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Modernist Poetics of Adolescence
IN 1981 THE Los Angeles punk band Rhino 39 made its third appearance on record, on the compilation LP American Youth Report; Rhino 39âs anthemic âJ. Alfredâ took all its words from T. S. Eliotâs âLove Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,â snarling and yelping through Eliotâs âLet us go then, you and Iâ; âI have heard the mermaids singingâ; and other lines (though not the whole poem). For these punk rockers, Eliotâs poem of hesitant anxietyâidentified by John Berryman as the site at which âmodern poetry beginsââbecame a fit emblem for the energies, anxieties, uncertainties, and aggressions of modern adolescence (Berryman, Freedom, 270). Rhino 39 got their scholarship partly wrong: Eliotâs backward-looking Prufrock, who sees himself proleptically as middle-aged, belongs not to modern adolescence, with its unchaperoned dates and peer-group slang, but to a pattern of Gilded Age social life in which courtship involved âcalling onâ young women at adult-sponsored social events or at home (Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat). Though he began the poem at Harvard, Eliot was living in France and England during the years when the newer American system of dates, public entertainments, and self-consciously youthful taste cultures came into its own.
Yet Rhino 39 got something right. Not only does American modernist poetry, in retrospect, permit contemporary adolescents to see versions of themselves, but some American modernists (though not Eliot, with his âstrenuous insistence on his own maturityâ) took a sustained and self-conscious interest in adolescence, in the kinds of experience and the new kinds of persons associated with young men and women in their teens and early twenties (Rosen, âLost Youth,â 487). Poetsâ responses to the new American adolescentsâin high schools, in colleges, in cars, and on city streetsâmake up a neglected side of American modernism. Little magazines and their editors echoed the celebratory views of adolescence they found in social and psychological thought. During the late 1910s and 1920s, William Carlos Williams embraced, but complicated, his peersâ devotion to the new American youth. Marianne Moore, however, rejected the types (and stereotypes) of youth that her peers embraced; she drew forms and ideas instead from her own experience at a womenâs college, where students found more freedom and more respect than the adult world would give.
Adolescent peer groups emerged in America simultaneously as a cultural idea and as demographic, economic, and institutional fact. Between 1890 and 1920, total (public and private) high school âenrollment approximately doubled every decadeâ; between 1900 and 1929, âa new high school opened every dayâ (Macleod, Age of the Child, 149; Mintz, Huckâs Raft, 175). Howard Chudacoff explains that âthe growth of junior high schools, high schools, and, especially, colleges after the turn of the century ⌠provided environments in which adolescents and young adults could increasingly insulate themselves.â1 âThe public high school,â Joseph Kett writes, âenabled âthe mass reclassification of young people in school as adolescents,â even if many working-class young people did not or could not attend (Rites of Passage, 235, 243).2 Parallel changes took place on evenings and weekends, as public entertainments (arcades, movie theaters, dance halls) and streetcars let urban young people gather in groups, or on dates. âAs never before,â Kevin White adds, âthe period of youth began to be comprehended as a distinctive time of life with its own patterns of norms, mores and values,â such as dating and âpettingâ (The First Sexual Revolution, 17â18).3
This visible social change inspired new theories of youth, foremost among them the psychologist G. Stanley Hallâs two-volume Adolescence (1904).4 Hall addressed his work âonly to those still adolescent in soulâ and wrote that âthe best definition of genius is intensified and prolonged adolescenceâ (1:viii, 2:90â91). Deploying a raft of sometimes contradictory qualities and superlatives, from malleability to determination, from sexual energy to religious faith, Hall opined (echoing Wordsworthâs description of infants) that adolescentsâ âtrailing clouds of glory usher in a new inner dawn ⌠that only poetry can ever describe, which it has not yet adequately done, but which I believe it is its very highest function to doâ (2:302). Hallâs book sold 25,000 copies in a year, and markedâif it did not help causeâa great change in how Americans viewed the life course (Ross, G. Stanley Hall, 336). Writing in 1950, the poet and critic Louise Bogan included Hallâs Adolescence in her short list of books important to modernist poets (Achievement, 30). Gerald LeTendre writes that Hallâs ââdiscoveryâ of adolescence ⌠set off an explosion of studies ⌠that have become part of the general educational culture and the broader culture as wellâ (Learning, 175). Examples stretch from Jane Addamsâs Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (1909) to William D. Lewisâs Democracyâs High School (1914) (with a preface by Theodore Roosevelt), to novels such as Booth Tarkingtonâs bestselling Seventeen (1915), F. Scottâs Fitzgeraldâs This Side of Paradise (1920), and the racy and controversial Flaming Youth (1923) by âWarner Fabianâ (Samuel Hopkins Adams).
Adults of the 1920s, Beth Bailey explains, grew âfascinated with âyouthââyoung men and women who defined themselves, as youth, partly through public sexualityâ (From Front Porch to Back Seat, 78). East Coast intellectualsâ interest crystallized earlier, thanks in part to the New York critic Randolph Bourne (1886â1918). A regular writer for The Dial and The Seven Arts, Bourne achieved prominence with Youth and Life (1913), which combined a call to radical activism, a generational manifesto, and a rhapsody (equal parts Hall, Emerson, and William James) on the meaning of youth. Himself twenty-five and a junior at Columbia (having entered college late), Bourne spoke for the rising generation with confidence: âit is the young,â he explained, âwho have all the really valuable experienceâ (12).5 âTheir vision is always the truest, and their interpretation always the justestâ (15). Older adults and young people, Bourne added, now âmisunderstand each other as they never did beforeâ; he attributed the gap in part to âthe four yearsâ period of high-school lifeâ (35).6 Bourneâand Bourneâs peersâapplied his findings to the arts. Like Hall, and like Addams, Bourne saw in modern adolescence a new and unrealized vocation for poetry: âIn this scientific age there is a call for youth to soar and paint a new spiritual sky.⌠If the old poetry is dead, youth must feel and write the new poetryâ (179).7
The first American poet widely received, in her time, as a voice of adolescence is rarely considered an innovator now. Edna St. Vincent Millay, then in her teens, won a national award for âRenascenceâ (1912); her first book appeared in 1917, before she left Vassar but after she had entered the protomodernist New York and Provincetown literary circles around Edmund Wilson and Floyd Dell. âRenascenceâ had passion and religiose sincerity, but none of the social facts, nor the new sense of freedom, associated with youth. Millayâs lyrics and epigrams of the late 1910s, however, made that new, sometimes scandalous freedom their subject. âRecuerdoâ (1920) celebrates as innocent merriment an urban adventure that would have shocked the generation beforeâMillay and her friends have traveled in an urban public conveyance, unsupervised, till dawn: âWe were very tired, we were very merryâ/ We had gone back and forth all night upon the ferryâ (Collected, 128) Millayâs âFigsââepigrams in the carpe diem traditionâcelebrate ephemerality and immediacy, rejecting plans, prudence, responsibilities, adult virtues of all kinds: âSafe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand: / Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!â (127) Middlebrow journals and modernist little magazines concurred in celebrating Millayâs adolescent qualities: energy, bold eroticism, âpride of youth ⌠discovering a new worldâ (Van Doren, âYouth and Wings,â 122â23). âThe artless and passionate artistry of this rhapsody of girlish mysticism,â The Double Dealer asserted in 1923, âmakes Miss Millay one of our ranking American poetsâ (Nethercot, âSophisticated Innocents,â 205). Gorham Munson remembered the vogue for Millay as âthe symbol of the âflaming youth moodââ (The Awakening Twenties, 3); the editor John Hutchens later described her as âthe lyric voice of the newly liberated and uninhibited youngâ (The American Twenties, 19).
Ideas about generational difference had even more influence in the self-conscious American vers libre of the little magazines than over the relatively popular, and formally conventional, Millay. The Dial began to publish poems in 1918: one issue led off with James Oppenheimâs poem âThe Young World.â Six pages and twenty Whitman-inspired sections long, it reads in part:
O the pride
Of the young world
These youngsters are aliens and exiles among their parents
Where they go
Goes rebellion,
It could not be otherwise.
(175)
Oppenheimâs 1919 memorial poem for Bourne remembered his âgreat love / Of the spirit of youthâ (âRandolph Bourne,â 7). Youth: Poetry of Today, a journal published in Cambridge, Mass., from 1918 to 1919 and devoted to âyouth, the symbol of growth,â included in its six issues poems by Conrad Aiken, Malcolm Cowley, Witter Bynner, Amy Lowell, and Arthur (Yvor) Winters. In Bynnerâs âYouth Sings to the Sea,â a personified âYouth ⌠Sweeps his hand with a stroke of fire / And calls to the mountain, to the sea, / To make him the god that he should beâ (10).8 âPoets today, like modern young folks, knowâ The Double Dealer agreed (Nethercot, âSophisticated Innocents,â 202; emphasis his).
Margaret Andersonâs Little Review grew especially strident in associating modernism with youth. Anderson announced in her first issue (1914), âwe take a certain joyous pride in confessing our youthâ (âAnnouncement,â 2). In the next, she mused, âsomeone accused us of being âjuvenile.â What hideous stigma was thereby put upon us?â (âThe Germ,â 2). (The facing page ran a poem entitled âRebellion.â) Andersonâs own Whitmanesque poem âRevealsâ asks, âWhat do you call this fantastic place where age that is weak rules youth that is strong? / Where parents prescribe life for children they cannot understand[?]â (2) Other contributors shared her interest: âSophomoric Epigramsâ (1915) by âA.E.D.â claims, âThere is no wisdom but youth.⌠Man loses his Ego at thirty and becomes conceited.⌠There is no beauty but youthâ (37â38). Florence Frankâs essay on Freud linked the modern interest in adolescence to the coming vogue for psychoanalysis: âThe priest of the future will be the Inspired Physician.⌠To the adolescent the value of the Inspired Physician can scarcely be overstatedâ (âPsycho-Analysis,â 15). Ben Hecht, later a celebrated screenwriter, contributed an essay, âThe American Family,â in which a daughterâs âawakened mental curiosityâ and âspirit of revoltâ represents American artistsâ resistance to philistinism (2).9
The words âadolescentâ and âadolescenceâ also enjoyed an American modernist vogue. The Double Dealer ran a poem called âFlorizel Adolescent.â10 E.E. Cummings, who called the moon âa song of adolescent ivory,â noticed adolescent social life as well: âspring omnipotent goddess ⌠thou stuffest / the parks with overgrown pimply / cavaliers and gumchewing giggly / girlsâ (Collected, 214, 61). One of Cummingsâs most famous poems, âin Just-â epitomizes the point in the life course where heterosexual desire overtakes childhoodâs homosocial play. âEddieandbill come / running from marbles,â âbettyandisbel come dancing // from hop-scotch and jump-ropeâ at the whistle of âthe / goat-footed // balloonManâ (Collected, 24). This call from Pan, this version of adolescence, stresses its continuities with older kinds of carpe diem lyric (Robert Herrickâs, say), as other American moderni...