The Forms of Youth

Twentieth-Century Poetry and Adolescence

Stephanie Burt

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2007
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9780231512022
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Early in the twentieth century, Americans and other English-speaking nations began to regard adolescence as a separate phase of life. Associated with uncertainty, inwardness, instability, and sexual energy, adolescence acquired its own tastes, habits, subcultures, slang, economic interests, and art forms. This new idea of adolescence became the driving force behind some of the modern era's most original poetry.

Stephen Burt demonstrates how adolescence supplied the inspiration, and at times the formal principles, on which many twentieth-century poets founded their works. William Carlos Williams and his contemporaries fashioned their American verse in response to the idealization of new kinds of youth in the 1910s and 1920s. W. H. Auden's early work, Philip Larkin's verse, Thom Gunn's transatlantic poetry, and Basil Bunting's late-modernist masterpiece, Briggflatts, all track the development of adolescence in Britain as it moved from the private space of elite schools to the urban public space of sixties subcultures. The diversity of American poetry from the Second World War to the end of the sixties illuminates poets' reactions to the idea that teenagers, juvenile delinquents, hippies, and student radicals might, for better or worse, transform the nation. George Oppen, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Robert Lowell in particular built and rebuilt their sixties styles in reaction to changing concepts of youth.

Contemporary poets continue to fashion new ideas of youth. Laura Kasischke and Jorie Graham focus on the discoveries of a specifically female adolescence. The Irish poet Paul Muldoon and the Australian poet John Tranter use teenage perspectives to represent a postmodernist uncertainty. Other poets have rejected traditional and modern ideas of adolescence, preferring instead to view this age as a reflection of the uncertainties and restricted tastes of the way we live now. The first comprehensive study of adolescence in twentieth-century poetry, The Forms of Youth recasts the history of how English-speaking cultures began to view this phase of life as a valuable state of consciousness, if not the very essence of a Western identity.

1

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 39’s anthemic “J. Alfred” took all its words from T. S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” snarling and yelping through Eliot’s “Let us go then, you and I”; “I have heard the mermaids singing”; and other lines (though not the whole poem). For these punk rockers, Eliot’s poem of hesitant anxiety—identified by John Berryman as the site at which “modern poetry begins”—became a fit emblem for the energies, anxieties, uncertainties, and aggressions of modern adolescence (Berryman, Freedom, 270). Rhino 39 got their scholarship partly wrong: Eliot’s 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 “calling on” 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 “strenuous insistence on his own maturity”) 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, “Lost Youth,” 487). Poets’ responses to the new American adolescents—in high schools, in colleges, in cars, and on city streets—make 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 peers’ 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 women’s 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 “enrollment approximately doubled every decade”; between 1900 and 1929, “a new high school opened every day” (Macleod, Age of the Child, 149; Mintz, Huck’s Raft, 175). Howard Chudacoff explains that “the 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.”¹ “The public high school,” Joseph Kett writes, “enabled “the mass reclassification of young people in school as adolescents,” 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. “As never before,” Kevin White adds, “the period of youth began to be comprehended as a distinctive time of life with its own patterns of norms, mores and values,” such as dating and “petting” (The First Sexual Revolution, 17–18).³

This visible social change inspired new theories of youth, foremost among them the psychologist G. Stanley Hall’s two-volume Adolescence (1904).⁴ Hall addressed his work “only to those still adolescent in soul” and wrote that “the best definition of genius is intensified and prolonged adolescence” (1:viii, 2:90–91). Deploying a raft of sometimes contradictory qualities and superlatives, from malleability to determination, from sexual energy to religious faith, Hall opined (echoing Wordsworth’s description of infants) that adolescents’ “trailing 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 do” (2:302). Hall’s book sold 25,000 copies in a year, and marked—if it did not help cause—a great change in how Americans viewed the life course (Ross, G. Stanley Hall, 336). Writing in 1950, the poet and critic Louise Bogan included Hall’s Adolescence in her short list of books important to modernist poets (Achievement, 30). Gerald LeTendre writes that Hall’s “‘discovery’ of adolescence … set off an explosion of studies … that have become part of the general educational culture and the broader culture as well” (Learning, 175). Examples stretch from Jane Addams’s Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (1909) to William D. Lewis’s Democracy’s High School (1914) (with a preface by Theodore Roosevelt), to novels such as Booth Tarkington’s bestselling Seventeen (1915), F. Scott’s Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise (1920), and the racy and controversial Flaming Youth (1923) by “Warner Fabian” (Samuel Hopkins Adams).

Adults of the 1920s, Beth Bailey explains, grew “fascinated with ‘youth’—young men and women who defined themselves, as youth, partly through public sexuality” (From Front Porch to Back Seat, 78). East Coast intellectuals’ interest crystallized earlier, thanks in part to the New York critic Randolph Bourne (1886–1918). 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: “it is the young,” he explained, “who have all the really valuable experience” (12).⁵ “Their vision is always the truest, and their interpretation always the justest” (15). Older adults and young people, Bourne added, now “misunderstand each other as they never did before”; he attributed the gap in part to “the four years’ period of high-school life” (35).⁶ Bourne—and Bourne’s peers—applied his findings to the arts. Like Hall, and like Addams, Bourne saw in modern adolescence a new and unrealized vocation for poetry: “In 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 poetry” (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 “Renascence” (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. “Renascence” had passion and religiose sincerity, but none of the social facts, nor the new sense of freedom, associated with youth. Millay’s lyrics and epigrams of the late 1910s, however, made that new, sometimes scandalous freedom their subject. “Recuerdo” (1920) celebrates as innocent merriment an urban adventure that would have shocked the generation before—Millay and her friends have traveled in an urban public conveyance, unsupervised, till dawn: “We were very tired, we were very merry—/ We had gone back and forth all night upon the ferry” (Collected, 128) Millay’s “Figs”—epigrams in the carpe diem tradition—celebrate ephemerality and immediacy, rejecting plans, prudence, responsibilities, adult virtues of all kinds: “Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand: / Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!” (127) Middlebrow journals and modernist little magazines concurred in celebrating Millay’s adolescent qualities: energy, bold eroticism, “pride of youth … discovering a new world” (Van Doren, “Youth and Wings,” 122–23). “The artless and passionate artistry of this rhapsody of girlish mysticism,” The Double Dealer asserted in 1923, “makes Miss Millay one of our ranking American poets” (Nethercot, “Sophisticated Innocents,” 205). Gorham Munson remembered the vogue for Millay as “the symbol of the ‘flaming youth mood’” (The Awakening Twenties, 3); the editor John Hutchens later described her as “the lyric voice of the newly liberated and uninhibited young” (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 Oppenheim’s poem “The Young World.” 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)

Oppenheim’s 1919 memorial poem for Bourne remembered his “great love / Of the spirit of youth” (“Randolph Bourne,” 7). Youth: Poetry of Today, a journal published in Cambridge, Mass., from 1918 to 1919 and devoted to “youth, the symbol of growth,” included in its six issues poems by Conrad Aiken, Malcolm Cowley, Witter Bynner, Amy Lowell, and Arthur (Yvor) Winters. In Bynner’s “Youth Sings to the Sea,” a personified “Youth … Sweeps his hand with a stroke of fire / And calls to the mountain, to the sea, / To make him the god that he should be” (10).⁸ “Poets today, like modern young folks, know” The Double Dealer agreed (Nethercot, “Sophisticated Innocents,” 202; emphasis his).

Margaret Anderson’s Little Review grew especially strident in associating modernism with youth. Anderson announced in her first issue (1914), “we take a certain joyous pride in confessing our youth” (“Announcement,” 2). In the next, she mused, “someone accused us of being ‘juvenile.’ What hideous stigma was thereby put upon us?” (“The Germ,” 2). (The facing page ran a poem entitled “Rebellion.”) Anderson’s own Whitmanesque poem “Reveals” asks, “What 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[?]” (2) Other contributors shared her interest: “Sophomoric Epigrams” (1915) by “A.E.D.” claims, “There is no wisdom but youth.… Man loses his Ego at thirty and becomes conceited.… There is no beauty but youth” (37–38). Florence Frank’s essay on Freud linked the modern interest in adolescence to the coming vogue for psychoanalysis: “The priest of the future will be the Inspired Physician.… To the adolescent the value of the Inspired Physician can scarcely be overstated” (“Psycho-Analysis,” 15). Ben Hecht, later a celebrated screenwriter, contributed an essay, “The American Family,” in which a daughter’s “awakened mental curiosity” and “spirit of revolt” represents American artists’ resistance to philistinism (2).⁹

The words “adolescent” and “adolescence” also enjoyed an American modernist vogue. The Double Dealer ran a poem called “Florizel Adolescent.”¹⁰ E.E. Cummings, who called the moon “a song of adolescent ivory,” noticed adolescent social life as well: “spring omnipotent goddess … thou stuffest / the parks with overgrown pimply / cavaliers and gumchewing giggly / girls” (Collected, 214, 61). One of Cummings’s most famous poems, “in Just-” epitomizes the point in the life course where heterosexual desire overtakes childhood’s homosocial play. “Eddieandbill come / running from marbles,” “bettyandisbel come dancing // from hop-scotch and jump-rope” at the whistle of “the / goat-footed // balloonMan” (Collected, 24). This call from Pan, this version of adolescence, stresses its continuities with older kinds of carpe diem lyric (Robert Herrick’s, say), as other American moderni...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Introduction
• 1. Modernist Poetics of Adolescence
• 2. From Schools to Subcultures: Adolescence in Modern British Poetry
• 3. Soldiers, Babysitters, Delinquents, and Mutants: Adolescence in Midcentury American Poetry
• 4. Are You One of Those Girls? Feminist Poetics of Adolescence
• 5. An Excess of Dreamy Possibilities: Ireland and Australia
• 6. Midair: Adolescence in Contemporary American Poetry
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Acknowledgments
• Index