Outline Ch. 5 Hoffman's "The Twenties"

I. The Image and Last Year's Magazines
a. "Experiment in Modern American literature began with the vigorous effort of a few persons to revise the status of the arts and to redefine the artists responsibilities." (Hoff 191) Pound was a prevalent figure in this movement.
b. "Pound was motivated by the purest of disinterested conviction: that literature was in a very bad way; that new writers, not yet established, could do much to improve it; that these writers needed every chance they could get to free themselves for the major work, the development of their talent. Pound felt that developments in the ‘new poetry' and the ‘new literature' should have their beginnings in moral definition." (Hoff 192)
c. "The artists must communicate his thought in terms of his art; this is essential to the survival and health of a civilization. If an artist has talent-if he is not from the beginning a fraud who exploits, gives in to, or shares the blame for sins against good taste- he should be encouraged to communicate and to learn how to communicate. Pound saw gloomily in 1913 that the artist, if he had an insight that did not conform, risked neglect or scorn when he tried to present it." (Hoff 193). Art should depict true and meaningfulness to be considered valuable art.
d. "The moral key to his aesthetic is the term integrity- which however variously defined and used in Pound's writings, means the artist's responsibility to communicate precisely, in whatever medium he has chosen, the idea, emotion, complex of ideas and emotions, with which he has originally inspired or moved." (Hoff 194)
e. "From about 1910 the influence of French writing grew steadily; the war, which brought many Americans newly to France and encouraged numbers of them to stay, was perhaps the most important factor in the change from AngloSaxon to French influence upon American writings. The first clearly defined development in experimental literature has classified in literary histories as Imagism. (Hoff 197)
f. "This was an absolute minimum of art; anything not crucially related to the complex was considered irrelevant, dishonest, false." (Hoff 199) "Any unnecessary word, whatever the incentive for including it, interfered with the directness of the treatment and was by that much a loss of precision, a moral and artistic defection." (Hoff 200) . "In spite of differences, French symbolism was not a negligible influence in the formation of modern American poetry. Both symbolism and Imagism were concerned with a poetry that vividly expresses states of consciousness." (Hoff 202). Poetry should be simple and pure, not extravagant of superficial.
g. "Fundamentally the lesson of modern poetry was one of restoring the communicative varieties and precisions in the language."(Hoff 204)

II. Some "Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads in Them"
a. "For these writers, poetry was experimental in its very nature; the writing of it was a continuous experience of discovery." (Hoff 205). "The poetry of Stevens, Williams, and Marianne Moore illustrates an important truth of the literature of the 1920's. Each wished to see the world in his own way and to evaluate it in his own terms." (Hoff 216).

III. The Color and Shape of the Thing Seen: Gertrude Stein
a. "Paris was a training ground for young writers, and in 1922 it was richly endowed with teachers of the craft."(Hoff 218). "The naturalist offered Hemingway and his generation of writers a sense of liberation form the limitations of subject matter; and they had at least begun the battle against the ‘genteel' critics at the turn of the century, had made the victory over them possible." (Hoff 219)
b. "More important was the naturalist's interest in violence, his experiments in the description of physical action." (Hoff 219). Progress in a narrative is the distribution of time, movement in terms of accretion, accumulation, essential sameness and subtle shades of difference." (Hoff 222)

IV. "Cry I! I! I! Forever.."
a. "The general attitude toward marriage during the years 1915-1930 was one of free criticism; there was a search for alternative arrangements between the sexes, within and without marital bounds. The novels of the period were filled with debate and discussion of sexual morality." (Hoff 229) Women began to rebel against society's patriarchal standards, and they attained suffrage rights.
b. Freud, Jung, Adler, and other psychoanalysts became widely popular in the 1920's and their views were reflected in some of the literature written at the time.

V. "Pure Psychic Automatism: Some Extremes of Improvisation"
a. "Dadaism was a series of attacks upon decorum and convention of all sorts. Dadaism was a violent attempt to kill off Western civilization through ridicule and laughter." (Hoff 241)
b. "Dada was a joke..it was against all systems, defied all logic and reason..it stressed the absolute significance of nothing." (Hoff 242). "From the beginning, however, surrealism was more than an experiment in the arts. Like Dadaism, it developed a strategy of attack against the conventional world, wherever that world seemed to offend the surrealist taste." (Hoff 243).

VI. Mr. Zero and Other Ciphers: Experiments on the Stage
a. "The American theatre in the 1920s was overwhelmed by experiment of one kind and another: it tried to represent life more concretely through abstractions, tried to moralize, satirize, lyricize in terms of new manipulations of space and movement, new concepts and sequences of dialogue, new versions of characterization." (Hoff 249-250))
b. "From Europe came the movement called most often expressionism. It affected all the arts, was especially striking in its demonstrations in German films and architecture." (Hoff 250)

VII. The Text: Hart Crane's "The Bridge": Crisis in Experiment
a. "The true meaning of experiment in modern American literature may be found, after close study, in Hart Crane's fifteen-poem symbolic reading of America, "The Bridge".(Hoff 257). "In short, Whitman was Crane's guide through the inferno of the 1920's, and, more than that, became a divine and mythical spirit to lead him safely to ‘Atlantis'; Whitman took over from Columbus in the journey to Cathay." (Hoff 262)