Popularity: -2
Vote:   | And how can poetry stand up against its new conditions? Its position is perfectly precarious. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | And it does not seem too hazardous to claim that poetry, as one of the formal arts, has for its specific problem to play a dual role with words: to conduct a logical sequence with their meanings on the one hand, and to realize an objective pattern with their sounds on the other. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | And yet what is Modernism? It is undefined. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | But we moderns are impatient and destructive. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | Emphasizing the newness of the matter, and the spontaneity of the Word, which was sacrosanct with all its edge and pungence just as it came forth, they were obliged to make their meters more elastic to accommodate their novelties. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | For no art and no religion is possible until we make allowances, until we manage to keep quiet the enfant terrible of logic that plays havoc with the other faculties. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | For their consecutive verses, wherein they laboriously round of the stanza, are as a string of beads, all of a size, a monstrosity of construction; and the individual lines, as they come to their inevitable climactic rhyme, fall into foolish platitudes, and are puerile. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | He can develop sense and style, in the manner of distinguished modern prose, in which event he may be sure that the result will not fall into any objective form. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | In poetry the Imagists, in our time and place, made a valiant effort to formulate their program. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | It is a miracle of harmony, of the adaptation of the free inner life to the outward necessity of things. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | Now between the meanings of words and their sounds there is ordinarily no discoverable relation except one of accident; and it is therefore miraculous, to the mystic, when words which make sense can also make a uniform objective structure of accents and rhymes. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | Or he can work it out as a metrical and formal exercise, but he will be disappointed in its content. The New Year's prospect fairly chills his daunting breast. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | The arts generally have had to recognize Modernism--how should poetry escape? |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The future of poetry is immense? One is not so sure in these days, since it has felt the fatal irritant of Modernism. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | The intelligent poet of today is very painfully perched in a position which he cannot indefinitely occupy: vulgarly, he is straddling the fence, and cannot with safety land on either side. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Their free verse was no form at all, yet it made history. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Thence their archaisms, their inversions, their illegal accents, for their audience appreciated the difficulties under which they labored; or else wanted the main experience of poetry, and were willing to disregard the invidious details. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | They conceived the first duty of the Moderns as being to disembarrass poetry of its terrible incubus of piety, in the full classical sense of that term, and they rendered the service. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | They know they cannot at once, waiving all immunities, realize the standards of style and at the same time meet the requirements of their meter. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Till now poets were privileged to insert a certain proportion of nonsense--very far in excess of one-half of one per cent--into their otherwise sober documents. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Too much is demanded by the critic, attempted by the poet. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | When critics are waiting to pounce upon poetic style on exactly the same grounds as if it were prose, the poets tremble. |