A New Perspective

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A New Perspective

Poets in American history have struggled over time to create or find a distinct American voice among the many different cultural influences and borrowed styles. Each era of poets contributed to the search in a slightly different way, but it was the modernists that really sought to make poetry new. A group to these modernists, called the expatriates, thought that the only way to obtain a new voice would be to escape any ties with old traditions, and to leave the country that held them captive in an inspirationaless environment. Turned off by America, they left for Europe only to rediscover America, and in turn, contribute enormously to the growth and development of the American voice.

Many reasons surround the great expatriate movement but the majority left because they felt America had nothing to offer but oppression. Writers in America were viewed as suspicious and were given no respect (Couteau, 1). Europe offered artistic freedom unlike the leftover American Puritanism and new commercialism that were hostile to the writer (Earnest, 254). William Carlos Williams stated that this heritage had produced "a race incapable of flower," and that America had "become the most lawless country in the civilized world...a generation of gross know-nothingism, of blackened churches where hymns groan like chants from stupefied jungles" (Earnest, 254). Ezra Pound echoed the artists' complaints in his poem The Rest (Ellmann, 500).

O helpless few in my country,

O remnant enslaved!

Artists broken against her,

A-stray, lost in the villages,

Mistrusted, spoken-against,

Lovers of beauty, starved

Thwarted with systems,

Helpless against the control;

You who can not wear yourselves out

By persisting to successes...

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...ions from Gordon Dahlquist.

Gertrude Stein...A new Music Opera. Copyright 2000

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McCarthy, Harold T. The Expatriate Perspective. New Jersey: Associated University Presses, Inc. 1974.

Pioch, Nicolas. "Picasso and Cubism." Webmuseum, Paris. Dec 31, 1995

http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/tl/20th/cubism.html

"The Rest." The New Oxford Book of American Verse. Ed. Richard Ellmann. New York: Oxford UP, 1976. 500-501.

Rodenbeck, Judith. Insistent Presence in Picasso's Portrait of Gertrude Stein. Columbia University, 1995.

http://www.showgate.com/tots/picasso/picstein.html

Hyperlinked version researched, formatted and updated: Jun., 1996/Jan., 1998/Mar., 1999/Dec., 1999 by Robert Fisher.

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