Original subtitles

It's going to be very difficult condensing American literature into one

hour, but that's the goal of this video.

And I think it's going to be very helpful for those of you who are going

to be studying the American authors so that you have a general sense of where

they're fitting in within the history. Now, it's interesting because American

literature is fairly new as an academic discipline. It's also fairly new as a

literature in itself because it really comes into its own voice in the 1800s,

so that makes it really about 200 years old, but it wasn't really an academic

study or discipline for several years.

When English departments started to be created and introduced to the U.S. in

the late 1800s, it was all English literature.

American literature wasn't really treated seriously by university

professors. It was considered inferior to classical literature, which was

really the standard in colleges in the 19th century.

And I think the first graduate-level seminar began at the University of

Virginia. in the 1890s. But for the most part, most universities did not

introduce American literature as a course or as a subject of study until

after World War I. I mean, you can imagine why. There was this new

patriotic interest, the nation was very interested in its own cultural heritage,

and the universities were responding to that interest, and I think rightly so,

because there's a lot of good American literature that deserves academic study

and scholarship.

So, That's one of the reasons why, for the next two months on Verse Community,

we're going to be studying American literature.

In May, I'm teaching a course titled Emerson and the American Renaissance

Essay. We'll be reading from the great essayists and speechwriters, including

Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, and of course

Emerson. And then in June, we're going to follow that with Du Bois' The Souls

of Black Folk. And we're going to be reading that.

book of essays, really, as a follow-up to the American Renaissance, because

it's an introduction to the Harlem Renaissance.

So we're going to be looking at these two Renaissance movements in America

that really represent a flowering of a particular American...

literary experience.

So in this video I wanted to give you all a bird's eye view of American

literature from its beginning to its end. Just a brief map of the territory

so students and self-learners and social didacts and friends of this channel know

exactly where they are when they pick up an American author.

So they have an idea of where exactly in this story these authors fit. So this

video will be a journey across time.

We're going to be Listening to some of the voices speak to each other. American

literature, just like any nation's literature, is a history of dialogues,

of problems, of resolutions, of different voices testing new theories.

So this is a story that begins with the religious anxieties of the Puritans and

the revolutionary and commercial interests that developed in the 1700s up

to the conclusion of the...

American Revolutionary War.

Then it develops into the period of democratic optimism with Emerson and

Whitman and this emergence of a unique literary identity in the age of the

American Renaissance.

We're going to see it cool into a period of post-Civil War literature in the late

19th century.

And then we're going to see American literature experience another

exhilarating revival, a burst of creativity with the modernist movement

and the Harlem Renaissance, which

furthers many of the innovations that were made in the early 1830s. From then,

it moves on to the beatniks and the formal innovations that they introduce

leads up to about 50 years of postmodernist poetry and prose and

a new way of African-American literature movements that are still happening

today. So there are nine major movements we'll cover in this video. And they're

all asking, what does it mean to be American?

And what does American literature look like?

The Puritans, the revolutionaries, the transcendentalists, the Harlem

Renaissance writers all answered that question differently.

And it's been an ongoing conversation.

So in this lecture, I'm going to introduce you to aspects of that

conversation. So our story begins with the Puritan colonial and revolutionary

period. And I've grouped those three distinct groups within a time frame of

the 1630s to the 1800s.

or to 1800 year 1800 so it's a broad group and i'll talk individually about

those those three now so you'll see here's the word cloud here of the main

names so i grouped puritan colonial revolutionary period of american

literature stretching between 1630 to around 1800 because they are best

understood i think as a series of responses to

uh historical pressures religious pressures particularly the earliest

english settlers in new england were not really interested in creating a new kind

of american literature that was not their priority and it wouldn't be a

priority until the 1830s what the puritans and settlers were interested in

was creating an identity that was religiously there's one based on

religious freedom

Their identity is very much attached still to England, and so is their

literary identity.

They were trying to survive, they were trying to build a Christian utopia,

and writing in this context became a tool for self-examination, a spiritual

self-introspection, and discipline.

So sermons, if you look at the sermons at this time, the poetry, some of the

journals, they all served the same purpose largely, and that was to

understand the human experience within the broader context of the Christian

story and to make sense of the hardship that they were feeling and to reconcile

that hardship with...

a hopefully perceived presence of god in daily life so within this very intensely

religious environment you have puritans like michael wigglesworth who

who wrote really intense poetry, Anne Bradstreet, who is a Puritan woman who

wrote and published beautiful poetry, and Edward Taylor, who wrote poetry but

did not publish it during his lifetime.

And these three main poets, you should start with them, they show how literary

expression really emerges under the pressures of these constraints of

Calvinism and Puritanism.

Bradstreet's poetry is...

Well, she does so much in her poetry. She celebrates, she laments, she tries

to understand, she meditates. Her poetry really reflects the pressure of

reconciling private emotion with public piety.

And it's a delicate way of doing this because women were not considered

authorities on religious matters within the Puritan hierarchy.

So these were conceived of as purely devotional exercises and poetic

exercises. She writes about loss. She writes about love and missing her

husband while he's away in Ipswich.

She writes about the family, and she's continually measuring those feelings

against her faith.

In the poem on the burning of her house, for example, she's really trying to

understand why the house burnt down and how she could use this to her spiritual

advancement.

Why did Providence allow the house to burn down?

Why do some of her children get sick? I mean, these are questions that many

Christians had to wrestle with.

And in that way, it's no different.

The Puritans are no different in that respect. But the way she does it, the

way she reconciles it with this Calvinistic God who not only allowed but

ordained it to happen is part of that theological tension that's going on in

much of her poetry.

I mean, Bradstreet published her poems in London.

And they were successful. Edward Taylor, by contrast, he's more inward. He's more

like the metaphysical poets. If you've read George Herbert, John Donne, a

little bit of Andrew Marvell, a little bit of Traherne, sort of like Henry

Vaughan in that way. It's obsessively spiritual.

You have this Puritan scrutiny going on, but there are times when the poems just

kind of... overflow with an emotional effusiveness that's that's just so in a

way surprising and luminous his poems are very rich again the metaphysical

imagery is is is very prominent and these were written as private acts of

devotion not for publication i want to mention Wigglesworth whose his

poem was titled the day of doom was a terrifying best seller it's a

description of the last days of judgment, full of hellfire and brimstone

and fear and trembling, and people loved it.

You might consider it like a Puritan gothic or horror, if you will. It was an

instant classic, and it really did try to wake people up to the spiritual

reality of judgment days coming, and one day, you know, people, souls will be

sorted.

from the righteous and the damned. And it's a very vivid, very vivid portrait,

his poetry is. So that was also very popular and very, very important to the

Puritan devotional act and social structures as well, as you can see. So

something happened. As the colonies expanded from the 1630s up to the 1690s,

Into the early 18th century, you begin to see that these new pressures are

being placed upon New England society, and they're shaping literary production

in new ways.

I mean, Boston and New England, more broadly, these coastal towns, changed

from the Christian utopian project to a new commercial project.

Puritans in Boston, they didn't like how...

commercial things were getting.

Boston became a major trading town. You had the Long Wharf, which was reaching

out into the ocean like a hungry arm. If you see pictures of the Long Wharf in

Boston, the way it used to be, or depictions of it on the map, see how

huge it was.

And ships would just come in and dock and unload merchandise and bring

merchandise back to London. And many of the Puritans started moving west to

preserve their religious inheritance because the The coast was getting too

secular for them. And it was becoming increasingly mercenary and capitalistic.

You also get this new idea. So as the Puritans and the more conservative

Christians are pushing west, you get the introduction of the Enlightenment ideas

that are coming over from England and Europe into Boston, which really

emphasized reason.

science, happiness, and human potential for happiness.

And this ethos gradually replaced the purely theological concerns that had

occupied Boston for many decades.

At the same time, the realities of slavery and transatlantic exchange

complicated this unified vision of the colonial identity, of the Calvinist

identity as well, because it was broadly theological.

Phyllis Wheatley, her work is coming out of this tension.

She was an enslaved African woman who wrote in a refined neoclassical style,

the kind that was very popular in England in the early 1800s. And it's a

wonderful demonstration of how well read she was and how she was

able to adapt her own sort of confessional voice to this proper mode,

neoclassical mode of writing.

And her poetry,

responds to the world that questioned her humanity, even as it celebrated

Enlightenment ideals of liberty and rationality.

In some ways, and this is what's challenging about Phillis Wheatley,

especially in her poem about being taken from Africa, is that she is grateful to

be in the States, and there is that, in a way, uncomfortable gratitude, we might

think, that's also balanced with what the poems are actually doing, which is

asserting her shared humanity with everyone else. And the fact that she's

been able to cultivate and to practice this neoclassical style is part of

the social importance of her work.

And I have a study of Wheatley's poetry on this channel, I believe.

I taught early American literature about a year ago or two years ago.

So that should still be on there if you're interested.

So you've got these subtle challenges of the underlying structures and

assumptions that really do reveal the contradictions at heart of the colonial

society and the very market society that's coming to Boston.

By the mid to late 18th century, political pressure came to the forefront

as the tensions between the American colonies and Britain escalated.

Literature became a vehicle for rhetoric, and this is where Philip

Frenot comes in.

Philip Frenot, very prolific poet.

I remember when I was manager of the Child Library at Harvard, I would go and

look at some of the collections that they had of his, and he has this three

-volume collection of his work in these old cloth-bound editions, and you open

it up, and you see it's double-columned, each page.

He's so prolific.

I looked into some of his poetry. I taught some of his poetry two years ago.

It's a good example of how poetry was very rhetorical. He was interested in

persuasion at this time. Again, very 18th century.

And Frenot used this to imagine a new national identity.

Frenot is speaking to that shift of the American epic identity coming

forth. And he's furthering it. His poems, his essays, his speeches directly

respond to the American conflict.

of the American Revolution, as it's amping up, as it's happening, and as it

concludes. He uses satire, he uses patriotic imagery to really rally and

support and to articulate a distinctly American voice.

Writing was no longer primarily about spiritual introspection when you get to

this period.

Benjamin Franklin was also really important as a prose writer at this

time. His voice is a favorable response and a voice really coming out of the

Enlightenment movement, all about industry and the ideal of the self-made

individual. You can read Franklin's autobiography, which is just beautiful,

beautiful prose. I mean, he's schooled on Joseph Addison and many of the great

English essayists of the 18th century, so it's just...

wonderful prose.

Poor Richard's Almanac is also another good one.

Gives a vision of human progress based on hard work, ingenuity, and yeah,

burning the midnight oil is really what his works celebrate.

So it's different in many of the ways.

that the Puritans were expressing their devotion and using writing, because it's

much more humanistic when you get to Franklin and Frenot.

Fits very comfortably with the Puritan ethos in some ways, because within the

Puritan ethos, you have this idea that you have to work hard to produce

evidence that you are saved. You don't work to be saved, but you work to prove

to be saved.

And again, you see this industry kind of going forward in some of Ben Franklin's

and in others' writings at this time, where the theological economy of

salvation for the Puritans is transposed into this actual very real market

economy of industry.

And so in that ways, they really do overlap.

I will say before I move on, John Woolman, John Woolman, I read his

journals. He's a Quaker, an abolitionist before it was cool,

beautiful spiritual insights. He was an itinerant minister.

Read Woolman's.

journals. Just absolute beautiful American prose, that is to say.

Chaste, plain, and confident.

That's the American style.

So once you get to the 1800s, not long after the Revolutionary War, we have

Frederick Douglass, Whitman, Herman Melville, American literature.

has a problem. So this is before we get to these folks. So the turn of the

century, 1800s, it's basically, American literature is basically no different

from English literature in its style.

It needs to differentiate itself and become unique.

I mean, the states, they gained political independence, they became the

states, the United States, but they had to gain artistic.

independence. In the American Renaissance, which spanned roughly from

the 1830s to 1865, was that movement, was that quest to find the true American

voice. Now in this section here, I've broadened this section to include

basically any writing between 1800 to 1865 to really accommodate some of the

forerunners like James Fenimore Cooper.

I would be wrong to admit him. He's a big novelist at this time.

With the U.S. no longer a set of fragile colonies, the states faced these new

pressures of rapid territorial advancement and expansion.

You have the new rise of democracy.

We had a lot of industrial change, and more urgently, a moral and political

crisis of slavery.

And in response, writers during this period of the long American Renaissance,

we could call it, began to ask,

What did it mean to think, write, and live as Americans, rather than as

cultural descendants of Europe?

What does it mean to actually have our own literature?

Now, some of James Fenimore Cooper's work, some of his works really lay the

groundwork for the American Renaissance. So his 1826 novel, The Last of the

Mohicans, is one of these stories. So there's this scene.

a conversation between Hawkeye and David. Let me just read you.

Book, repeated Hawkeye, with singular and ill-concerned disdain.

Do you take me for a whimpering boy at the apron string of one of your old

gals? In this good rifle on my knee for the feather of a goose's wing?

My ox's horn for a bottle of ink? In my leathern pouch for a cross-barred

handkercher to carry my dinner?

Book?

What have such as I, who am a warrior of the wilderness, though a man without a

cross, to do with books?

If you're familiar with the Transcendentalist, you know where this

is going here.

He goes on. I never read, but in one.

And the words that are written there are too simple and too plain to need much

schooling, though I may boast that of forty long and hard-working years.

What call you? The volume, said David, misconceiving the other's meaning.

tis open before your eyes returned the scout i have heard it said that there

are men who read in books to convince themselves there is a god i know not but

man may so deform his works in the settlement as to leave that which is so

clear in the wilderness a matter of doubt among the traitor

traitors and priests now this concept of the wilderness as the book of god like

you don't need to read any other books than this wilderness very romantic very

wordsworthian very emersonian and if you read henry david thoreau's essay on

walking which combined two lectures one on walking another called the wild

you'll see how this this concept that cooper establishes here in his novel

is at the forefront of the transcendentalist movement in the 1830s

and 40s and 50s. So keep that in mind. And then come to the 1836 essay

on nature, so that when the main figure of the American Renaissance, Ralph Waldo

Emerson, published his 1836 essay, Nature, you'll find this similar

sentiment. To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature.

Most persons do not see the sun.

At least they have a very superficial scene.

In the woods is perpetual youth.

Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign.

A perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of

them in a thousand years.

In the woods, we return to reason and faith.

emerson's concept of the woods very much very much like cooper's concept or

hawkeye's concept of the wilds and the wilderness and there are studies about

cooper's influence on emerson but emerson's essays call for this

intellectual call for this intellectual independence and self-reliance and he

wrote in response to what he saw as america's cultural dependence upon

europe and his ideas prompted the american transcendentalist movement

See my other videos on YouTube about that.

And Henry David Thoreau. So you can see here a dish of many, many, many samples

of literature here.

Henry David Thoreau puts these ideas into practice most famously in his

experiment at Walden Pond in his book titled Walden. And his writing reflects

both a withdrawal from society and a critique of it, which is so much of what

his walking does, so much of what is a week on the Merrimack.

does in many of his other great writings.

His journals, too, are just fantastic in this respect.

He's responding to the pressures of industrialization, this pressure to

conform to the market.

I mean, what was it? The market explosion, the market revolution of the

1850s was happening, was at its height when Thoreau published Walden. That's

when we needed to hear it. So you have this strain developing in American

literature at this time.

a conflict really between commercial moneyed interests and this deeper

spiritual vision and from now on this is going to drastically shape the

character of american literature this tension as we see it all the way up to

the present day the period here the american renaissance is marked by a

conflict over slavery and no writer responds with more rhetorical force

against this than frederick douglas

I mean, Emerson is writing against it, Thoreau is, Sojourner Truth, Harriet

Beecher Stowe, many others, Margaret Fuller, but Frederick Douglass, he was a

former enslaved man whose autobiographical narratives just exposed

the brutality of slavery and asserted his own intellectual and moral authority

on the subject and as a writer in general. He's one of the greatest

rhetoricians. of American literature.

We'll be reading one of his speeches in our course, The American Renaissance

Essay. So his work challenges some of the more optimistic individualism of

transcendentalism by basically arguing that freedom must be understood as a

political, that is, social necessity.

So the rugged individual can only go so far here. We need everyone helping in

pushing toward a more social idea of justice.

and a better world. And you can see the Puritan concept of like, let's make

our community here a Christian utopia, an ideal.

You see this search for the ideal even present in the abolitionist writings.

And I think rightly so. Frederick Douglass's small novel.

The Heroic Slave, for instance, takes the Protestant conversion narrative and

adapts it to a conversion to become an abolitionist. So you have this moment

where this figure, who's not an abolitionist, hears words being spoken

and instantly converts, almost like a religious experience.

So that's an interesting continuity you'll see in Douglass' work and many of

the other.

abolitionists of this time. The American Renaissance also produces some of the

most ambitious works of fiction in the nation's history, and I'm looking at

Herman Melville here, but Nathaniel Hawthorne as well. He explores the

legacy of Puritanism as it lives on in his short stories and his novels. Herman

Melville pushes even further, and he uses the

The voyage in Moby Dick to confront these questions of meaning, the search

for revenge, of obsession, which is a very American thing,

and the limits of human knowledge.

It's also ecologically interested in a way that's still very relevant to the

American ethos today. Meanwhile, in poetry, you have Walt Whitman, of

course.

who's breaking radically from the poetic tradition. He's celebrating democracy,

the body, the diversity of human life in race and sex.

His verse is expansive free verse.

He is a poet of extension, as Helen Vindler said.

And Emily Dickinson's writing around this time too, although I included her

in the next panel. I'll explain why later. But she's also, she's the poet of

concision, and she's writing during this period too.

So let's go to the late, what I'm calling the late Renaissance period from

1865 to 1900.

This overlaps with the larger Renaissance movement, but it's

different. So this period begins with the aftermath of the American Civil War,

a moment that forced the United States to confront the physical devastation of

the war and the moral and social fractures that were...

were opened like a wound at this time, a festering wound. And the earlier

optimism of American Renaissance and American Transcendentalism is really

giving way to a more sober, a more critical and questioning literary

sensibility. So writers in this era are responding to those pressures.

Industrialization is...

is rapidly moving at this point. You have the expansion of cities, this

movement to the west, widening of class divisions, the breach between the south

and the north following the war, and the unresolved consequences of emancipation.

As a result, literature begins to turn toward realism.

So in the previous movement, we had a lot of romanticism and idealism,

transcendentalism. Now we're returning to something a little more grounded. You

get the social realism of Henry James, even of Mark Twain and Kate Chopin to an

extent. This is a transition period between the American Renaissance and the

post-Civil War era to modernism. So you can see this as the stepping stone into

modernism, which we'll see in a moment.

You see I added Dickinson here, although she was writing at the same time as

Whitman. She was a contemporary of Emerson.

Emerson actually came to stay.

at her sister-in-law's house right across on the property of the Dickinson

estate. And she was familiar with his writings.

So she really does belong in both of these camps, but I put her here because

her poems were first published all together in the 1890s.

In terms of like a force upon the literary history, she's in this movement

for that reason.

Now, one of the most enduring voices of this period is Mark Twain. I've got his

name very big there. He's humorous with a bite.

Many of his novels contain a sharp social critique under a layer of the

comical. I'm thinking of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

And these books preserve an American dialect.

And this use of the vernacular language of American dialect, one of many

American dialects, is an innovation at this time. It's bringing something new

to the tradition, and it helps reflect the reality of America as a place with

distinctly different sounding voices.

So this is an element of social realism, or rather literary realism, here.

William Dean Howells also promoted realism as a literary movement you get

this really matured beautifully in henry james a real american literary genius

james's novels give attention to the psychological and

cultural tensions developing between the united states and europe he's interested

in exploring those a portrait of a lady is a good example of this where you have

american culture and european culture

compared and at odds with each other at some times.

James's work is interested in a different kind of pressure, a question

of how American identity is shaped in contradistinction to these older

religions, or these older cultural traditions.

Europe, for example.

Like, to some extent, America is trying to develop an identity that is not

contradistinctive only, but something that can stand on its own legs. And this

is the problem with modernity since, I'd say, the Reformation, where it's like,

how do you define a movement like the Reformation without its antecedent Roman

Catholicism? How do you define Unitarianism without its antecedent in

Calvinism? How do you define secularism without its antecedent in Christianity?

How do you define American art, American literature and art, without reference to

its antecedent in European and English literature?

So again, really wrestling with the sense of American identity and

literature, and you get a sense of that in his novels. Two other figures

important here.

Edith Wharton, her name really should be bigger, sometimes called America's first

lady of letters, and Kate Chopin.

both expand literary realism by including the issues of power, of sex,

of sexuality, and personal freedom.

Kate Chopin gets taught the most, but Edith Wharton, I think, is a better

artist. So, you know, that's one of the reasons why Kate Chopin is a little bit

bigger, because when it comes between the two, I've found that most high

schools, if they're going to teach a woman writer of this period, it's

usually Kate Chopin, because she's got short stories that work really well.

for teaching in a classroom setting. So I think it's more of that convenience.

But Chopin is really great for exploring the inner lives of women in American

society, in a society, particularly in the South, that restricts their

autonomy.

So The Awakening is a good example of this. It confronts the constraints

placed on female identity, and it pushes against some of the social norms.

I mean, like Twain, she's got a bite. So does Wharton.

Edith Wharton examines the rigid structures of the upper class and really

drags it through the dirt.

She's very critical of it in her novels.

And her novels in this way are just beautiful works of art, but they're also

commentary on the social elite.

A House of Mirth is a good example of that, probably a good one to start with.

So the theme here is kind of like critique, I would say.

Emily Dickinson is, in a way, critiquing.

Calvinistic evangelicalism, just as Henry James is placing American identity

under scrutiny, Mark Twain as well, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton. So you see this

is a very critical period that gives way to the modernist period, which I'm

grouping roughly between 1900 to 1940s. The modernist movement in American

literature really begins in the early 20th century as a response to

The confidence of inherited traditions, namely the Victorian literature, but

also some of the decadent literature of the previous period.

Inherited traditions, it's pushing out. So it's moving beyond critique of those,

which we saw in the last period, as kind of a stepping stone to this. It's going

to do something new.

So after the devastation of World War I, you had these very disorienting effects

of industrialization, mechanized warfare.

The fragmentation of society and religious structures, the breakdown of

authority and tradition, all of this contributes to the sense of the older

ways of understanding being insufficient.

We need something new.

Writers no longer trust the linear narratives.

The stable identities of the past are really, you know, we've lost faith in

those at this point. In some ways, we're working with ruins.

The modernists.

experiment with form and language.

T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland is a good example of that. They capture a reality

that feels fractured and often incoherent, and they want to make it

intelligible through meaning, through process of meaning making.

I mean, sometimes uninformed critiques of modernism and postmodernist

literature will often say that, oh, they just, they destroyed meaning and they

wanted to get rid of the logos and, but actually, no, it was like really the

wars that did that, and poetry was the logos trying to bring things back

together. I mean, read Hilda Doolittle's poetry after World War I, and you'll see

that she's not participating in an iconoclasm. A lot of his poetry is

trying to bring meaning back into relevance.

So I think that's important to mention.

Somehow on YouTube, modernism and postmodernism have become these bad

words, and maybe it's Jordan Peterson's fault. I don't know.

The internet culture is still very foreign to me. I don't really understand

my way around these issues like I probably should.

But I just wanted to say, really understand modernism on its own terms.

T.S. Eliot, you can begin with him.

understands the cultural disintegration.

He's got these dense, elusive lines in his poetry.

The Wasteland is a good example of that, which assembles fragments, different

voices, allusions, different languages into this collage that really mirrors

the brokenness of modern life, but actually prompts connections between

those fragments.

Ezra Pound, huge figure at this period, calling for a radical renewal of poetic

language. He has this command to make it new.

That's really the motto of the age.

He's interested in reviving a kind of global classicism. Emerson was

interested in reviving American classicism. You can see Pound

participating in that too.

William Carlos Williams, fantastic poet.

responding to Eliot and Pound in his own way. He will insist that poetry in the

local, in the immediate, is the way to write.

He's not interested in the elusive so much. He's not interested in connecting

his works to a broader network of literary tradition.

Now he's famously arguing that there are no ideas but in things.

So he's returning back to things.

His work responds to the same pressures as Eliot.

and Pound, but he seeks to clarify and make his poetry concrete in form and

content. His poetry is often funny, sometimes a little difficult, but not as

difficult as Pound or Eliot. So coming off of Eliot and Pound, William Carlos

Williams is a breath of fresh air. You have Robert Frost, which by the way, the

best of Frost never gets anthologized. The best of Frost never gets taught.

I am so determined, very soon, to offer a course on Robert Frost, where we're

going to be reading, we might read through all of it. I mean, we read all

of Yeats back in August.

We read all of Yeats' lyric poetry on my platform.

Why couldn't we do that with Frost?

I'm determined to do it eventually, if not this year, next year.

Because Frost is fantastic, and most of the best of his work you don't find in

anthologies. You have to buy a whole collection of his poetry to read it.

Wallace Stevens, just fantastic.

I have nothing to say there other than, than Sunday morning, his whole idea of

the imagination.

He shares with William Carlos Williams this interest in going away from ideas

and back to things, or rather the imagination.

Beautiful essays on the imagination, actually, he has.

He's interesting as well. Marianne Moore, Lowell Bishop.

These are figures that bridge the modernist movement with the

postmodernist movement. We'll talk about them, but they also belong in this group

and in the next, as we'll see. In prose fiction, you find similar portraits of

psychological and social critique and fragmentation.

Ernest Hemingway develops a spare, masculine, understated kind of

prose, which is really...

really sinewy and strong.

It's good prose.

It's such a distinct style. He does it really well. His characters are often

struggling with finding meaning as well, especially in a world that seems

completely indifferent to human life.

William Faulkner, though, as the opposite of Hemingway,

He's interested in complex, long sentences.

He's interested in shifting perspectives through these nonlinear narratives to

explore the history and meaning in the American South during the war years and

kind of after the war years during the Reconstruction period.

Also interested in the tensions, the social tensions between the South and

the North.

And his work really reflects those lingering problems in the South.

especially in the past, the legacy of slavery, of prejudice, of the injustice

of the white yeoman, all of that that happened with the American Civil War and

after. And he's interested in the consequences on the present. And I would

say that if you really want to understand the American South today, you

really should go back and read Faulkner and study the Civil War.

I mean, the nostalgia that's so heavy.

in American country music today, where it's like most country music today, or a

lot of it, I should say, doesn't even involve narrative. It's just a catalog

of good things like, like, I don't know, chicken and cold beer and like a can of

skull in the back of my jean pockets sort of thing. And what's interesting is

like as a phenomenon, I think it's very much located to this impulse to go back

to the way things were.

Something was stolen from us. It was the North who did it.

We are persecuted, and our ways are dying and fragile, and we must protect

it. And the catalog and country music are the list of things they celebrate,

is an elegiac impulse. I think it's a response to the loss of part of what's

happening, and that loss is really lived on in American Southern culture.

namely through its art. Let's move on to the Harlem Renaissance, because this is

where we see another flowering of a distinct American voice.

This Renaissance emerges in early 20th century.

It could be, you know, part of it's a response to the historical pressures

that reshaped African American life and identity in the States after the war.

So Faulkner will tell the story of the white southerners after the war. The

Harlem Renaissance is really interested in life and identity of the African

American after the Civil War. You have the Great Migration, which is bringing

hundreds of blacks from the South to the North to live in northern cities like

Harlem, where these communities are formed under the conditions of both

opportunity and constraint and scarcity.

So at the same time, One of the things that prompted this was black veterans

coming back home after World War I. The war really intensified the demands for

civil rights.

A lot of the black veterans came back, returned to a home that was unwilling to

even let them sit in the front of the bus or to enter into certain

establishments after they fought for the country. And so they were really

unwilling to accept these racial injustices that...

that they came back home to. So at the intellectual center of this movement is

W.E.B. Du Bois.

whose ideas about double consciousness articulate the tension of seeing oneself

through both black and American identities.

He's really the start of it, I'd say, which is why we're studying him in June

before we study the Harlem Renaissance lyric in July.

So this is a prelude to the Harlem Renaissance poetry we'll study later.

But he draws from an older American tradition begun, I think, by Emerson.

As many critics and scholars have noted, Harold Bloom, a favorite among the

watchers of this channel, among them. So compare how Du Bois draws from Emerson

to create his own representation of black identity.

So here's a passage from Emerson.

Man is the dwarf of himself.

This is from Emerson's Nature.

Once he was permeated and dissolved by spirit.

He filled nature with his overflowing currents.

Out from him sprang the sun and moon.

From man the sun, from woman the moon.

The laws of his mind, the periods of his actions, externalize themselves into day

and night, into the year and the seasons.

But having made for himself this huge shell, his waters retired.

He no longer fills the veins in veinlets.

He has shrunk to a drop. He sees that the structure still fits him, but fits

him colossally.

Say, rather, once it fitted him.

Now it corresponds to him from far and on high.

Okay, and then you go to Du Bois in his Souls of Black Folk, his essay.

on spiritual strivings. Hold that Emerson in your mind here.

So as I'm reading this aloud, I will be reading the word Negro to quote from Du

Bois. I don't want to change his language here.

That's a standard practice when you're reading from these texts. Otherwise, I

think it would be pretty inappropriate for me to do that. But just so everyone

knows, I am going to read that in this passage here.

He writes, Du Bois, after the Egyptian and Indian the Greek and Roman, the

Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born under a veil,

and gifted with second sight in this American world, a world which yields him

no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the

revelation of the other world.

It is a particular sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of

always looking at oneself through the eyes of others.

of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt

and pity.

One ever feels his two-ness.

An American, a Negro.

Two souls, two thoughts. Two unreconciled strivings. Two warring

ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn

asunder. What's striking here is that Du Bois adopts that expansive, almost

cosmic language of Emerson in a way and turns it into a fundamentally different

psychological and social reality. That is, of being a black American at this

time. Emerson imagines an original, a unified human spirit that once filled

nature and now it's really diminished, kind of fall from wholeness. And Du

Bois... I think takes that. He's in conversation with it in an interesting

way. He takes that concern with the divided self and reinterprets it through

a lived experience of the black Americans.

So Du Bois argued that art is political. And I do want to go back to the cloud

here that we have.

So we have that with the other names too. Art is political for Du Bois. He

insists that literature should serve the cause of racial...

justice, social transformation.

And his influence really did shape this broader movement, even pushed some

writers into writing.

The thing is about this movement, some of the authors in this cloud would

really have issues with Du Bois.

But the thing about all these movements that we've studied so far, including the

Harlem Renaissance here, is that it's not really a unified single philosophy.

You can't think of it as like they were all agreeing to the same exact doctrine.

our philosophy.

However, they were all pushing the purpose and the direction of black

American literature in new ways.

Langston Hughes responds to this need by embracing the rhythms of everyday black

life in his poetry. He incorporates some jazz rhythms, vernacular speech.

Claude McKay, very confrontational at times, using traditional forms like the

sonnet.

and direct political language to protest some of the injustices that he sees.

Fiction writers at this time are also considering these complexities.

Zora Neale Hurston, Of the South, Their Eyes Were Watching God

is her novel. It draws on black folklore and oral traditions. You have that

amazing and astounding, it astounds me every time I read it.

moment of the vultures speaking to each other in that novel.

It breaks out of that realistic mode into kind of the supernatural, which is

really interesting.

All of these are worth studying, and we're going to be studying some of them

this year on Verse, so do join us if you're interested in that.

The next movement, number six, is the beats.

And you can think of this as kind of a prelude to the postmodernist movement or

the early postmodernist movement. The Beat Movement in America emerged in the

1950s as really a response to the spiritual bankruptcy of America.

It's funny, you know, like I said, so much of American literature is

responding to a lack of real spiritual character in America. These guys are

confronting consumerism.

This is during the Cold War, during that anxiety.

I mean, after World War II, The U.S. experienced great economic growth.

You have the growth of the suburban stability.

And many writers felt that this prosperity came at too high a price.

Really, it was the cost of spiritual depth.

What you see all throughout America is a kind of superficial Christianity rising

at this time. And the Beats reacted against what they saw as a culture of

corporate materialistic greed.

Christian nationalism to some extent.

And the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, who's probably the closest literary descendant

of Walt Whitman, captures that urgency in the rebellion of the beat generation.

His book Howl, wonderful collection of poetry, is long, breathless, it's

raw. It's got this powerful subject matter and language.

He's borrowing, too, from the Hebrew prophets in the way that Whitman does.

But he does it to such a powerful effect.

I mean, you've got to read Jeremiah and Isaiah, the books of the Bible and the

King James, to really understand how.

Which, the title, How, comes from these prophets.

That's a quotation from the King James.

So this, I mean, and he's Jewish, so this is another part of his poetic

identity here.

And he's challenging.

this character of superficial spirituality in America.

And he's bringing to light people whose voices are ignored by mainstream

society, the America that the televisions want to show. And he

responds to a culture that he believed was completely bankrupt spiritually, and

he thought that poetry and protest and language of revelation could really

bring it back.

Jack Kerouac is in this...

this ethos as well. Kerouac is challenging, he's trying to channel that

desire for freedom into a prose style that feels spontaneous and unfiltered.

And his works on the road are the Dharma Bums.

In those works, he transforms travel as a kind of spiritual pilgrimage.

And Kerouac, he wanted to

Revitalize American spirituality by introducing the Eastern traditions.

So this was partly inspired by Buddhism Vedantic texts Partly

also inspired by reading Thoreau's Walden So this is connected all the way

back to the American Renaissance and those guys were reading the the Hindu

scriptures as well so he And Gary Snyder, as we see here, wanted to

introduce Buddhism to really open up a new way of seeing the world, new

spiritual identity.

Kerouac said that Beat, the Beat generation, Beat stands for beatific, as

in the beatific vision, in a way.

Kerouac was very interested in making this part of American culture.

Gary Snyder, too, responds to it.

different unrelated pressure as snyder's interested in that growing alienation

that we are feeling from the natural world so now there's this split between

the suburban sprawl and the urban sprawl and our connection to nature which we

really did have so he draws on this very environmental awareness that's emerging

he's introducing eastern philosophy as a way to revitalize a theology of nature

a philosophy of nature, which we still need, and Snyder's poetry tries to offer

an alternative to the industrial and consumeristic philosophies that are

going on in America at this time. So in a way, he's taking the transcendentalist

impulse, moving it forward, and transforming it into really a spiritual

discipline. So that's one of the great things that the Beats did, and you can

really see it in their poetry.

Next, I just want to say a few words about postmodernist poetry.

which I'm dating from 1960s, maybe all the way up to today.

Allen Ginsberg, you see, makes an appearance here. American postmodern

poetry emerged mid to late 20th century, and it was a response to the aftermath

of World War II in the same way that the Beats was, in similar ways.

These poets are confronting a reality that's shaped by mass media now.

by television and consumption of of shopping malls and the technological

expansion of competing ideologies and the digital screen we we are still very

much dealing with the problems that they were trying to solve the confidence in

the coherent narratives of the american identity and history are starting to

unravel at this time the myths are are are are falling apart under scrutiny.

And many of these poets are trying to figure out where they belonged in this.

So in reaction to some of those things that I just mentioned, postmodernist

poetry often embraces uncertainty and play, really. Their poetry really is

playful to really understand the postmodern poetics.

Don't think of like Derrida's deconstructionism. I

actually think that has

that influence has been overstated. They're interested in play.

They're in language play, treating language as a choice in a way, as

something unstable and yet open to reinterpretation, as something inviting

dialogue, and something that's not monologic.

And I think I should say there is a difference between what's called

postmodernist philosophy, kind of post-Nietzschean philosophy, and

postmodernist poetry.

I mean, Poetry is really interested in meaning and playing games with meaning.

It's influenced partly by Wittgenstein, of course, but, you know, it's

interested in preserving the connections that our minds make in the process of

interpretation. And yes, I added Ginsberg to this to signal that the

Beats is a movement toward this postmodernist aesthetic.

You can actually even lump it in all together.

John Ashbery becomes one of the most...

loud voices, one of the most influential voices.

And he's difficult because he's consciously resisting the

straightforward interpretation.

He's resisting the close reading method that's really popular with

the new critics of the 60s and 70s. And he's moving toward more fluid voices

between tones and images and perspectives that really resist a

reductionistic interpretation.

A.R. Ammons explores the relationship between this chaos and order.

You've got that going on as well.

The poems are more meditative, tracing patterns of thought.

So it is in a way, poetry becomes very much like thinking in motion, thought in

motion. And whenever I've taught postmodernist poetry, I sometimes

preface it.

by reading a few metaphysical poets because I do think that the instability

of language, the ambiguities that the metaphysical poets like John Donne,

George Herbert were playing with, becomes a new tactic in this era. And

that's really related to developments in criticism, which was really turning a

new critical eye to the metaphysical poets for the first time. So these poets

were reading them. So some of these poets respond to...

historical pressures. You know, you've got the Vietnam War.

Denise Levertov has some wonderful poems in response to that.

Louise Glick is also a voice that's still very important here.

Jory Graham.

I will say Levertov beautifully combines lyrical intensity with political

engagement. And she also uses, draws in the same way that Ginsberg does from

Hebrew prophets in interesting ways.

She's addressing issues of war and social justice.

And so this is carrying forward some of the Harlem Renaissance preoccupations

and understandings of art as a tool, as a political tool.

Jory Graham, a lot of her lyrics will show how looking at the world involves

an act of careful seeing and meaning making.

Charles Olson is associated with the Black Mountain School, which takes a

more radical approach to form in his concept of projective verse.

reflects that traditional structure of poetry in favor of a more open field of

composition, where poems follow the movements of thought. So again, you have

this idea of thought becoming, playing a real role.

Poetry is interested in enacting thought in interesting ways. So that's

postmodernist poetry.

Let me say a word about postmodernist fiction.

Don DeLillo's on here, let's see, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, and I've labeled

this all the way up to today, so we have the 1960s up to now, develops under

similar circumstances that the poets are responding to. They're interested in

formal experimentations.

I mean, the main guy here is Thomas Pynchon, with his sprawling and densely

elusive novels, many of which present the world governed by hidden systems of

control.

There's a little bit of Kafkaesque there. It's a little bit of the 18th

century. Works like Gravity's Rainbow.

There is this deep suspicion beneath the surface of history.

There's this suspicion that I think is very important to the postmodernist

fiction at this time.

Don DeLillo's style is one in which reality is constantly mediated by

screens, commercials, and advertisements.

Jargon, institutional language, and...

digital meaning making. It's really difficult to distinguish in his novels

the authentic experience from the representation of those experiences in

the digital world. And that's exactly what we're wrestling with now. And with

Pynchon, you have this rise of metafiction, which is basically a mode

of writing that draws attention to its own artificiality. I mean, the

postmodernist novel is very aware in this way.

John Barth is a good example.

of this kind of writer you can get a sense that barth's novels are a self

-contained system of language and conventions there's this reflexivity

this sort of awareness of a broader cultural skepticism about grand

narratives and stable meanings and since we are reading james joyce's ulysses

in august and september of this year i will say that if you read that novel I

think it is a good precursor, a good prerequisite for studying the post

-modernist novel.

And then the last, the last moment I want to highlight here is the post-war

African-American literature, which goes, well, you could date it early 1950s all

the way up to today. Post-war Black American fiction developed

as a response to the nation still structured by racial inequality even

after formal emancipation and the constitutional promises of equality and

even in some respects after the civil rights movement Just like the Harlem

Renaissance, you can trace this back. It's very much in conversation.

You can trace the minor current here from Frederick Douglass in the 19th

century, black American authors, all the way through to the Harlem Renaissance

and this post-war African American literature tradition.

Black Americans returned from fighting in World War I and from World War II,

came back to a world that was segregated, in which they were treated

inferiorly. And this tension, between the democratic ideals and the lived

reality becomes one of those central shaping forces of the literature of this

period. And you see this going all the way back to Phyllis Wheatley, where you

have the Enlightenment ideals all in the culture about freedom and liberty and

the social reality at odds with those ideals.

James Baldwin brings a personal and analytical voice to the questions of

race.

His His prose confronts the moral contradictions of the African-American

experience in American society.

Ralph Ellison also responds to the pressure of being seen but not truly

acknowledged. Again, the title of his novel, Invisible Man, is one of those

works that does that. He also was named after Ralph Waldo Emerson.

You're picking up a connection here where the American Renaissance movement

was really...

a cradle of American literature, and even Black American literature, which

becomes really important as an extension of that movement.

So in a way, Ellison uses a high modernist style in his art, in a way

that some of the others kind of took issue with.

Toni Morrison expands the scope of African American literature.

Her work beautifully recovers the histories that have been neglected.

So she's bringing attention.

I mean, if you think of Beloved, absolutely heartbreaking.

astonishing novel is a good example of this response to that enduring trauma of

slavery and its psychological afterlives that literally haunt the scenes

and the landscapes and the people even after that's gone the ghost is a symbol

of the past that's still past and still present Again, probably start there with

her. It's absolutely wonderful.

Alice Walker's The Color Purple responds to the silences within American society

and the literary tension.

It's like, how do we get a realism to represent what these tensions are like

for our readers?

That was really a question for the prose of the post-war African-American

tradition, even up to now.

It's all a part of that representation within...

literature, which is so interesting because literature, I mean, a lot of

people love to treat literature as though, well, let's separate it from

politics and let's separate it from race and let's separate it from gender and

just look at it as it is when really like the picture is more difficult than

that. You can't separate it from spirituality, from religion, from race,

from sexuality.

personal experiences and identity as a citizen in the U.S. And so what you

see in the long arc of any nation's history, you see a long conversation

developing in literature.

And that conversation was part of what this essay tried to capture, to see how

these folks here in this cloud are speaking to the clouds all the way that

we started with in this video.

And the more you read these figures, the more you'll overhear that conversation,

that literature is not a constellation of isolated events, but it's a long

flowing stream of discourse, of dialogue, of sharing ideas, of

confronting and contesting ideas, and bringing forth something new out of

critique into innovation.

And that's what all great literature does. And so when you think about

tradition, think also about lineage in that way.

uh i hope you enjoyed this if you like my teaching i come to verse i'm i'm

bringing the academic study of literature to those outside of the

academy and all of my courses are they're all discussion based and they

all mirror the university classroom so come come check us out thanks for

watching and until next time