Literary Evolution: Symbolism, American Lyricism, Avant-Garde
Baudelaire: Poetic Revolution and Symbolism
Charles Baudelaire, positioned before the advent of Symbolism, is credited with a poetic revolution that allowed poetry to transition into its modern form. Later, Arthur Rimbaud, a quintessential “damned poet,” embodied the bohemian life of Paris, a man of great talent and intelligence.
His seminal work, Flowers of Evil, introduced new elements and demonstrated a progression of poems within the book. As the work advances, various options for escaping the anguish of life are presented, yet the poetry ultimately feels empty. Baudelaire considered his poetry to be crafted from an intellectual domain, not from romantic rapture; it neither teaches nor moralizes. He was prosecuted for the scandalous conduct of some poems.
Baudelaire depicts vice as a flight from reality, indicating a clear desire to lose himself in pleasures and evil to avoid boredom. The city was one of the new areas he explored; it was a place of contrasts that both attracted and repelled him, a place of change but also of misery. Baudelaire’s work approaches Decadence, Parnassianism, and Symbolism, coinciding significantly with the latter. We see the poet creating something new, giving meaning to things through symbols. He believed in “correspondences,” where affinities between phenomena enter through the sensations, thus producing a harmony that fuses opposites rather than leading to confusion or mere perceptions.
American Lyric Poetry: Whitman and Dickinson
In contrast to Baudelaire, American lyric poets often celebrated life as it is.
Walt Whitman
His major work, Leaves of Grass, sings with emotion about the self, the body, his country, and its land. Whitman’s poetry is characterized by optimism and love towards life and human beings. His style is real, concrete, and energetic, often based on repetitions.
Emily Dickinson
Dickinson’s lyricism is marked by intimacy with an individual self, reflecting a woman’s vision of love and loneliness. Her short poems are notable for their concentrated expression.
The Avant-Garde Movements
The Avant-Garde movements shared four constant traits:
- Rupture: A common rejection of and break with tradition or old styles, exemplifying the cult of new, modern art.
- Experimentation: A search for new languages and forms of expression, leading to significant artistic freedom.
- Culture of Image: Emphasis on visual and symbolic representation.
- Provocation: A deliberate challenge to established norms and sensibilities.
These movements broke with the idea that language should primarily seek beauty or sentimentality.
Cubism
Originating in France, Cubism involved the decomposition of reality, leading to unexpected associations. It introduced simultaneity, the appearance of distinct acts in time and space at the same moment. Cubism rejected sentimentality and intellectualism, favoring images based on illogical elements. It also introduced calligrammatic writing and other forms that broke with the classical idea of verse or rhyme, sometimes even eliminating punctuation marks.
Futurism
Beginning in Italy with the Futurist Manifesto written by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Futurism emphasized strength, energy, and dynamism, often attacking traditional senses. There was a strong cult of machines, speed, cars, and technology. Its language broke with usual forms of syntax, opting for a new lexicon rich in technical terms. Italian Futurists often embraced ideas that aligned with fascist notions of force and vigor.
Surrealism
Born from the ashes of Dada, Surrealism was characterized by absolute rebelliousness against Western societal values, defending spontaneity that liberates humanity from social conventions and moral rules. Surrealists believed there could be no distinction between Surrealism and life; rather, the movement had to be a way to approach life and reflect on the person. They aimed to end everything that confined humanity: oppressive political and economic standards, moral, and aesthetic conventions.
Surrealism sought a different life, beyond the normal and the real, incorporating the irrational—the neglected side of humanity. They were profoundly attracted to dreams for several reasons:
- In dreams, repression imposed by the subconscious is attenuated.
- Dreams are a creation of the subconscious.
- Dreams create something that is within us but feels foreign.
- In dreams, imagination reigns, a true logic that is not governed by usual logic, allowing for dream creation without following previous aesthetic or moral rules.
Surrealists utilized automatism, specifically automatic writing, which involved writing without a prior plan or conscious thought, so that neither reason, ideas, nor aesthetics would guide them; much was written from the unconscious. They also employed unexpected encounters and chance, which became recurring themes in Surrealism. A major theme was love, often “mad love,” resulting in poetry full of imagination. As they were against the traditional idea of the artist, they often practiced collective works where chance was again a significant element.