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  • Chapter 29 - The Romantic and Anti-Romantic in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens

  • from Part III - Forms of Modernism, 1900–1950
  • Edited by Alfred Bendixen, Princeton University, New Jersey, Stephen Burt, Harvard University, Massachusetts
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of American Poetry
    Published online:
    05 December 2014
    Print publication:
    27 October 2014, pp 650-669

  • Summary

    T.S.Eliot was the figure who defined modernist poetry for educated Americans. His isolated childhood had produced considerable alienation from quotidian society, making it necessary for him ultimately to find a sense of belonging only in a relation to transcendental domain. The Waste Land has five sections that are beautifully correlated with the movements of Beethoven's quartets. Each builds on juxtapositions and allusions to reflect a different aspect of spiritual crisis. The poem asks whether there is an alternative to this death by water, and so whether there is any possibility of reading water as baptismal. After The Waste Land Eliot was done with trying by secular poetry to establish a spiritual core for his culture. He devoted his secular energies to founding and editing the review The Criterion, which from 1922 to 1939 tried to represent the best writing in Europe about its cultural dilemmas.