Realism and Poetry

American poetic realism still remains a largely unknown and untold story. Although it came to American poetry relatively late by comparison with fiction, the typical American realist poem has a distinctive nexus combining theme, diction, and style. Chief among the first American realists are Robert Frost, Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg, and Sara Teasdale. Specifically, realist poetry expresses a pragmatic philosophy rejecting the individual’s location in the world as something knowable, fixed, and stable. Realist poets reject as amoral and quietist the commitment to beauty for the sake of beauty and tend toward virtues associated with masculinity. Their poetry rejects generic nouns in favor of particulars and depicts recognizable contemporary landscapes and, above all, contemporary American cities such as Chicago, Boston, or New York. It emphasizes the interior space of the self as revealed by the new science of psychology. It also focuses on the living idiom of talk and speech rather than a “literary” language.

Footprints of the Twentieth Century

This chapter examines how modern American poetry dealt with skyscrapers as a theme during the 1910s. The most potent icons of modernity in the early twentieth-century city were great buildings, structures of unprecedented scale and grandeur that punctuated the skyline and symbolized the metropolitan ethos. Carrying a wide range of symbolic meanings, skyscrapers and other great buildings, such as Manhattan's Metropolitan Life Insurance Building, drew strong interest from anyone seeking to represent urban modernity, from painters and sculptors to photographers, commercial artists, and the many Americans who began writing city poems in the early 1910s, including Sara Teasdale, Harriet Monroe, and Carl Sandburg. This chapter discusses the American poet's fascination with the skyscraper, which commands attention not only for its enormous degree of visual prominence but also for its tremendous, if profoundly paradoxical, signifying power.

Poems by a Suicide: Sara Teasdale

An analysis of trends over time in the poems of Sara Teasdale as the time of her suicide approached identified a decrease in positive emotions and fewer references to the self and to others. These trends are different from those previously identified from studies of letters and diaries written by suicides.