Bifurcated Narratives in the Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, C. K. Williams, and Denis Johnson

Abstract

Narrative innovation is a nearly ubiquitous fact of modernist poetic practice. In the context of the defining narratives of high modernism—Hart Crane's The Bridge, T. S. Eliot's "The Wasteland," Ezra Pound's Cantos, and William Carlos Williams's Paterson—poets experimented with narrative structure to produce what Albert Gelpi calls, paraphrasing Crane, "epic[s] of modern consciousness" (406). These experimental narratives tended to be disjointed and, influenced by cubism and other experimental forms of visual art, attempted to represent modern consciousness itself. According to Crane, such work did not follow a linear structure but instead followed "the logic of metaphor" or, as Crane wrote in a letter about his own epic narrative, "the structure of my dreams" (qtd. in Gelpi 406, 407). In the case of Pound and Eliot, the deployment of narrative fragmentation and disintegration works as an organizing strategy, a method of cubist assemblage, particularly in The Cantos and "The Wasteland," that compels the reader to construct an emotional coherence out of the text's manifold discontinuities.