Modernist poetry: Or, the growing taste for the lower kinds of poetry

In the history of the poetry we now call “modernist,” that is, the genre-bending, convention-breaking, often perplexing, verses that a group of young poets writing in English started to pen in the early twentieth century, the decade of the 1910s is certainly crucial to the story. The ten years between 1910 and 1920 witnessed the founding, in America and abroad, of periodicals and presses started specifically to print experimental work. These ten short years gave birth to a variety of alternative aesthetic “schools” and “isms,” imagism, futurism, vorticism, Dadaism, that organized and reorganized poets and other artists. These ten syears also began the national and international careers of a prolific array of young American poets (H. D., Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Alfred Kreymborg, Amy Lowell, Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, and Alice Corbin, among others), whose work, challenging to the literary conventions of their day, still fascinates and irritates. These ten years created an intense debate about poetry in a practical age. Why, in ten short years, horribly blown in half by the first modern global war, did all this happen? Why 1910 to 1920? Such is indeed a big question and, to answer it, I need to offer a bit of history. On February 5, 1904, Alfred Austin, the genteel conservative Poet Laureate of England, gave a lecture for the Royal Institution of Great Britain entitled “The Growing Distaste for the Higher Kinds of Poetry.” He complained bitterly that the world as he knew it was going to hell. Seventy years old, a friend of the late Alfred Lord Tennyson, Austin argued that people no longer had patience for the serious, ennobling elevations of verse. Prose fiction had destroyed the public mind with its sordid stimulations. Against such putrid social decay, Austin pitched intellectual, serious, masculine poetry as the last refuge of dignity (438–43).