Term
Carl Sandberg
e.e. cummings
Ezra Pound
Gertrude Stein
T.S. Eliot
H.D (Hilda Doolittle)
Wallace Stevens
William Carlos Williams
Marianne Moore
› Robert Frost |
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HOG Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:
They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
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THE fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on. |
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THE fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on. |
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Term
It begins:
E. P. ODE POUR L'ELECTION DE SON SEPULCHRE
For three years, out of key with his time,
He strove to resuscitate the dead art
Of poetry; to maintain "the sublime"
In the old sense. Wrong from the start --
No, hardly, but, seeing he had been born
In a half savage country, out of date;
Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn;
Capaneus; trout for factitious bait: |
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Definition
“Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”
Ezra Pound |
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O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Give me in due time, I beseech you, a little tobacco-shop,
With the little bright boxes
piled up neatly upon the shelves
And the loose fragment cavendish
and the shag,
And the bright Virginia
loose under the bright glass cases,
And a pair of scales
not too greasy,
And the votailles dropping in for a word or two in passing,
For a flip word, and to tidy their hair a bit. |
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Definition
"The Lake Isle"
Ezra Pound |
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Term
While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.
... |
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Definition
“The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter”
Ezra Pound |
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Term
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough. |
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Definition
"In the station in the Metro"
Ezra Pound |
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Term
The Cantos
"Hugh Selwyn Mauberley"
"The Lake Isle"
"The River-Merchant's Wife"
"In a Station of the Metro" |
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Part I, Stanza XIII
She may count three little saisies very well
By multiplying to either six nine or fourteen
Or she can be well mentioned as twelve
Which they may like which they can like soon
Or more than ever which they wish as a button
Just as much as they arrange which they wish
Or they can attire where they need as which say
Can they call a hat or a hat a day
Made merry because it is so. |
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Definition
"Stanzas in Meditation"
Gertrude Stein |
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Term
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter. |
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Definition
"The Wasteland"
T.S. Eliot |
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Term
LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit. |
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“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
T.S. Eliot |
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Term
| Objective Correlative (1919): A term introduced in an essay “Hamlet and His Problems” and defined as the set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which will set of a specific emotion in the reader. |
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Term
"The Waste Land"
"Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
Four Quartets
"Journey of the Maji" |
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Term
"Oread"
“Never more will the wind”
"Helen"
"Stars wheel in purple" |
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Definition
| H.D. (Hilda Doolittle 1886-1961) |
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Term
Whirl up, sea—
Whirl your pointed pines.
Splash your great pines
On our rocks.
Hurl your green over us—
Cover us with your pools of fir. |
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Definition
“Oread”
H.D. hilda Doolittle |
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Never more will the wind
cherish you again,
never more will the rain.
Never more
shall we find you bright
in the snow and wind.
The snow is melted,
the snow is gone,
and you are flown:
Like a bird out of our hand,
like a light out of our heart,
you are gone. |
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Definition
“Never more will the wind”
H.D. |
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Term
All Greece hates
the still eyes in the white face,
the luster as of olives
where she stands,
And the white hands.
All Greece reviles
the wan face when she smiles,
hating it deeper still
when it grows wan and white,
remembering past enchantments
and past ills.
... |
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Stars wheel in purple, yours is not so rare
as Hesperus, nor yet so great a star
as bright Aldeboran or Sirius,
nor yet the stained and brilliant one of War;
stars turn in purple, glorious to the sight;
yours is not gracious as the Pleiads are
nor as Orion's sapphires, luminous; |
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“Stars wheel in purple”
H.D. |
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Term
"13 Way of Looking at a Blackbird"
“Anecdote of the Jar”
“The Emperor of Ice-Cream”
"The Snow Man" |
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Definition
Wallace Stevens
(1879-1955) |
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Term
I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
... |
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Definition
"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"
Wallace Stevens |
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Term
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee. |
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Definition
“Anecdote of the Jar”
Wallace Stevens |
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Term
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. |
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Definition
“The Emperor of Ice-Cream”
Wallace Stevens |
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Term
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
... |
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Definition
“The Snow Man”
Wallace Stevens |
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Term
"Spring and All"
“Aspodel, that greeny flower”
“Landscape With The Fall of Icarus”
"Tract"
"The Red Wheelbarrow" |
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By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast-a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen
patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees
All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines-
Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches-
They enter the new world naked,
... |
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Definition
“Spring and All”
William Carlos Williams |
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Term
Also see Auden's poem on this painting.
According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring
a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry
of the year was
awake tingling
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Definition
in hell.
“Landscape With The Fall of Icarus”
William Carlos Williams |
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Term
I will teach you my townspeople
how to perform a funeral--
for you have it over a troop
of artists--
unless one should scour the world--
you have the ground sense necessary.
See! the hearse leads.
... |
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Definition
“Tract”
William Carlos Williams |
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Term
I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a |
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Definition
"Poetry"
Marianne Moore (1887-1972) |
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Term
"Mending Wall"
"Design"
"Meeting and Passing
"Mowing"
"Spring Pools" |
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Term
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
... |
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Definition
“Mending Wall’ *
Robert Frost |
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Term
I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth --
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth --
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite. |
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As I went down the hill along the wall
There was a gate I had leaned at for the view
And had just turned from when I first saw you
As you came up the hill. We met. But all
We did that day was mingle great and small
Footprints in summer dust as if we drew
The figure of our being less that two
But more than one as yet. Your parasol
Pointed the decimal off with one deep thrust.
And all the time we talked you seemed to see
Something down there to smile at in the dust.
(Oh, it was without prejudice to me!)
Afterward I went past what you had passed
Before we met and you what I had passed. |
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Definition
“Meeting and passing”
Robert Frost |
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Term
There was never a sound beside the wood but one,
And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.
What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself;
Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun,
Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound--
And that was why it whispered and did not speak.
It was no dream of the gift of idle hours,
Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf: |
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These pools that, though in forests, still reflect
The total sky almost without defect,
And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver,
Will like the flowers beside them soon be gone,
And yet not out by any brook or river,
But up by roots to bring dark foliage on.
The trees that have it in their pent-up buds
To darken nature and be summer woods --
Let them think twice before they use their powers
To blot out and drink up and sweep away
These flowery waters and these watery flowers
From snow that melted only yesterday. |
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Definition
“Spring Pools”
Robert Frost |
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