Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound are all American poets who were roughly contemporaneous with one another, living from sometime during the last quarter of the 19th century into at least the first half of the 20th century. The works of each of these poets reflect the influences of Modernism to a greater or lesser degree. Of these four, Pound and Williams are most obviously Modernist, while Millay and Frost retain more traditionalism in their verse. Like Frost, Millay often wrote in traditional verse forms, using regular rhyme, rhythm, and meter and presenting her subject matter in a coherent fashion. Frost and Millay shared a love of nature, from which they could often draw metaphysical meanings. Frost's "The Pasture" and Millay's "Afternoon on a Hill" both present the unabashed joy of being out in nature and use short, emotion-packed stanzas.
The poetry of Pound and Williams often reflects Imagism, the movement that Pound started that sought to capture a concrete visual snapshot in words and gave up the wordiness and conventions of traditional poetry. Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow" and Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" showcase this style. While Pound and Williams were writing such sparse free verse, Millay wrote multiple sonnets, a very prescriptive type of verse. While Williams in particular experimented with punctuation and capitalization, or lack thereof, the other three poets followed the conventions of standard written English.
Two things that set Millay apart from these three fellow male poets are her feminist slant in her works and her personal perspective. Reading Millay's poems feels like reading a woman's diary. Whether all the sentiments expressed were hers or whether she wrote in a persona is hard to know, but many of her poems are written in a vibrant, open first person style. Along with that, she often expressed her views about life as a woman, something Frost, Williams, and Pound obviously did not do.
No comments:
Post a Comment