The Difficulties of Modernism

Speaking at Harvard in the early 1950s, the poet Randall Jarrell noted that he had been asked to talk about the “Obscurity of the Poet.” Jarrell commented that his assigned topic did not mean that he was to talk about a timeless quality of art, but was instead to speak on something that had come to prominence in the first half of the century. Its outlines could be sketched with precision: That the poetry of the first half of this century was too difficult—just as the poetry of the eighteenth century was full of antitheses, that of the metaphysicals full of conceits, that of the Elizabethan dramatists full of rant and quibbles—is a truism that it would be absurd to deny. How our poetry got this way—how romanticism was purified and exaggerated and “corrected” into modernism; how poets carried all possible tendencies to their limits, with more than scientific zeal; how the dramatic monologue, which once had depended for its effect upon being a departure from the norm of poetry, now became in one form.