[MUSIC] Hi, I'm Melissa Gerard, a professor at Loyola University Maryland. And I'll be talking today about modernist women's poetry and the sentimental tradition. In the late teens, in early 1920s, a new generation of women poets, dominated the American poetry scene. Edna St Vincent Millay was the widely acknowledge leader of this loose group, which also included Louise Bogan, Sara Teasdale, Genevieve Taggard, and Elinor Wylie, among other women poets whose names we've now forgotten. They won dozens of prestigious awards and inspired legions of devoted fans. Thanks in large part to the success of Teasdale's 1918 collection Love Songs, intricately crafted formal love poems written by women for women became one of the Modernist era's dominant poetic trends. In 1918, Love Songs was awarded the Columbia Prize for Poetry despite strong competition from more than 500 books including T.S. Eliot's Prufrock and Other Observations, HD's Sea Garden and Ezra Pound's Lustra. When the popular and formally conventional Love Songs was chosen from among this innovative field, it sparked critical controversy. In Poetry Magazine, Harriet Monroe went so far as to question the credibility of the judges. Although Monroe did congratulate Teasdale, she praised Love Song solely for its refreshing simplicity. Such superficial appreciation was typical of Teasdale's modernist critics. Even today, many critics still dismiss Teasdale as a popular, but insubstantial poet. Let's take a look. I'll begin with Teasdale's poem The Kiss. It's a brief, eight line poem that describes a young woman's romantic disillusionment. I hoped that he would love me, And he has kissed my mouth, But I am like a stricken bird That cannot reach the south. For though I know he loves me, Tonight my heart is sad. His kiss was not so wonderful As all the dreams I had. Edna St. Vincent Millay called The Kiss perfect. And considered it to be one of Teasdale's finest poems. All her little songs are like that, Millay said. You think they're going to be like something else you've read but they never are. What makes The Kiss new and modern the is way it subverts traditional romantic paradigms. In Teasdale's poetry love is no longer a drama between and man and a woman but between a woman and herself. In the modernist era American women gained new freedoms including the right to vote. But the kiss suggests that the new woman is still constrained by the same inherited romantic scripts. By highlighting the gap between a woman's romantic dreams and the realities of modern love, Teasdale critiques prevailing gender and sexual ideologies. Her self symbolizes a scene of sexual equality and independence, desire unfettered by gendered norms, which she believes the modern woman has yet to reach. Teasdale's direct, concise style was also revolutionary for the period. Like Emily Dickinson, Teasdale wrote predominately in quatrains and was unafraid of the nursery rhyme rhythms of common measure. That means alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter. Teasdale's embrace of the shortened three and four beat lines that would become her signature was part of a broader revolt in American women's poetry against the dominance of iambic pentameter. Although Teasdale's style may seem simple to us today, she was pursuing some of the same formal goals as her Imagist contemporaries. And like HD and Ezra Pound, she was also inspired by Sappho's poetry in particular. Even today in the 21 century we don't always take women's romantic lives and experiences seriously. Phrases like girl talk trivialize women's thoughts and feelings. And genres like Chick Lit separate women writers and readers from serious literature. Some of Modernism's most important literary works document a crisis of masculinity. For example, T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. To name only a few of these Modernist masterpieces. Teasdale launched a women's love lyric tradition that revolutionized femininity for the jazz age. Along with her poetry, Teasdale also edited an anthology, Answering Voice, Love Lyrics by Women, which collected some of the period's most important love poems. In the preface, Teasdale notes with pleasure, the explosion of women's writing in the 1920s. It is undeniable, Teasdale says, that a new impotence has been given to women to express themselves in poetry. Furthermore, she continues, these Modernist era poems differ radically in feeling from the poems of the previous generation. One finds little now of that ingratiating dependence upon the beloved, those vows of eternal and unwavering adoration, which filled the poems of even the sincerest of women of the times before our own. One finds little, too, of the pathetic despair so often present in the earlier work. As Teasdale suggests this new spirit of autonomy and independence runs throughout women's poetry in the 1920s. These new feelings about love, sex, and marriage transformed modern American poetry. [MUSIC]
