Modernist Poets E.E. Cummings, Wallace Stevens, and T.S....

Modernist Poets E.E. Cummings, Wallace Stevens, and T.S. Eliot Change the Face of American Poetry Modernist poets such as E.E. Cummings, Wallace Stevens, and T.S. Eliot changed the face of American poetry by destroying the notion that American culture is far inferior to European culture. These and other American poets accomplished the feat of defining an American poetic style in the Modern Era by means of a truly American idea. That idea is the melting pot. Just as American culture exists as a mixture of races, beliefs, and ideas, the new American style of poetry exists as a mixture of old English styles with a new concept of the international style. Modern poets experiment with language, theme, and convention to cleanse language†¦show more content†¦Pound was showing influence from the fourteenth-century Italian poets such as Guido Cavalcanti. In their works that follow their time in Europe, both Eliot and Pound display a hybridization of English and French and Italian ideas. Cummings began to imitate French Modernist poets Guillaume Apollinaire and Stephane Mallarmà © . He also adopted an aesthetic based on the manifestos of French Surrealists and Dadaists, who detached literature from referential meaning and linked it to experimental play (McQuade 1235). Such experimental play is seen in Cummings poem [she being brand] in which the creatively formed words and syntax give the image of a young mans thoughts, feelings, and actions upon driving his new car: again slo-wly; bare,ly nudg. ing (Cummings 15). The use of punctuation gives a vivid image of his thoughts as he carefully puts the stiff transmission into gear. Into another Cummings poem, [in Just-], we see more experimental play with the words to create the impression of the way excited children talk: and eddieandbill come running from marbles and piracies and its spring (Cummings 6). Wallace Stevens was influenced by French poetry and art. Stevens often intertwined French and English in sentences, as in the line from The Plain Sense of Things: We had come to an end of the imagination / Inanimate in an inert savoir (Stevens 4-5). Stevens style seemed to imitate the French