English 101: English Literature

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In this lesson, we'll go over a few more figures in Modernism who are important to understanding the breadth of the movement. We'll introduce the poet and tastemaker Ezra Pound, the writer and art enthusiast Gertrude Stein, and the fantastic short story writer Katherine Mansfield.

Even More Modernists!

So there are way more interesting people and books and things that are involved in Modernism than we can possibly cover in this course. But there are definitely still some of them whom you should be aware exist, even if we don't go into nearly as much detail about what they wrote as people like Joyce, Woolf and others we've already talked about.

It's kind of like if, back in the day, you liked *NSYNC and you might know everything there is to know about Justin Timberlake, because he was the most important one. You still knew the names of everyone else in the band, because they're important, too. We're meeting the rest of the band in this video. So they're important, just not as important. But know them anyway.

So we're making the band, fleshing it out. We're going to go over Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and Katherine Mansfield. These are all people whom you could talk about endlessly, and scholars do. I wrote my undergrad thesis on Ezra Pound's Cantos. I'm still recovering from that experience.

But we're not going to go down that road. We're not going to go into that much detail. We're going to go really fast.

Ezra Pound

So Ezra Pound. Fun fact: Have you ever met anybody from Idaho? I secretly wonder if Idaho might not really exist, or if it's just an adjective to describe potatoes. But Ezra Pound is actually from Idaho, before it was a state, even. So he's really got extra credit for that.

But like most people, he ends up in Europe. He ends up in London in 1908. He enters the literary scene. He sort of ends up as a big dog, head cheese, Modernist tastemaker. He's kind of like an 'it girl' who wears all the designers but doesn't really design clothes.

Although Pound does write poetry, he ends up being more famous for picking out people who are really, really good at what they do than he is for his own work in the end. He hangs out with all these poets, like Yeats and T.S. Eliot.

Actually, T.S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land wouldn't be what it is if Ezra Pound hadn't gone in there with his red pen and been like, 'No, no, no. Fix this.' He really was a huge influence on making The Waste Land into the awesome poem that it is, so props there. He also gets Joyce's novel A Portrait of the Artist, his first novel, he gets it published. He gets it serialized in a magazine that he had influence with.

He's into creating artistic movements. He does Imagism and he does Vorticism.

Imagism is where his most famous poem comes in. That's called In the Station of the Metro. It's really short, so I will just read it to you:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

So it's super short. That's what Imagism is all about: really short, imagistic things. That's what he was into.

He pulls the airplane slide and leaves London in 1920. He's kind of disillusioned. He publishes another famous poem, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, that's about that. Then he spends the rest of his life writing The Cantos, which is this unfinished 800 page epic poem that I mentioned before I had the pleasure of writing a thesis on.

He also becomes a fascist in Italy, which makes him not too popular with most people and rightly so. That's Ezra Pound.

Gertrude Stein

Moving right along, we're going to go to Gertrude Stein. She is another American expat. She's living in Paris. She's played by Kathy Bates in the recent Woody Allen film Midnight in Paris.

She was running an art gallery with her brother, Leo. They were really into displaying all the famous Modern painting works, like Picasso, Matisse and Cezanne. They were right in the middle of the art scene.

She's also a writer herself. She writes these difficult-to-understand fiction, poems, she kind of does it all. They're mostly characterized by wordplay as greater than meaning. She's more interested in how words sound.

A classic Steinian phrase is 'A rose is a rose is a rose.' What does that mean? I don't know. But it sounds kind of cool, and that's Stein in a nutshell. A classic example of this kind of work is Tender Buttons, which she writes in 1914.

She's also a famous lesbian. She entered a long-term relationship with another American expat named Alice B. Toklas. She wrote about that The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which isn't actually an autobiography because Gertrude Stein wrote it. It's a little bit more accessible than the weird Tender Buttons stuff. It's still a little weird.

Basically, like Pound in London, she's most famous for being this tastemaker in Paris. She knows lots of people. She runs a salon. She runs an art gallery. That's Gertrude Stein. And she also writes kind of weird stuff and was a famous lesbian.

Katherine Mansfield

Onward and upward, we've got one more and her name is Katherine Mansfield. She is living in London, back across the Channel. She's actually originally from New Zealand, which is kind of cool because I thought that only hobbits lived there. But Katherine Mansfield is from there, too.

She lived a pretty bohemian lifestyle. She had relationships with men and with women. She also had some bad situations. She got pregnant from her lover, then she had a failed marriage.

Her mom swooped in and sent her off to Germany to go and kind of figure it out. That's actually where she discovers the Russian writer Anton Chekov, who ended up having a huge influence on her as a writer. So that was good in the end that she ended up in Germany.

She comes back to London and she starts publishing short stories, which is really what she's most famous for. She ends up getting married and she and her husband were really good friends with another Modernist, D.H. Lawrence, whom we talk about in another video.

Things are always a little rocky in her marriage. She doesn't live the most placid and smooth life.

Her work is interesting. It's not necessarily as aggressively weird as a lot of Modernist works. But it does follow this idea of capturing the moment and evoking rather than describing. She's still really quite innovative, but her stuff actually tends to be a lot more readable than some of the other things in the Modernist movement.

She ends up dying really young at the age of 34. She dies of tuberculosis, which is very sad. But she was extremely prolific for such a short life. She wrote tons of stuff. And like I said before, it's all reasonably accessible. So that's Katherine Mansfield.

Lesson Summary

We've talked about Modernism's other folks. We're going to do a quick review.

Ezra Pound is a poet, a tastemaker, an American expat living in London. He's famous for starting movements, like Imagism (as in his poem In the Station of the Metro). Later, he turned into a fascist and wrote The Cantos.

Gertrude Stein is an American expat in Paris. She kind of runs the art scene. She runs a gallery. She writes weird, nonsensical stuff, like Tender Buttons. She also writes about her relationship with Alice B. Toklas in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

Then we've got Katherine Mansfield, who's New Zealand-born and she goes to London. She's famous for writing really good short stories. She was influenced by Chekhov when she was living in Germany.

Those are the other Modernists.

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