With the advent of modernism and postmodernism, the 20th century was a time when poetic expression was extremely diverse. Especially in the aftermath of the Second World War, poets sought to broaden the scope of their craft; for example, they experiment with minimalism and strive to accentuate the realism that poetry is capable of conveying. Later, with the postmodernist movement, the struggle to represent things in an entirely new way emerged in ideas as diverse as expressionism, which placed a strong emphasis on emotion and subjectivity, and imagism , whose emphasis was on clear language and objective presentation of things. pictures. This panoply of ideas produced a veritable spectrum of poetry, and three poets in particular can be considered among the most influential: Ezra Pound, Allen Ginsberg, and Charles Olson. In this essay, their work will be analyzed and the voices in their poems compared and contrasted. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay It is perhaps prudent to start with Ezra Pound, as he is credited with developing Imagism, a poetic movement focused on the economical use of language. and transmit a clear and sharp image. This movement played a major role in the development of poetry as a whole, and Pound's influence was dominant for many years. A good example of Pound's imagism is his poem "In a Subway Station"; it is only fourteen words long and yet is often considered as thought-provoking as any longer work. The poetic voice contained therein is extremely taciturn, but conveys a number of different things in few words. Generally, the first task when analyzing the poetic voice of a piece is to find the speaker and the addressee, which is not easy in Pound's poem. Rather than being deliberately subjective or objective (e.g., using pronouns), the speaker is not explicitly made clear; considered independently of its title, the poem conveys only a brief image. However, consideration of the title opens the poem to interpretation by establishing the location – a subway station – which invites the reader to consider the speaker as a person within the station itself. The recipient is another tricky question, because again the poem avoids any concrete details that might help the reader define it, and even the title doesn't help. It can therefore be said that "In a Metro Station" represents a speaker in the crowd, having an ephemeral visionary experience described in extremely economical language. Understanding this spare style is important to realizing the purpose of the poem and, by extension, the rest of Pound's work. He himself commented on his intention in an essay entitled "Vorticism", published in the magazine Fortnightly Review in September 1914: seeing picturesque people in the Paris metro, he tried to describe the feeling he had and wrote that he was trying to find “words that sounded”. .. worthy, or as charming as this sudden emotion” (Chilton and Gilbertson, 1990, p. 228). The poem exemplifies imagism in that it is extremely dense, describes a very clear and precise image (the "damp black branch"), and contains no unnecessary words. In fact, the speaker's use of the word "appearance" greatly expands the interpretive scope, as it allows the faces themselves to be, possibly, imaginary. Furthermore, “the appearance” seems to act as the subject of the sentence, to which the following post-semicolon metaphor can be applied. In short, the speaker of this poemdeliberately uses ambiguity to conceal the "true" meaning, thereby allowing significant variations in interpretation, and much of it is driven simply by the use of a single word. Pound's poem, is quite different in terms of length and style. The name of the speaker in this poem is a controversial issue, as the various stanzas of the poem are not all contiguous and some may be seen as spoken by different voices than the majority; as such, "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" is as much a collection of poems as it is a single long poem. For example, in poem IV of Part II, the speaker modulates from third person to first person (although written in represented speech form). In the first part, the poem establishes itself as a narrative poem, describing Mauberley's difficulties in producing new and exciting poetry in a world that demands mass production and reproducibility – as exemplified in the lines "The age demanded an image/Of his accelerated grimace.” » (21/22) and “The time especially required a plaster mold / Made without wasting time” (29/30). Mauberley's work is characterized as "wringing the lilies from the acorn" (7). This is a powerful metaphor, as acorns can symbolize life and potential (the potential to become a giant oak tree, which can live for hundreds of years), and lilies – although beautiful flowers – have a short lifespan. Thus, Mauberley not only attempts to extract beauty from that which is not, but also sacrifices the potential for immediate beauty. Perhaps surprisingly for modernist poetry, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” is full of classical references, which were widely used from the Renaissance onwards; this has a number of effects on the reader, including emphasizing the speaker's assertion that Mauberley was "out of step with his times" (1), and succinctly adding layers of meaning. For example, the speaker simply uses the word "Capaneus" (8) and in doing so expresses the arrogance and pride of the Greek mythological warrior. This is entirely consistent with Pound's earlier work and the general philosophy of saying more with fewer words. The really interesting thing about "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" is that the speaker is often seen as a proxy for Pound himself; in "The Modulator Voice of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley", William V. Spanos states that "Ezra Pound [is] the speaker of the entire sequence and, equating him throughout with Mauberley, interprets the poem as the confession of an artistic failure of Pound” (Spanos, 1965, p.73). There is also a stylistic technique in the poem in which the speaker repeats an earlier line, but enclosed in quotation marks, which is aptly described by Spanos as “an ironic and reductive implication” (Spanos, 1965, p. 88). Two examples are the repetition of the expression "the required age" and the similar treatment of the line "His real Penelope was Flaubert" (13), repeated in the second part, line 5. This technique has the effect of mocking or to trivialize, the previous line, and is another example of profound statements with as few words as possible. This modus operandi was not favored by all poets of the 20th century, however; where Pound tested the limits of terseness and reticence, others, like Allen Ginsberg, experimented with stream-of-consciousness writing, which often prioritized giving away too much information. A classic example is Ginsberg's Howl, a poem divided into three parts (although this essay will focus entirely on the first part). Although the narrative is much more talkative than Pound's work, their poetic voices share certain characteristics: for example,they both use extremely dense referential text. In Howl, however, the entire first section is one continuous sentence, containing only commas until the very end of the section, where there is a period. The pace is extremely fast and pushes the reader to move through the text at full speed. Additionally, Howl's speaker seems to constantly employ vague word associations and speaks almost entirely in metaphor; a prominent example would be "Teahead's shopping districts, a neon flashing traffic light" (23), and line six is ​​similar, indicating "poverty and tatters and hollow, high eyes" (6). This adjective-rich structure is repeated throughout the poem and arguably echoes the way the brain works, creating connections and having these loosely associated things arise one after the other. It also reflects the way an exhausted drug addict might speak, adding another layer of meaning to the text. Additionally, the narration is in the first person – “I have seen the best minds of my generation…” (1) – increasing the reader's involvement and making it seem like they are having these thoughts themselves. There is also an interesting disconnect here between the speaker's claim that he witnessed the destruction of the best minds of his generation and the actual conduct of the people he speaks about; a factor that goes some way to defining the speaker of the poem. They are described as “angel heads” (4), an undeniably positive association, but also “curling up in unshaven rooms in their underwear” (14), “dragging through the Negro streets” (2). and being “arrested…. with a marijuana belt” (16). These are just three examples, but the poem contains many more references to actions and deeds that would have been unthinkable to the public of the time, such as homosexual relationships and, of course, drug addiction. Attributing these things to the “best minds” the speaker knows could have had the effect of legitimizing these practices; However, the description of desperate addiction and empty sexual encounters contradicts this, leaving only one explanation: that the speaker overlooks these factors when deciding exactly whom to admire, perhaps because he has personally experienced these experiences. In the foreword to Howl and Other Poems, William Carlos Williams states that he believes this: "it was the poet, Allen Ginsberg, who went through, in his own body, the horrific experiences described in his life in these pages” (Williams, 2006, p.8). In any case, this conclusion says a lot about the speaker, who clearly separates actions from thoughts, and the brutal, punishing honesty of the poem makes it more real, as if spoken without an audience. This is one of the ways in which “Howl” is considered poetry rather than prose; In Reading Poetry: An Introduction by Tom Furniss and Michael Bath, it is stated that "poetry is meant to be the private meditation of the poet, produced spontaneously and without any conscious or design of a listener or reader" (Furniss & Bain, 2007, p.219). While this is of course not always true, it highlights and emphasizes the speaker's honesty, allowing the reader to trust him or her more implicitly. One of the poems for which this is not true is "I, Maximus of Gloucester, to you". " by Charles Olson. For the purposes of analysis, this poem will be treated as one long, continuous poem, and each individual short poem will be referenced by a number. Again, Furniss and Bath's assertion that poetry n 'no consciousness' of an audience is patently false for this poem; in fact, the poem presupposes an audience in that the audience ("you") is mentioned in the title as such;.