The Modern Sequence and Its Precursors

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. University of Wisconsin Press andThe Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Contemporary Literature.A "new" genre, the modern poetic sequence, has evolved over the past century and a half or longer. It has emerged so naturally, so without fanfare, as hardly to have been noticed. Yet, once its existence has been pointed out, and a name proposed for it, 'tis very like a camel or a mountain or a whale or-to return to things literaryan epic poem.Its presence becomes abundantly obvious, for the modern sequence is the decisive form toward which all the developments of modern poetry have tended. It is the genre which best encompasses the shift in sensibility exemplified by starting a long poetic work "I celebrate myself, and sing myself," rather than "Sing, Goddess, the wrath of Achilles." The modern sequence goes many-sidedly into who and where we are subjectively; it springs from the same pressures on sensibility that have caused our poets' experiments with shorter forms. It, too, is a response to the lyrical possibilities of language opened up by those pressures in times of cultural and psychological crisis, when all past certainties have many times been thrown chaotically into question. More successfully than individual short lyrics, however, it fulfills the need for encompassment of disparate and often powerfully opposed tonalities and energies.It is striking that the presence of this genre, the outgrowth of poets' recognition and pursuit of "new thresholds, new anatomies" (Hart Crane's visionary exclamation in a somewhat different context), has gone unappreciated for the most part. It is especially striking that experts in the very works that represent it so overwhelmingly-such works as Walt Whitman's Song of Myself, the ?M. L. Rosenthal and Sally M. Gall, 1981. Excerpted from the opening chapter of The Modern Poetic Sequence, to be published in 1981 by Oxford University Press. This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Mon, 8 Dec 2014 09:41:41 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditionsfirst great unmistakable exemplar of the form, and Ezra Pound's Cantos-should have missed the fact that they were confronting something new artistically, a creation of the genius of modern poetry to be closed with only through the dynamics of individual works. How could this have happened? One explanation, we believe, is the character of poetic evolution itself. It is easy to detect superficial signs of newness: departures from traditional rhyme and meter, the absence of explanatory or narrative links between images or other evocative centers, the use of a vocabulary and subject matter hitherto taboo o...