Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore

What I noticed about both Stevens and Moore is that they seem to jump around a lot. Sometimes they have real solid rhythms and real solid rhymes but other times they seem to just go free verse. It’s a bit hard to get use to. One paragraph will be very floaty and rhyme very well and then the next is just incredibly hard to read. It could be that there is some rhyme scheme going on that I just cant get unless someone else read it but most of the time reading it I couldn’t find any or the rhyme was just obvious. I’m not very familiar with rhyme so that could a big part of it. I am by far a novice with the terms as well.
One that I did notice is that there was a great deal of alliteration in Wallace’s poems even though it often didn’t seem to add to the flow at all. "The Idea of Order at Key West" by Wallace Stevens had a great deal of rhyming plays in it. In line 13 Stevens uses a weird version of what I guess you could consider alliteration. It says “The grinding water and the gasping wind.” I found this so odd because it is just repeating the first letter of two words in a row later in the same sentence. Its almost like the end of the sentence is a mirrored image of the beginning. I do not know much about the background of Stevens but I would not be surprised if I came to find out he was not well respected by many for his poetry because a lot of sentences seem like they are cheating with rhyme schemes. An example of this is in line 6 when it says “Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry.” He repeats words as a rhyme. I always thought using the same word to make something rhyme was kind of the cardinal sin in poetry or music but he does it without any fear. One other thing I noticed he does is he often changes where the rhyming word in a sentence is.
Moore does a lot of the same things. In “Nevertheless” there is a rhyme scheme that goes on through out the whole poem but it feels offset when words repeat. The poem goes in sets of three lines where the last word of the second line and the third line rhyme. The repetition of a word in the sentence does not occur in all of them but it does throw you off when it does. An example is in lines 22 to 24 where it says “to me unless I go/ to it; a grape-tendril/ ties knots in knots till.” The words tendril and till are the words that rhyme and knot is the word that repeats. The next paragraph as well does this with under and stir being the rhyming words and gone is the repeating word.

The Waste Land....ummmm....uhhhhh....yeaaaaa....

Upon reading this I initially thought “Wow this isn’t that bad. I’m enjoying this and I get what he is saying.” However, before I got to chapter II I realized I was wrong and soon began to hate how confusing it would get. It may have been because my brain is a bit fried due to mid-terms but I would read entire chapters and made no sense of them. In regards to ways he is different from other modernists is that I found he doesn’t say things straight forward. The modernists’ movement seemed like there was a pretty universal understanding that a message should be presented without all the extra verbal foliage. Everything was either a metaphor or an allusion or both. These were used by other modernists but their poetry never depended on it like this did. Also one thing I noticed about this that I hadn’t seen before was that it was like a mobius strip. It tended to loop back over the same stuff and end where it began but it was always changing as well. I enjoyed that form.

Ways in which it embodied modernism was that it still struggles with where humanity is going and that whole depersonalization. Another way is that he conveys feelings and thoughts without simply explaining them. The modernists tended to go for the feelings and thoughts that can’t be explained only conveyed by examples and literary devices. He gave a real sense of detachment. An example of how he conveys something you can’t simply describe is the entirety of chapter II. He puts you in the moment and there is soooo much tension going on between him and the woman. He made it seem like he was being hunted or stalked in some way. He was the pray and she was the hunter. It can be described but you can never fully understand it unless you are put there in that situation. He does that very well. I’m not sure what else to say about it. I’ve pretty much read through it twice so far and I feel like I would need to have a conversation about it and analyze it with other people before I could understand it any better. If this isn’t in depth enough then after next class I think I could revise this and could go much more in depth. At this point though I’m stuck.