Reading American Modernist Poetry with High-School Seniors

Abstract

On Saturday morning this last spring, listening only lazily to an interview on National Public Radio, I heard spoken tongue-in-cheek a Chinese proverb: A fish rots from the head down. Worth at least a nod of recognition, it epitomized the dilemma at the heart of my attempts to build a poetry class for high-school seniors of the sort I would have wished for myself. For four years, I have offered a course, Poetry as Power, which is chiefly an introductory study of American modernist poetry. We begin with a base of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, then read Langston Hughes--especially his I, Too, Sing America which contains Whitmanian allusions students happily recognize-and Gwendolyn Brooks; then, but briefly, we read Rupert Brooks and Isaac Rosenberg as a thematic preface to T. S. Eliot's Hollow Men, and Ezra Pound, H. D., William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens blend into the postmoderns and contemporary voices such as Robert Lowell, Marianne Moore, Anne Sexton, Theodore Roethke, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Alice Walker, Marc Kaminsky, James Wright, the prison haiku of Etheridge Knight, and whoever else might be noticed by students as the semester progresses. Modernist poetry, especially, was wrought of a fierce aesthetic, one fist in tradition, the other yearning to make it new, that imagist phrase echoed by H. D., Pound, and Williams.