<span xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:m="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" style="font-style:italic;">Six Modernist Moments in Poetry</span> (review)

Abstract

Six Modernist Moments Poetry. David Young. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006. xiv + 175 pp. $29.95 (cloth). These are six rooms, David Young tells us by way of introduction, in my gallery of modernist (ix). Young's latest book, Six Modernist Moments Poetry, offers readers a stimulating tour of his gallery, featuring of six modernist poets: Rainer Maria Rilke's Bowl of Roses, William Butler Yeats's Among School Children, Wallace Stevens's Sunday Morning, William Carlos Williams's January Morning, Marianne Moore's An Octopus, and Eugenio Montale's Mediterranean. Young's experience and skills as a poet, translator, and teacher result an engaging and accessible reading experience for general readers, as well as a thought-provoking analysis for scholars. Young provides a personal rationale for why he selected these six poets and why these six poems. The book, he states, is outcome of an encounter with modern poetry that began for him as a freshman at college when he pulled Stevens's The Auroras of Autumn off a library book shelf. Consequently, book is culmination, what Young describes as composite portrait, of many years of studying, teaching, translating, composing, and loving poetry. His conclusion is this: the modernist narrative is really many narratives at once and that modernist poetic practice as I understand and value it can best be demonstrated through close attention to six exemplary poems (ix). He presents each poem its entirety at opening of a chapter devoted to its exploration. The inclusion of these should be a valued introduction for some readers and a welcomed reentry point for others. Following poem, Young offers his readers a thorough, clearly written close reading. For chapters devoted to Rilke and Montale's poems, he provides his own lucid translations which, given his extensive experience translating their works, further aid ensuing explications. In his introduction, Young states, It's my hope that grouping them together and examining them company of someone who has spent a lot of time with them will prove a helpful experience for (x). By reading this book, one undoubtedly will be helped to see interpretive nuances of each poem. It is as though a master poetic guide leads you through textual ambiguity helping you to both see and understand modernist aesthetic. A case point is his presentation of final section of Yeats's Among School Children. He patiently guides readers to conclusion that contains most inconclusive images and its slipperiest (38). He convincingly points out: The reader can, for example, decide that final lines introduce a resounding unity or that they open up a gulf that reveals a crisis of meaning and signification. However, articulation of such resolutions and chasms is a choice that a reader makes, not a conclusion so firmly built into poem that no one can argue it or mistake its meaning. (42) Such a comment reminds me of best teachers I had as a student. In Young's case, he aims to open up interpretive possibilities for his readers, while not foregoing an appreciation and understanding of language and structure created by poet. It is not about reducing poem to a single interpretation, rather it is about illustrating to his readers how poem plays with language and offers us possibility to engage it imaginatively. Of six modernists Young's book, three of them-Williams, Moore, and Stevens-are Americans who stayed at home to write rather than travel to Europe. Their selection indicates part of Young's purpose for this study. [l]f modernist art was to be truly valid, applicable to every place and every culture, he argues, then it could and should be naturalized and practiced on American soil (xii). Young admits his introduction that his appreciation for Williams came later, for it took him longer to hear music. …