poem.
LUNAR BAEDEKER: Written from a women’s point of view, Mina Loy’s “Lunar Baedeker” is a
poem that illustrates an imaginary place on the moon. A “Baedeker” is a term that represents
a guidebook for travelers. In the poem, Loy claims that the moon is the place of afterlife in
which lustful people go to have sex. Loy notes that the “a flock of dreams browse on
Necropolis” (34-35) to express the fact that the moon is the land of dead dreams since
Necropolis is the city of the dead. Loy also expresses how light can represent the greed and
lust of these people. The word “light” ironically brings darkness to the poem by attracting the
inhabitants to the corrupt culture on the moon. Through challenging conventional morals and
using the word “light,” Loy depicts a land full of lifeless souls that are attracted to sex, drugs,
and other excesses that the moon had to offer.
Loy wrote “Lunar Baedeker” to show that she was unafraid of showcasing a style of writing
that was not accepted by many people of her time. In the first stanza, Loy named Lucifer that
represents immorality, including rebellion and explicit sexuality. Light imagery is used in
“Lunar Baedeker” to signify the inhabitants’ sexual greed. By using vivid imagery, Biblical
references, and allusions throughout the poem, Loy depicts how the land appeared and how
the adults on the moon acted. 

ZITKALA SA: (GERTRUDE SIMMONS BONNIN) Zitkala-Sa was born on February 22, 1876 on the
Yankton Indian Reservation. She spent her early childhood on the reservation with her mother.
When Zitkala-Sa was eight years old, missionaries from the White’s Manual Labor Institute in
Indiana came to the Yankton reservation to recruit children for their boarding school.
According to her autobiography, as soon as Zitkala-Sa boarded the train, she regretted begging
her mother to let her go. She was about to spend years away from everything she knew. She
did not know English, and tribal languages were banned at the school. She would be forced to
give up her Dakota culture for an “American” one.
In 1895, Zitkala-Sa graduated and joined a teacher training program at Earlham College in
Indiana, where she was one of the few Native American students. By 1900, she was teaching
music and speech at the Carlisle Indian School. Zitkala-Sa worked at the Carlisle School for less
than two years. The experience reminded her of her own traumatic education. She realized
the schools were designed to erase her people’s culture. Zitkala-Sa channeled her frustration
into a love for writing. She wrote about her personal experiences and the customs and values
she had learned from her mother. In 1901, she published a compilation of her work in a book
called Old Indian Legends. While working at the Bureau, Zitkala-Sa met fellow employee
Raymond Talesfase Bonnin. They were married in 1902 and had one son, whom they named
Raymond.
The family moved to Utah, where Zitkala-Sa worked as a teacher. While teaching, she met
William Hanson, a music professor at Brigham Young University. With William’s help, Zitkala-
Sa combined her loves of music and writing. She wrote The Sun Dance, an opera based on her
essays. By 1916, Zitkala-Sa and her husband wanted to more actively fight for the rights of
Native people. They relocated to Washington, D.C., where she worked for the Society for
American Indians and American Indian Magazine.  Her efforts raised public awareness about
many issues related to Native Americans, including education, economics, employment,
health, and religion.
IMPRESSIONS OF AN INDIAN CHILDHOOD: Zitkala Sa's "Impressions of an Indian Childhood”,
“The School Days of an Indian Girl” and “An Indian Teacher among Indians” were published in
the Atlantic Monthly in 1900. In these books she uses her story as a means to convey the
peaceful existence of Native Americans as well as to demonstrate the inherent humanity of a
people often described by the white press as "sub-human."
In “An impressions of an Indian childhood” she remembers when she was seven and eight,
when she lived with her mother in their village. A sense of strong nostalgia permeates this
series of memories, probably because they mark the last ones Zitkala-Ša has of living with her
family in a traditional way.
In “The school days of an Indian Girl” she talks about her experience at school. Zitkala-Ša's
recounting of this time in her life begins with her experiences on the train. She begins to
suspect at this time that life in the East will not be the fairytale she and the others were
promised. But, Later, Zitkala-Ša returns home for summers between school terms. She feels
she no longer fits into her old world with her mother or into the new world of school.
In “An Indian Teacher among Indians” she talks about her experience as teacher he goes to
work for an "Indian School" farther East, hoping to make a difference for other indigenous
children but in the end faith in the system and quits her job. She is depressed with the
realization that the system is not made to benefit the Native person at all but instead to give
jobs to incompetent white people.
WHY I AM PAGAN: was published in 1901. Her writing was full of imagery and emotion and
frequently harangued on the white oppression of Naive Americans. The first thing that we
have to underlain in this work is the difference of airmaion between the two groups in the
text. The entire first half of the text describes the author’s journey to her home. In this section,
she comments on nature while attributing “omnipotent thought” to things like plants and
animals. She describes the river as “murmuring”, the lowers as “folk”, and a dog as a “roguish
spirit”. Zitkala-Sa uses this to aim her beliefs, and to compare them to the “naive preacher’s
beliefs. Zitkala-Sa’s beliefs, to her, are intrinsic in every living thing, from the smallest bird to
the largest river, while the “naive preacher”’s beliefs are circumstantial and based upon fear.
The preacher’s argument consists of “‘avoid[ing] the ater-doom of hell ire”, saying “There is
one God who gives reward or punishment to the race of dead men”. Another topic of which
we have to discuss is the theme of racial homogenization present in this text. Zitkala-Sa talks
about how racial lines were clearly denied in the past, but now are as significant as the
different pieces of stained glass in a mosaic. Zitkala-Sa denies both scenarios in a negative
light, however. She describes the “racial lines” as being biter, but also describes this new
assimilation in a negative light as well. Zitkala-Sa uses a capitalized “His” in referring to a
higher power, namely the Great Spirit referenced later in the text, this is a clever rhetorical
strategy. In “Why I Am a Pagan”, Zitkala-Sa depicts vividly how the voice of the white-
American majority has swallowed the one of the Native-American community.

GERTUDE STEIN: Gertrude Stein was an American author and poet best known for her
modernist writings, extensive art collecting and literary salon in 1920s Paris. Gertrude Stein
was born on February 3, 1874, in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. The daughter of a wealthy
merchant, she spent her early years in Europe with her family.
In 1903, Stein moved to Paris, France, to be with her brother, Leo, where they began
collecting Post-Impressionist paintings, thereby helping several leading artists such
as Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. 
She and Leo established a famous literary and artistic salon at 27 rue de Fleurus.
By the early 1920s, Stein had been writing for several years, and had begun to publish her
innovative works: Three Lives (1909), Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms (1914) and The
Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family's Progress. During World War I, Stein
bought her own Ford van and served as ambulance driver. Then, Stein made a successful
lecture tour of the United States in 1934 but returned to France, where she would reside
during World War II. After the liberation of Paris in 1944, she was visited by many
Americans. In addition to her later novels and memoirs, she wrote librettos to two operas
by Virgil Thomson: Four Saints in Three Acts (1934) and The Mother of Us All (1947). Stein
died on July 27, 1946, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. Though critical opinion is divided on
Stein's various writings, the imprint of her strong, witty personality survives, as does her
influence on contemporary literature.
THE MAKING OF AMERICAN Being a History of a Family’s Progress: novel by Gertrude
Stein, completed in 1911 and considered to be one of Stein’s major works. The novel was
not published in book form until 1925. The Making of Americans is considered a modernist
novel covering the history, progress, and genealogy of the fictional Herlsand and Dehning
families. It’s written in Stein’s inimitable and experimental style, one that requires much
patience, as it is steeped in excruciating detail and heavy repetition. In general, we can say
that this novel resists literary classification. In fact, while some critics regard it as a novel, it
may be better characterized as a daybook, containing literary sketches, reflections, and,
frequently, a running commentary on the text’s own writing. Criticism of the text tends to
concentrate on Stain tendency to depart from the rules of novel-writing.  It does not
conform to a reader’s anticipation of a focus on events or happenings that generally form a
novel’s plot. Where the text does describe action, its movements seldom appear in the
order in which they occurred, according to the sequence of linear time. The Making of
Americans does not rely on one continuous speaking voice. It does not frame its contents
with a single, governing point of view. Characters remain similarly elusive, rarely receive
the kind of development that might be thought typical of fiction, sometimes remain
unnamed.
The book lacks chapter divisions, but it is roughly divided into sections corresponding to
the lives of one generation of Herslands: Alfred, his wife Julia, his sister Martha, and his
brother David. Stein employs a limited vocabulary and relies heavily on the technique of
repetition. The book contains many autobiographical elements. Some scholars argue that
David Hersland is a representation of Gertrude Stein's brother Leo while Martha Hersland
represents Stein herself.
Stein claimed that the book was the history of all Americans. Her objective was to analyses
the “bottom nature,” or essence, of “every kind of men and women” and to demonstrate
how new generations descend from the old generation. It is important to note that the
society has to teach the generations, so it is crucial the repetition, because repetition is
what sets out history and the making of America is a wake up call for all socieies in the
globe to start upholding values that were once held in the societies.
The Dehning and Hersland families’ American history begins with their immigrant
grandparents’ separate journeys to America. Both families settle in Bridgepoint. Years
later, the two families come together when Julia Dehning wants to marry Alfred Hersland.
Her father cautions her not to encourage Alfred’s advances. But, Julia and Alfred are
married after a year’s engagement.
ROBERT FROST: Robert Frost was an American poet who depicted realistic New England
life through language and situations familiar to the common man. He won four Pulitzer
Prizes for his work and spoke at John F. Kennedy's 1961 inauguration. Famous works
include “Fire and Ice,” “Mending Wall,” “Birches,” “Out Out,” “Nothing Gold Can Stay” and
“Home Burial.” His 1916 poem, "The Road Not Taken," is often read at graduation
ceremonies across the United States.
Frost was born on March 26, 1874, in San Francisco, California. Frost moved with his
mother and sister, Jeanie, to Massachusetts. Beginning in 1897, Frost attended Harvard
University but had to drop out after two years due to health concerns. In 1900, Frost
moved with his wife and children to a farm in New Hampshire, it was a difficult period in
his personal life, as two of his young children died. Despite such challenges, it was during
this time that Frost acclimated himself to rural life began setting many of his poems in the
countryside. He died in 1903.
MENDING WALL: It was first published in the year 1914. The poem revolves around the
story of two neighbours who come across each other in spring every year to mend the
stone wall that separates their farms. The poem demonstrates how good fences create
good neighbours. The speaker of the poem senses that there is no need for any boundary
because they have just trees in their farm. According to the poet, mending the wall is an
unreasonable activity. But, since his neighbour is attached to his traditions, he tries to
justify building it. He emphasizes on boundaries and distances that are important for
relationships to work. However, the thing that captivates the reader is the message he
delivers- which is that most relationships can work well with boundaries.
THE ROAD NOT TAKEN: 'The Road Not Taken', first published in 1916, is perhaps Frost's
most famous poem. The poem describes someone standing at a fork, or turning point, in a
road in the woods, trying to decide which path he's going to take. He looks down one road
as far as he can see, and after thinking for another minute, decides to take the other one
because it looks like nobody's been that way yet, and he's curious about where it leads.
He thinks maybe he might come back another day and try out the other path but he has a
feeling that the road he's chosen will lead him to new places and discoveries, and he
probably won't be back. He thinks wistfully about that road, the road not taken, and where
he might have wound up if he'd gone that way instead. Part of him regrets his decision, but
he also realizes that the things he's seen and the places he's gone because of the direction
he chose has made him who he is.
'The Road Not Taken' is more than a poem about someone trying to decide which road
he's going to take on a stroll through the woods. It's actually a poem about the journey of
life. The two roads diverged in a yellow wood symbolize a person's life. The narrator's
choice about which road to take represents the different decisions we sometimes have to
make and how those decisions will affect the future. 
“The Road Not Taken” consists of four stanzas of five lines. The rhyme scheme is ABAAB.
THE OVEN BIRD: The Oven Bird by Robert Frost was written in 1916 and published in the
Mountain Interval. It is a poem about an Oven Bird who sits on a tree on a mid summer’s
evening and sings about the coming of winter. There is a certain sadness in the song of the
bird as it rues the falling of the leaves of the cherry blossom. So, the speaker observes a
bird whose call signifies a change in the seasons. By heralding these changes the bird notes
the passage of time, so ultimately this poem is about our progression towards death.
The Oven Bird is a fourteen line sonnet with full end rhymes.
FIRE AND ICE: was written and published in 1920, shortly after WWI (first world war). The
speaker weighs up two different scenarios for the end of the world. Some people think the
world will end in fire, whereas others think ice is more likely. Based on the speaker's
experiences with desire, he or she tends to agree with those who believe fire is the more
likely scenario. In the poem the fire represents the desire while the ice represents hate and
indifference. According to Forest, these natural elements have the capacity to destroy
civilization itself.
STOPPING BY WOODS ON A SNOWY EVENING: is one of Robert Frost's most famous
poems, was written in 1922 and talks about the relationship between life, death, man and
nature. The speaker in the poem is traveling at night through the snow and pauses with his
horse near the woods The speaker continues to stand near the woods, attracted by the
deep, dark silence of his surroundings. He feels compelled to move further into the snowy
woods, but he ultimately decides to continue due to his or her obligations. In this poem ,
the wood can represent the solitude or the desire of being free of responsibilities . It might
also suggest a sense of adventure and attraction to danger. Perhaps the speaker wants to
experience new things and place but his responsibilities keep him from going off on dark.
At the same time, the woods are also “dark and deep” so they can represent darkness and
some have interpreted them as a symbol of death. (4 stanzas)
THE FIGURE A POEM MAKES: The poet Robert Frost wrote a wonderful preface to the
1939 edition of his collected poems (The collected Poems of Robert Frost). It was
titled  The Figure a Poem Makes and it described how he viewed his process of unveiling
the true nature of his work. It talks about his own perception of how poem should be and
how people should view poem. He mentions that all poems should be distinct from one
another and should have wisdom that the readers can benefit from, not only to entertain
them. The poem should also evoke its readers to discover something they previously do
not know, but they actually know from the start. Frost also noted the relationship of the
writer’s emotions while writing the poem and the reader’s emotion while reading the
poem. At the end of his essay, Frost asserted that poems are eternal—that they will
forever bear their wisdom and truth. In this preface Frost considers 5 important areas
about the construction of the poem: the poem’s origins, its development, its impact on
writer and reader, the importance of the poet’s freedom. About the poem’s origins Frost
argued that the poem should develop from an insight or sensing of a connection between
things which has a familiarity and feels like a remembrance. The substance of this initial
insight is what constitutes at least the beginnings of the “context-meaning-subject matter”.
Thus, the poet make sense of what he encounters by reference to what he has
experienced in the past. About the typical question “how true to the original experience
must the poet be?” Forest insists on the greatest freedom of the poetic materials to move
about and to establish relations regardless of time and space. So, we can say that in this
preface Frost talks of the experience of writing rather than reading.

EDGAR LEE MASTERS: Edgar Lee Masters (1869-1950), American author and lawyer, is
mainly remembered for his "Spoon River Anthology," a collection of free verse about
small-town American life. Edgar Lee Masters was born on Aug. 23, 1869, in Garnett, Kans.
In 1880 the family moved to Lewistown near the Spoon River. Masters continued his
schooling, worked in a printer's office, and reported for local newspapers. Masters entered
a law partnership in 1893 and succeeded professionally, socially, and financially. He
married Helen Jenkins in 1898 and published A Book of Verse. Masters's next volume of
poems, Domesday Book, appeared in 1920, as did the first of seven novels, Mitch Miller. In
the 1930s he turned to biography and history, writing of Lincoln, Walt Whitman, Mark
Twain and his autobiography, Across Spoon River, appeared in 1936. He died on March 6,
1950.
TRAINOR, THE DRUGGIST: Edgar Lee Masters’ "Trainor, the Druggist" from Spoon River
Anthology offers a final installment covering the pitiful story of the Pantiers: Mr. and Mrs.
Benjamin Pantier and their son, Reuben.
Trainor, the chemist/druggist, is dramatizing his take on the Pantiers' marriage as he
philosophizes about how chemicals and personalities may combine to produce results unlike
either of the components.
Trainor begins by remarking and somewhat contradicting himself about what a chemist can
know. He first states that "only" a chemist can know the results of combining certain
substances, but he quickly adds that not even a chemist can "always" know the result of
"compounding / Fluids and solids."
Trainor then asks a rhetorical question, wondering who can ever predict how a certain man
and a certain woman might react to their relationship. He also wonders, "what children will
result?". He gives us the example with the Pantiers, concluding that each was "good in
themselves." But when they were bound in a relationship, they were "evil toward each other
and his son was a fire. Thus, the poem emphasizes that personalities may combine to produce
results unlike either of the components.
DOC HILL: The poem, “Doc Hill,” from Edgar Lee Masters’ American classic, Spoon River
Anthology,talks about a doctor who basically lived his life through the people he cared for in
his medical practice. “Doc Hill” by Edgar Lee Masters is a poem in which the speaker, Doc Hill,
delivers his message to the reader after his death. The doc begins by reporting that he spent
most of his time with his patients, most of whom were poor as well as sick, for the purpose of
rehabilitating his reputation. Then he explains that he spent most of his time with his patients
because his wife and his son detested him.  Thus, the doc had no family life. He found
consolation thanks to his profession, but at the same time we can understand that it is excuse
for remaining absent from his home and problems. Then, he speaks about the day of his
funeral that allows him to revel in the return of to the love that he gave during his life. Here,
he mentioned a name of a woman Em Stanton, who was suffering in hiding. The identity of
this woman remains a mystery. Readers are left to imagine just what all might have been
involved in the relationship between the doc and Em Stanton. The message of the poem is
that it was the denial of love and affection from the people closest to him that led Hill to
choose the path of serving mankind.
MARGARET FULLER SLACK: from the classic American work, Spoon River Anthology, depicts a
tormented woman—ironically named after the first American feminist, Margaret Fuller—who
believes motherhood doomed her ambition to become a great writer. Mrs. Slack begins her
poem by proclaiming that she "would have been as great as George Eliot”, but, when she
married John Slack and give to birth 8 children, she argued that she had not time to write”. In
the end, she argued that she died from lock-jaw during she was washing the baby’s thing.
I think that in this poem we find a woman who wants to build her own life not following the
typical conventions about the woman, so to marry and to give birth to children, but this
attitude wasn't accepted during that time. I develop this concept reading the answer "Should it
be celibacy, matrimony or unchastity?".
ABEL MELVENY:Is a poem that starts from reality, it is like a story of farmer who has a farm
yard full of machines. The story seems to be told by an old man who is sitting behinde a
window. We can notice that the massage of the poem seems to be the fact that he didn’t live
his life, he didn’t value time, opportunities, he wasted life, how shows the last phrase “I saw
my life as a good machine, that life had never used”, so he did not live the life as he wanted,
and now he is now old and realizes that time is no longer on his side.
LUCINDA MATLOCK: Edgar Lee Masters, in his 1915 work “Lucinda Matlock,” conveys the
beauty of life, whether it is lived with action and excitement or through “mundane” activities.
In this poem, the narrator, Lucinda Matlock, chronologically describes her life. As a young
adult, she "went to the dances at Chanderville," playing games such as "snap-out" and
socializing with an abundance of peoples. After changing partners one evening on a date, she
met her future husband, Davis. The two settled down to a stereotypical twentieth century
lifestyle, with Lucinda caring for their many children. Although Lucinda notes that she and her
husband lost eight of their twelve children, her positive attitude never falters. By the age of
sixty, Lucinda's life consisted of typical housewife duties; she "spun," "wove," "kept the
house," "nursed the sick," and "made the garden." Even in the midst of these seemingly dull
tasks, she enjoyed herself, "shouting to the wooded hills, singing to the green valleys."
Following her death at age 96, Lucinda looks on at the younger generations. She notes their
complaints regarding life's difficulty and their proclaimed discontent. However, she does not
understand the musings of these "degenerate sons and daughters." In Lucinda's eyes, the
youth need to fully realize the incredible beauty of life. Life is too perplexing to them because
"it takes life to love Life."
Lucinda maintains an optimistic tone about life throughout the poem’s entirety. Even at the
work’s end as she scolds the youths for their complaints, she is scolding them for not having a
positive outlook. Masters likely wrote the poem with the same mindset as Lucinda. He hoped
to shed light on the narcissistic and negative tendencies of modern society, and he
accomplished this by using the narrator’s life as a metaphor. This poem lacks any kind of
personification, which speaks to its straightforward nature. Its ultimate purpose is to express
to readers that they can elicit joy from even the simplest of life’s
EDWARD ESTILN CUMMINGS: E.E. Cummings was an innovative poet known for his lack of
stylistic and structural conformity after self-publishing for much of his career, he eventually
found wide recognition. Indeed, he became known for poems that played wildly with form and
spacing, punctuation, capitalization, overall grammar Cummings' work was also known for its
focus on nature, sexuality and love, in both a sensual and a spiritual sense.
Edward Estlin Cummings was born on October 14, 1894, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He
studied at Harvard University and then served in World War I as a volunteer for the ambulance
corps.
A pacifist, Cummings was imprisoned for several months by French authorities for suspicion of
treason due to letters he'd written. He later recounted his jail experiences in the
autobiographical novel The Enormous Room, published in 1922. Then, during the 1940s and
'50s his style of writing came to be more favored by the masses. He died on September 3,
1962.
O SWEET SPONTANEOUS: In this poem Cummings argued that philosophers, scientists, and
the religious have used earth for their own wants and needs.  The philosophers, the scientists,
and the religious people all are equally performing notorious acts to pollute the earth.
Humankind doesn't let the earth to be eternal and absolute. The philosophers are
unnecessarily pinching and poking the sweet earth. The scientists have used this earth as the
lab for their various experiments. Even religion doesn't find any worth in the eternity and
spontaneity of the earth. These three issues are only a few examples, but the earth is attacked
from everywhere and by everyone. Nonetheless, every year earth still gives us spring. A
common theme with Cummings is that life goes on, and this poem is another example of that.
“O sweet spontaneous” by E.E. Cummings (Edward Estlin Cummings: 1894-1962) is an
experimental poem. It is a striking poem from the stylistic point of view. Its punctuation, word
formation, poetic lines and versification are so unique that the poet has made a new
experiment of language in creating this poem. This poem employs the incorrect use of
punctuation and rejection of the rules of English grammar. O Sweet Spontaneous begins with
alliteration and continues its use throughout and he uses assonance and it gives importance
to enjambed lines.
BUFFALO BILL’S: Buffalo Bill's by Cummings plays with more than one possibility of meaning
and attitude of the poet towards the subject, the dead hero, Buffalo Bill. In one sense, the
poem is an expression of respect towards the heroic personality of the man. But if we read the
poem critically, we sense that the poet is satirizing the traditional heroism of killing the
armless and harmless animals with guns, from a distance! The reader is left free to interpret in
his own way. In fact, this poem is partly a tribute to the legendary hero who ruthlessly killed
buffalo as well as pigeons, and partly it is an ironic poem that tells us that no one is heroic in
front of death. This is truly a modernist poem in which one and certain meaning is neither
intended nor possible.
in this poem:
1. Free Verse: Free verse is a type of poetry that does not contain patterns
of rhyme or meter. This is a free-verse poem with no strict rhyme or meter.
 2. Stanza: A stanza is a poetic form of some lines. There is a short poem having only one
stanza composed of eleven verses.
I sing of Olaf glad and big: The poem 'i sing of Olaf glad and big' by Cummings is a typical
poem based on Cummings's experience in the army. Usually considered the most hard-hitting
antimilitary piece written by Cummings, it is based on his brief acquaintance with one soldier
at Camp Devens who shared his disgust for violence and his unwillingness to participate in war
or to use a gun. After a confrontation with the commanding officer, Olaf (not his real name)
was seen no more, but rumor persisted that he had been brutalized for his pacifistic stance.
The poem consists of seven stanzas of inconsistent length, and it praises those individuals
whose conscience compelled them to resist war and its destruction.  Olaf is a new kind of
personal and private hero who persists in maintaining a gentle and patient rather than warlike
attitude.
NEXT TO OF COURSE GOD AMERICA I: E. E. Cummings published "next to of course god
america i" in 1926 as part of his poetry collection Is 5, which contained a number of anti-war
poems. In keeping with this, the poem satirizes the intense patriotism that many people
adopted during World War I. In fact, the poem’s main speaker shows the patriotism that was
popular in the United States during and after World War I, but this speech is filled
with clichés and empty platitudes. As a result, the poem becomes a parody of patriotism itself,
the poem suggests that mindless patriotism often leads to violence, since it can fuel
enthusiasm for war. The speaker rapidly quotes the national anthem and then transitions into
the patriotic song “America (My Country ’Tis of Thee)” but the way way that the speaker
references them makes them seem insignificant. So, when the speaker describes the “heroic
happy dead” soldiers, readers are invited to consider the fact that national pride encourages
people to idealize the idea of dying for their country. After all, there is nothing “beautiful”
about dying a violent death. The speaker wants to underline how the patriotism can be so
powerful that it can keep people from thinking for themselves. Indeed, in the end the speaker
wonders if America's spirit of freedom and liberty has died along with the heroic happy dead”
soldiers.

ZORA NEALE HURSTON: Hurston was born on January 7, 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama. Hurston
was the daughter of two formerly enslaved people. Her father, John Hurston, was a pastor, and
he moved the family to Florida when Hurston was very young. To support herself and finance
her efforts to get an education, Hurston worked a variety of jobs. In 1920, Hurston earned an
associate degree from Howard University, having published one of her earliest works in the
university's newspaper. Hurston established herself as a literary force with her spot-on
accounts of the African American experience. Hurston also drew attention for her
autobiographical essay "How It Feels to be Colored Me"
HOW IT FEELS TO BE COLORED ME: The title "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" is ambiguous. If
the word colored is an adjective, then the title refers to how it feels to be a person of color.
However, colored could also be part of a passive verb phrase. If so, the title refers to how the
author feels when other people color her identity. I think that the right interpretation is the
second. She describes her childhood in Eatonville, Florida. Everyone in her town had dark skin,
so the only white people Hurston encountered were the ones she saw on their way to or from
the nearby city of Orlando. Hurston says that during this period, the only differences she
noticed between black people and white people were that white people did not live in town
and they paid her to recite, sing, and dance. She found this last bit strange because she would
gladly have performed without pay, and she definitely did not get paid for such activities by the
people in her town. Young Hurston's uncomplicated views on race changed dramatically when
she was 13, when she moved to Jacksonville. Hurston’s move to Jacksonville inaugurates her
“colored” life, as it recognizes and enforces racial distinctions that Eatonville doesn’t, she
rejects the notion of being “tragically colored”. She contrasts herself with other African-
Americans, who she says feel victimized by their oppression. She doesn’t dismiss the horror of
slavery or the prevalence of racism, but still wants to think that the world is open to her and
that skin color does not matter much. Hurston does not recognize a conflict between her
American identity and her dark skin because she sees herself as a part of the whole.
-the very day that [she] became colored." This assertion introduces the idea that being colored
is not the same thing as being born with dark skin; instead, it is a result of social training.
The moment in which she changes is during the the riverboat to Jacksonville; she makes clear
only that the change in her was profound. The reader must imagine what happened. Hurston's
experiences may have involved racial slurs, physical attacks, abuse by authority figures, sexual
assault, or any combination of these. By leaving the details to the reader's imagination,
Hurston deftly and succinctly makes the point that there were a thousand possible horrors a
young African American girl could have experienced while traveling alone.