The Forms of Youth: Twentieth-Century Poetry and 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:

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 modernist versions would not.

After her move to America in 1916, Mina Loy used the words “adolescent” and “adolescence” in poem after poem. “Perlun” (1921) describes “the whipper snapper child of the sun,” who “puts the world / to the test of intuition”:

American literature could be deprecated as well as praised for its seeming adolescence. Amy Lowell’s “Miss Columbia: An Old-Fashioned Girl,” which appeared in the Little Review in 1914, explained that “Miss Columbia” “is in her artistic teens, and is as unimaginatively conventional as is the human animal at the same age” (37). Van Wyck Brooks in 1918 complained that American “life is, on all its levels, in a state of arrested development,” adding in 1921 that “the chronic state of our literature is that of a youthful promise which is never redeemed” (America’s Coming of Age, 97, 164). Calls for maturity, for an adult mindset, would later become a New Critical signature: T. S. Eliot in 1926 complained that the modern “literature of disillusionment is the literature of immaturity” (Varieties, 128). John Crowe Ransom—whose elegant early-1920s lyrics (such as “Blue Girls”) treat youth as pure premodern pastoral—in 1929 decried American “men in a state of arrested adolescence” (My Stand, 5). A decade later, Ransom protested that “the kind of poetry which interests us is not the act of a child, or of that eternal youth which is in some women, but the act of an adult mind” (World’s Body, viii) These critics reacted against the very experiment and enthusiasm—and the desire to find, for a new generation, new forms—which “little magazines” of the teens and twenties sought.

Such magazines invoked youth, with only occasional anxiety, as subject, metaphor, and positive model. None did so more often than Others, coedited by William Carlos Williams. Its first issue (1915) opened with Mary Carolyn Davis’s “Song of a Girl,” which asked what it meant “Just to be young / Young enough to laugh when one should weep” (4). In Skipwith Cannell’s “Ikons” (1916), “We young men come up from our beginning crying / ‘Way! Make way for us!’” (156, 158). If Others poets pursued youth as an ideal; they also observed particular young men and women; some wrote amorous verses to alarmingly young girls.¹² Douglas Golding’s “Highbrowettes” (subtitled “Merveilleuses de nos jours”) describes the “rows of young women” at a poetry reading, who “smoke a great deal, bathe little, and wear no stays” (131). The American modernist interest in adolescence included both praise for young men’s vigor and attention to girlish allure: indeed, one sign of the new thinking about adolescence was that these two qualities were sometimes conflated, or treated similarly, as “youth.” In such treatments, the adolescent—like the modernist poem—is disturbing, full of potential, incomplete, sometimes baffling, and no longer innocent; he (and, as with Millay, she) does not pretend to ignorance of the wide world.

Not all modernists shared in the vogue for youth: one who had mixed feelings was Wallace Stevens, whose undergraduate sonnets pursued the idea obsessively but whose first published poems (such as “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle”) often concerned middle age.¹³ Stevens’s 1917 play “Bowl, Cat, and Broomstick” (whose title names its speaking parts) made fun of the French “poetess” or poetaster “Claire Dupray.” The character Bowl praises Dupray’s photograph: “She cannot be more than twenty-two,” which, Bowl explains, “is an age when red becomes tawny, when blue becomes aerial—and when a girl, at least, when a girl like Claire Dupray, becomes a poetess” (Collected, 622–23). Bowl, Cat, and Broomstick also read Dupray’s poems aloud (in English prose): “Does not such a poem, so young, so communicative, warrant the definition of the poetess made by her portrait? How new she is!” (630). Dupray seems to caricature Millay, who would have been famous already in 1917; Millay had acted in the Provincetown Players, who performed Stevens’s previous work for the stage.

Others’s most sustained look at adolescence arrived with the poet Emanuel Carnevali, a manic charmer who appeared first (aged twenty-one) in Harriet Monroe’s journal Poetry in 1918; he met the Others circle in New York through her (Parisi and Young, Dear Editor, 235–36). Carnevali’s essay “Arthur Rimbaud” ran in Others in 1919. Much of it applies the optimistic ideas in Hall and Bourne to Rimbaud’s poetry (and by implication to Carnevali’s own verse): “Rimbaud is the Advent of Youth. Almost everything else in the world is unbelief in Youth.… Almost everything else in the world, beside the poets, who have all believed in Youth, is a construction of the error that life is from Youth up: it is from Youth down” (“Rimbaud,” 20). Rimbaud (Carnevali continued) represents “certainties of the age of seventeen and eighteen, certainties born of a perfect harmony of Youth’s life and being, certainties of God.” “As for me I know Youth in love, I know Youth encountering the first men.… For this I believe in Arthur Rimbaud” (“Rimbaud,” 20, 23). In Lola Ridge’s salon in 1919, Carnevali accused New York modernists (Williams among them) of having “forgotten your youth”; he would soon found “a little club” in New York devoted to “youth, sheer youth” as a principle, apparently, of literary interpretation (Carnevali, Autobiography, 147, 124). As late as 1925, Ernest Walsh in This Quarter found Carnevali “more important than Keats,” since Carnevali marked “the beginning of the Republic of Youth”; he was, Walsh continued, “a major poet and primarily the poet who has given us the life of the youth of this age. Perhaps that is the only life that matters” (“A Young Living Genius,” 324, 328).

Though Rimbaud’s poems were not unknown in America, Carnevali seems to have prompted fresh attention to them. The Dial in 1920 ran excerpts from Illuminations and Une Saison en enfer, as well as W. G. Blum’s “Remarks on Rimbaud as Magician.” “Disgust,” as expressed in Une Saison en enfer, Blum explains, “is not the peculiar adjunct of genius, but an emotion perfectly familiar to no end of adolescents” (727). According to Munson, it was through these articles that Hart Crane discovered Rimbaud (The Awakening Twenties, 204). Though the first poem in Crane’s first book hailed “all those who step / The legend of their youth into the noon” (Complete Poems, 3) Crane’s later published poems rarely emphasize either his own youth or youth as a principle in the way that the poems of Carnevali—and Millay—did. Modernist attention to adolescence did, however, shape ways in which Crane was received: his status as the archetypal young poet, the youth of promise (succeeding several failed candidates for that post, such as Millay, Carnevali, and John Rodker), let his contemporaries demand from him either a definitive realization of youth (a contradiction in terms) or else a “mature” long poem, both finished and promising, of a sort which nobody could have produced.¹⁴

European Futurists, to be sure, also invoked youth. Blaise Cendrars’s “Transiberian Prose” (1913) begins, “En ce temps-là j’étais en mon adolescence [In those times I was in my adolescence]” (19, 20). Repeating its opening line, Cendras’s poem emphasizes youthful ardor to the point of disorientation: “mon adolescence était alors si ardente et si folle / Qui mon coeur … brûlait comme le temple d’Éphèse ou comme la Place Rouge de Moscou / Quand le soleil se couche” [My adolescence was so ardent and so foolish/ That my heart … blazed like the temple of Ephesus or like Red Square in Moscow / At sunset] (Poésies complétes, 20). F. T. Marinetti boasted in 1910 “the oldest of us is thirty”; Giovanni Papini in 1912 described himself a “man of twenty,” to whom “even sunsets seem to show the delicate white spangles of lingering sunrises” (Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, 23; 95). Loy knew both Papini and Marinetti from her years in Florence; Carnevali modeled both his verse and his personality on their examples.¹⁵ Yet these writers’ “futurist moment” (Marjorie Perloff’s term) entered poetry in English largely through the Vorticism of Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, London-based writers relatively uninterested in the new cohort of American boys and girls.¹⁶ As late as 1929, Ezra Pound asked George and Mary Oppen (both twenty years old, and newly arrived from the United States) “What do ‘girlfriend,’ ‘boyfriend’ mean?” (Mary Oppen, Meaning a Life, 132). Other American modernists—and even Loy, in her poems of New York—located their evocations of adolescence in America, representing America’s new youth.

Carnevali’s 1919 essay provoked Williams to think through his own relation to adolescence as an American phenomenon and to youth as a literary ideal. An editorial in the last number of Others (for which Williams served as sole editor) construes Carnevali’s emphasis on youthful energy as the reductio ad absurdum of Others aesthetics: Carnevali’s

(The next page of this final Others contained Moore’s poem “Poetry.”) That issue concludes with a much longer essay, unsigned but clearly by Williams, that asks in what sense, if any, modern writers had to be young: “Perhaps a man does get a bellyache at 19, perhaps he does run to verse for aid … but I deny this has anything to do with the question as between excellence and modernity” (“Belly Music,” 26). Williams goes on to deplore the vogue for startlingly young poets, naming the Idahoan H. L. Davis (born in 1896), deriding H. L. Mencken’s then-recent quip that “every poet” should be “killed at 26,” and taking the occasion to explain his own aesthetic goals:

Say I cannot write as well as Davis, I have not the locale, the stability, of anything—the youth. My youth we’ll say was crass, steeped in a mad ignorance. Yet I am not forbidden from singing. It is damnable nonsense to think to anchor a poet on his Byronic adolescence of body and mind.… There IS a way to come through the loss of youth or first youth and the loss of love.… It is art.… It is the NEW! not one more youthful singer, one more lovely poem. The NEW, the everlasting NEW, the everlasting defiance.

For Williams, modernist newness is like adolescence but not the same as “adolescence of body and mind”; those who confuse them take the sign for the thing. The then thirty-six-year-old doctor goes on to distinguish artistic from biophysical youth:

It is the youth, I have seen written somewhere, that won the war; it is to the youth then that we must look for the energy that will carry us—etc., etc. The devil with youth! What does youth care or what do I care for it? … It is a lie that there is any significance in youth because the brain is young. The new is not in any way related to the work of a BEGINNER but to that of a MASTER. He is young. He is the unborn.… What is the difference between 17 and 70? I see none save a certain hardening and weakening of the flesh. There are far more important differences between individuals of the same age than that.

If modernism connotes youth, immaturity, newness, Williams argues, it must do so figuratively, in its language, not simply due to the age, in years, of the writers. Williams’s prose of 1919 thus echoes Stevens’s play of 1917, whose character Broomstick disabuses Cat and Bowl of their admiration for “Dupray,” refuting the assumed link between the poet’s youth and the “newness” of her expressions: “She is young. Therefore she is new. Or her poetry is young. That is one of the most persistent of all fallacies. Her poetry is young if her spirit is young—or whatever it is that poetry springs from. Not otherwise” (Collected, 631–32). Dupray, Broomstick shows, is in fact fifty-three years old (634).

Despite his critique of the cult of youth in Others, Williams found in adolescents and their peer culture after the First World War important analogues for the newness, demotic speech, and sexual energy he sought in his own New World verse. Biographically oriented critics (among them Paul Mariani and Mike Weaver) have noticed Williams’s accurate sense of himself as a late bloomer. Readers have been slower to see how Williams’s ideas about physical, psychological, and sexual development, as they inform his verse, draw on ideas about youth. Williams compared his poems to young people’s actions almost as soon as he embraced a modernist idiom. “January Morning” (1917) likens the poet’s attitude to that of the girls he observes:

Attractive, lyrical, symbolically defiant, sociable (arranged in groups), immature, deliberately demotic, and at home on the street, these colorful “pinkish” girls prefigure the strong and promising, “reddish, purplish” weeds of “By the road to the contagious hospital,” weeds that Williams’s critics often understand as figures for his own art. Carl Eby writes that in “The Lonely Street” “the male observer becomes ‘one of the girls’” (“‘The Ogre’”).¹⁷

Williams staged further debates about the literary uses of adolescence in the periodical Contact (1920–23). Its third issue includes Kenneth Burke’s essay about Jules Laforgue: “Of course, Laforgue was an adolescent. The metaphysical interest, when it is emotional rather than intellectual, is quite the common thing with adolescence” (9). Contact’s version of modern writing would identify adolescence not with Laforguean languour but with youthful, American strength. Such was the burden of Williams’s own essay “Yours, O Youth,” also from Contact 3: “The American critical attitude! it is that we are seeking to establish. It is young. It is not necessarily inexpert … but it is necessarily young” (15). That is (remembering Williams’s earlier demurral to Carnevali), the writers need not be youthful, nonadult, immature, but their “critical atittude” must let them sound as if they were. The “Critical Note” that concludes Contact 5 (appended to Williams’s poem “New England” and almost certainly his work) praises in choppy syntax the vitality to be found in West African woodcraft, dance, and nudity, and among the young people (boys and girls) “at the High School play” (n.p.).

Williams explored the new American youth culture—with its high schools, social groups, insistent sexuality, cars, and dates—most thoroughly in his experimental verse and prose sequences of the late 1910s and 1920s. Kora in Hell (1917) associated beauty and poetry almost shamefacedly with nubility, youth, and spring: one Kora (Persephone) figure prompts Williams’s exclamation “It is no part of the eternal truth to wear white canvas shoes and a pink coat. It is a damnable lie to be fourteen. The curse of God is on her head!” (I 68) All Williams’s readers find images of birth in the first poem of Spring and All, where young weeds “enter the new world naked.” We might also find, in that poem’s later verbs of sexual discovery, individuation, and self-definition, a botanical trope for adolescence:

No one would claim that Spring and All describes, primarily, American adolescents, nor that all its sections of poems and prose reported on the American high school.¹⁸ Yet the farther we move into Spring and All, the more it looks in part like a report on the new world of American youth. In Williams’s American-Petrarchan love poem (no. 4) a lover brings his beloved into the new, big city, with its terrestrial “lights” and then offers “a crown for her head with / castles upon it, skyscrapers / filled with nut-chocolates—” (I 99). What could this candied crown represent except an inexpensive, innocent night out in Manhattan—in other words, a date? Couples on dates, of course, attended movie houses, whose “phenomenal / growth” made them the new “cathedrals” of poem 15, and whose films helped standardize the erotic, “thrilling” kiss (I 127; Kevin White, The First Sexual Revolution, 158).

Since Spring and All identifies American virtues with American adolescents, its complaints about American inequality begin with a girl who has missed out on adolescence for reasons of geography and social class. “Sent out at fifteen to work in/ some hard-pressed/ house in the suburbs,” Elsie in poem XVIII (later titled “To Elsie”) reveals “the truth about us”—about the more fortunate citizens of Williams’ America—because the country and its institutions will not let her realize her own adolescent potential, the potential Williams in other moods ascribes to America as a whole (CPW 218). She can neither “witness” the folly of adults (because she is already its victim), nor redirect it (“drive the car”).

If these readings seem unduly speculative, poem XIX makes its adolescent contexts unmistakable:

At this point we can see modernist adolescence in Williams not just as a topic but as a component of style: it means not only sexualized energy but unfinished surfaces, refusals of inherited norms and of inherited ideas of mastery. We can also see in the flower-bearing tough boys an attempt to synthesize youth as pastoral (present in every generation) and youth as something rebelliously new (and American, too), an attempt that the newly visible peer culture both represents and permits. Williams may be the first poet to attempt that synthesis in a lyric poem.

He attempted it, too, in experimental prose. The Great American Novel (1923) spends even more time than Spring and All in the new world of consumption-driven youth, which it both mocks and enjoys. Here Williams’s new words, and the naïveté they connote, look so much like high school crush notes that the resemblance makes the poet cringe: “Liberate the words. You tie them. Poetic sweet-heart. Ugh. Poetic sweetheart. My dear Miss Word let me hold your W. I love you. Of all the girls in school you alone are the one—” (I 167). Blocking agents attempt to repress new words just as adult educators attempted to mold and control new boys and girls: “Save the words. Save the words from themselves. They are like children. Young Men’s Hebrew Association. Save them while they’re still young. Words must not be allowed to say, to do—Geld them” (I 172). Identifying sexual and artistic potency, Williams identifies both with the newly visible sexuality of youth, which the YMCA, YMHA, and similar adult-run groups tried to restrain (Kett, Rites of Passage; Kidd, Making American Boys).

Williams’s interest in youth culture may never remain fully separate from the erotic interest in much younger women, or girls, described in some of his writings (such as “The Ogre”). Yet Williams’s work of the 1920s also reveals a time when (in Beth Bailey’s words) “young people thought the divisions between men and women were less important than the division between young and old” (Front Porch to Back Seat, 78). However unlikely it seems in retrospect, Williams and his contemporaries identified adolescent refusals of authority, and a drastic lessening of gender inequality, with high school. Bourne wrote in 1913 that high schools present “a youthful society where there is perfectly free intercourse, an unforced social life of equals,” with the “result … that the boy’s and the girl’s attitude toward life, their spiritual outlook, has come to be the same” (Youth and Life, 35). Indeed, “during the 1910s [boys’] premarital sexual experiences and those of girls grew increasingly similar” (Mintz, Huck’s Raft, 229). As a physician with both an obstetric and a pediatric practice, Williams would have seen evidence for these changes, which took place long after his own teens.

The Great American Novel thus identifies high school students as New World explorers: “Now they lay half covered in the leaves and enjoying the warmth looked out on the new world. And he was passing and saw them. And wondered if it were too late to be Eric. What a new world they had made” (I 182). “The boys kick the ball up into the wind and the wind hurriedly writes a love note upon it: Meet me tonight. Say you are going to the Library and I will have my car at the corner of Fern Street. I have something to tell you. There is one word you must hear: YOU” (I 179–80). The wind here is another American youth who drives his—or her—car and arranges a secretive date. So is the automobile itself, the supposed heroine of Williams’s antinovel: “Oh, to be a woman, thought the speeding mechanism. For they had wrapped something or other in a piece of newspaper and placed it under the seat and there were pictures there of girls—or grown women it might be, in very short skirts” (I 190). American novelty, as this car—and Williams’s text—understand it, has everything to do with a “new look,” a new way of being, in which “grown women” look more than ever like “girls,” boasting “very short skirts” and (one page later) “Greenwich Village honkie-tonk bobbed hair” (I 191). Just such a fast young woman becomes the heroine of Flaming Youth, a book that Williams goes out of his way to praise, incorporating or parodying its disapproving newspaper reviews (I 201). Youthful “flamboyance” and “creative energy,” Williams writes twice in these passages, mark “at least the beginning of art” (I 200–201).¹⁹

Williams’s views of American adolescence as it developed in the 1910s and 1920s thus gave him models and metaphors for his own deliberately unfinished, always-beginning-again works of art. Spacks writes that “adolescence means possibility: so writers in all centuries have felt. Not until [the twentieth] century,” however, “have novelists sustained a fantasy of preserving its values and its indeterminacy” (The Adolescent Idea, 250). We might read The Great American Novel, with its insistence on the “new” and its almost spasmodic avoidance of plots and conclusion, as just such a fantasy—though it might be better to call it a project: we might, in fact, see the similar projects of specifically adolescent energy and indeterminacy throughout Williams’s book-length works of the 1920s, all of which (excepting his conventional novel, A Voyage to Pagany) feature repeated beginnings without clear conclusions and almost all of which (except Pagany and In the American Grain) include at least one segment devoted to the new 1920s youth.

A final instance of adolescence in Williams also stands among the most condensed and most powerful. Cars and dates and athletes and schools, boys and girl, turn up again in The Descent of Winter (1928), whose “11/1” segment constitutes a multum in parvo of 1920s youth. Williams’s hopes of artistic rejuvenation (which The Descent of Winter as a whole takes up) here rests on his ability to incorporate young people’s culture into his own poems:

“11/1” starts with something a girl on a date might say and ends by depicting the boys she might admire: the poem becomes the place where girls and boys, night and morning, written text and heard or seen young people meet. The lyrical aspect of youth here appears eternal (it harks back to Sappho’s poem about the Pleiades), but its energies also seem—like running pants and billboards—historically new. A rejuvenated American poetry such as Williams hopes to write must (this poem suggests) include all these phenomena: Pleiades, nameless weeds, nameless athletes, dates, hurdlers, moon. The athletes and dates continue a tradition in which old love poems (now rewritten) can also take part; just as the hurdlers leap over their “printed” hurdles, the lines about hurdlers vault over their line breaks, showing off the enjambments that Stephen Cushman has plausibly read as the prime source of Williams’s formal innovations. Only if such new young characters (on billboards and in person) fit into Williams’s 1920s style can he accomplish the poetic rejuvenation that Descent (like Williams’s earlier sequences) seeks, in which “a young dog / jumped out / of the old barrel” (I 238).

If Spring and All found one symbol for its aesthetic objectives in the new youth of American suburbs and towns, it found another in the writings of Marianne Moore, who (Williams wrote) “is of all American writers most constantly a poet” (CPW 230). Bonnie Costello writes that Moore “became the heroine of Williams’ Spring and All, where he praised her for precisely the qualities he was trying to achieve” (Marianne Moore, 11).²⁰ They were not the qualities she was trying to achieve. Williams lauded the young for their sexualized, very much extracurricular energy. Moore also used adolescence—tastes, habits, and attitudes proper to modern young people after childhood and before adulthood—as model and metaphor for her own poems. Yet Moore—with her notes and notebooks, her enthusiasm for quotations, and her fastidious attributions—identified her poetic methods with the procedures of a responsible student. Dissenting from models of youth as praiseworthy rebellion, Moore’s writing (in verse and prose) about youth and young people defends the virtues of mind engendered by well-run educational institutions. Her early poems announce their collegiate roots, which contribute to their distinctive tones. Few of her later poems depict students or adolescents at length, but those which do include several of her most admired works. Drawing both on her reading about education and on her experience of it, Moore found not only precepts to embody the qualities she sought in American youth but a style that gave those precepts their due.

We can see those precepts in the prose she contributed to the Dial during her editorship (1925–1929). Moore devoted three pages to an exhibit of art by “children from eight to thirteen years of age,” praising its “unstrained-for esprit” (and remembering that “at the age of thirteen one feels older than one can ever really be”). Moore also reminds us that students produced all these artworks with and for teachers, in school: “these diverse designs” offer “proof that imagination gains rather than loses by guidance, and one is assured that the creating of beauty is, like the appreciating of beauty, in part the result of instruction” (Complete Prose, 153). In Moore’s prose (if not in many people’s experience), middle school, high school, and college appear as continuous parts of one potentially virtuous instructional process. Where her contemporaries found a generation gap, Moore emphasized the continuity of instruction and of student life from medieval times to her own. “Gabriel Harvey’s report of intellectual assumptiveness at [late-sixteenth-century] Cambridge applies equally to our [collegiate] halls of residence,” Moore wrote in 1927; in 1929 she deplored “the dreary way in which some ‘keep speaking of “adults” and “adolescents”’” (Complete Prose, 190, 217). Three years earlier, she commented: “Our most presentable young people seem to share in the attitude of haste, and are accused of irreverence, ingratitude and flippancy. We are, however, encouraged to suspect beneath the mannerism of quick self-sufficiency, a root of seriousness” (quoted in Taffy Martin, Marianne Moore, 55). Moore dissents here both from the journalists who celebrated flappers and “petting parties” and from the social critics who excoriated them. She finds in modern youth something else to admire.²¹

Biographically inclined readers have made perhaps too much of Moore’s years of teaching at the Carlisle Indian School (1911–1914), which seem to have left her overworked, unhappy, and in conflict with its management. By contrast, as Charles Molesworth notes, “her college education” at Bryn Mawr “was one of the transforming experiences of her life”; she later “toyed with … writing an appreciation of college education in America” (Marianne Moore, xii). Moore expected to like Bryn Mawr before she got there, and she did like it very much, writing during her first year, “I am wandering through the enchanted land as I had pictured to myself” (Complete Prose, 571; Selected Letters, 15). Her rebuff by the English Department did little to dim her loyalty to the college: she wrote to Bryher in 1921, “my experience there gave me security in my determination to have what I want” (Selected Letters, 178). While full of appreciation for individuals, Moore’s letters do not describe her adult workplaces in anything like such devoted terms. A 1929 letter describes Moore’s attendance at “a luncheon … in the interest of endowment for women’s colleges & I feel the need a very great one” (Selected Letters, 247).²² Cristanne Miller (citing Carroll Smith-Rosenberg) has discussed Moore’s place among the “college-educated women coming to professional maturity in the United States between 1890 and 1920,” a group shaped by “the proliferation of women’s colleges” (Marianne Moore, 97). Miller sees Moore as “determined to establish in her writing a communally focused authority that avoided egocentric and essentialist assertions … while also avoiding … self-erasure” (vii). Such a communal authority resembles, and may derive from, an idealized college or scholarly community—or so Moore’s poems about students suggest.

Those poems consider schools, colleges, and students in three separable ways. First, poems in Observations (some written at college) situate the book partly in a collegiate context. Second, Moore’s style, with its quotations, borrowings, notes, gestures of deferred or refused authority, and scholarly trappings, invites readers to see certain poems as analogous to students’ library-based research. Finally, poems of her middle period articulate Moore’s dissent from popular versions of adolescence, likening her own approach to poetry to her less flashy ideals for American youth.²³

Moore chose to open Observations with “To an Intra-Mural Rat”; its title puns on the Moore family’s animal nicknames and on the titular adjective, denoting either a rodent between walls or an underhanded undergraduate (Becoming Marianne Moore, 51).²⁴ The poem, which might describe a collegiate rivalry, invites readers to view the whole book as a collection of student writings, “a parenthesis of wit.” To say, as “Rat” does, “You make me think of many men” to an “intra-mural” rival at Bryn Mawr places both poet and target as women in men’s roles; it also presents the book as an extension of Bryn Mawr (whose students, Moore included, sometimes took masculine pronouns). Moore follows “To an Intra-mural Rat” with “Reticence and Volubility,” a poem in which Merlin speaks and a “student” answers (Becoming Marianne Moore, 52). Of the next few poems in Observations, one appears as thanks for a gift (“a yellow rose”) of the sort Moore’s classmates sent and received; the next, “Fear Is Hope,” takes the form, but not the content, of undergraduate social verse, being an invitation to a “holiday” “for us two spirits”—the poet, and the sun (Becoming Marianne Moore, 56–57).

To open Observations as if it were an undergraduate endeavor, to present its contents as responses to student life, has implications both protective (the book should not quite be judged by adult standards) and empowering (it extends an environment in which women can sound scholarly, in which they may assume male roles). Sherrie Innes notes that “discourses surrounding college women” in the early twentieth century “taught them that rebellious behavior should be limited to the college years” (Intimate Communities, 8). Moore’s interest in thinking—and in reading—like a student turned those teachings to advantage. Some of Moore’s first male readers took the hint: T. S. Eliot in 1923 described Moore’s “peculiar and brilliant and rather satirical use of … the curious jargon produced in America by universal university education” (“Moore,” 49). (By “universal” Eliot meant perhaps “open to women,” perhaps “held up to all as a goal.”) Ezra Pound in 1918 wrote of Loy and Moore: “The arid clarity, not without its beauty, of le temperament de l’Americaine is in the poems of these, I think, graduates or post-graduates. If they have not received B.A.s or M.A.s or B.Scs. they do not need them” (“Others,” 58).

Moore’s major poems of the early 1930s also suggest the proclivities of a diligent student, busily learning and copying down (in Margaret Holley’s words) “factual information on the habits and characteristics of creatures, procedures for cultivation and production, historical events, symbolic conventions, terminologies” (Poetry, 95). Such a student would cite her sources. Moore’s “Note on the Notes” (first published in 1941, and carried through into her 1967 Complete Poems) admits: “I have not yet been able to outgrow this hybrid method of composition” (PMM 375; emphasis added). Moore is perhaps remembering Eliot’s remark about “the way … a poet borrows,” his claim that “immature poets imitate; mature poets steal” (Selected Prose, 153); as Miller put it, Moore “represents her poetic act as a borrowing of ideas” (Marianne Moore, 189).²⁵

Three of Moore’s major poems consider youth and education in more direct ways. “Novices” (1923) begins with a clear attack on vices associated with (male) adolescence. “Novices” (Moore explains) rush foolishly into all they do or say: they solicit others’ judgments before they know enough to form their own “the little assumptions of the scared ego confusing the issue” (PMM 152). Such novices (who may be as old as “thirty”) “write the sort of thing that would in their judgment interest a lady.”²⁶ They seek not truth but social approval. Against such callow sociability, “the good and alive young men demonstrate the assertion / that it is not necessary to be associated with that which has annoyed one” (PMM 153). Even these “young men,” however, find themselves “bored by … the stuffy remarks of the Hebrews,” that is, the Hebrew prophets, whom Moore herself revered.

The poem thus rebuts the reverence for rude youth that Williams (and Moore’s other modernist acquaintances) espoused. “The spontaneous unforced passion of the Hebrew language” demonstrates the right kind of unpremeditated energy (the novices having demonstrated the wrong kind); so does the ocean, with its “reverberations and tempestuous energy.”²⁷ In Williams such unselfconscious force seemed the root of all originality, visible in the boys and girls the poet observed, whose ways his style sometimes emulated. When contemporary people in Moore try to imitate unselfconscious force, they fail; they barge in like novices, or flatten others’ sensibilities like steamrollers. Contemporary people ought to study that force (in nature as in literature) rather than setting up as its rivals. A poetry of studiousness, Moore suggests (in the next poem she finished after “Novices”) will imitate “Chinese lacquer-carving,” showing that “we are precisionists” (PMM 154). Though “precisionism” also denoted a school of modern painting, Moore here associates “precision” with formal education or (more precisely) with the sort of young people whom formal education helped to create.

Such a young person arrives, by name, in “The Steeple-Jack” (1932).²⁸ That poem includes three sorts of admirable characters: the steeple-jack himself (realigning the “star, which on a steeple / stands for hope”); “presidents who have repaid / sin-driven // senators by not thinking about them” (Moore probably meant Herbert Hoover); and a “college student / named Ambrose” whom Moore invites us explicitly to admire (PMM 183–84, 416; Selected Letters, 298). Ambrose

It may be overreading to see in Ambrose’s “not-native books” a riposte to Williams’s and Contact’s campaign for American locality. It seems unavoidably right, however, to see in Ambrose a figure for Moore: their “likings,” at least, are the same (they even like hats), and the “college student,” combining “not-native” books with close observation, engages in just the activities that produced Moore’s descriptive poems.²⁹

If Ambrose so little resembles the “flaming youth” of Williams or Fitzgerald or Millay, in what sense is Ambrose adolescent? He is not adult: he comes to study, observe, and draw his own conclusions, and he is a product of a college. He is Moore’s answer to the football players in Williams (for example) and to the racy couples in Millay, and he means more if we keep his rivals in mind. The long unruly lines in “Novices” imagine, first, the mess the novices make and then the ocean’s admirable force. The syllabic stanzas of “The Steeple-Jack,” by contrast, advertise an unemphatic order. Though Moore leads with the town’s least attractive features—“stranded whales”—the town will by the end display unostentatious symmetries that offer both “a reason for living” there and a reason for living in general, for thinking well of life. Shaileen Beyer has suggested that the poem instantiates an argument from design: its natural features resemble its manmade ones, offering similar instances of reliable (yet sometimes dangerous) order (the steeple would fall without someone to repair it; the sea sometimes kills its whales) (Beyer, private communication). Named for the patron saint of schoolchildren and students, Ambrose becomes the only character in a position to see this order and affirm that argument.³⁰

If “The Steeple-jack” invites both poet and readers to emulate a “student,” who reads books, “sees … progress,” and looks at life with generosity and reserve, “The Student” makes that invitation explicit. The poem’s initial incarnation (as part 2 in “Part of a Novel, Part of a Poem, Part of a Play”), buries what would become the finished poem amid a debate about French and American education. In it, college looks like a type of Eden, with its “pair of fruit-trees”—“tree-of-knowledge—/ tree of life—each with a label like that of the other college”; “these apple-trees should be for everyone” (PMM 417–18). Even college athletics (the subject, then as now, of vigorous debate) seems to Moore a source of moral strength:

Perhaps remembering Eliot’s remark about “universal university education,” Moore defends the late-nineteenth-century educational model by which many high schools aspired (however unrealistically) to prepare every one of their students for college: facing rapidly rising enrollments (and noxious theories of sexual or ethnic difference), “progressive” educators in Moore’s own college years had challenged just that goal.³¹

Moore (or Eliot) kept “The Student” out of her 1935 Selected but returned the poem to her oeuvre in 1941. If the original version shows Moore’s immersion in debates about American undergraduate education, the later one gives the poem the precision it lauds: college degrees for all Americans stand not for decadence but for integrity:

All three figures (Ambrose, “student,” “hero”; “part of a novel, part of a poem, part of a play”) represent the right kind of “observation”—selfless, careful, in search of moral exempla. All three represent Moore’s poetic and moral goals in part by evoking formal education as a shaper of youth; all three hence recall Moore’s own college experience. Collegiate life and an idealized student ethos gave Moore a way to mediate between youth as pastoral (self-enclosed, the same in each generation) and her own novelty of modernist form. As they had for Williams in Spring and All, as they did for so many of Moore’s less accomplished coevals, the characteristics of modern adolescence—among them enthusiasm, “inner light,” and a close relation to schooling—became for Moore not only a topic but a determinant (one among many) of style, even though Moore selected, from among these characteristics, some that Williams would not choose.

Modernist poems of adolescence—Williams’s, Moore’s, those of the little magazines—consider adolescence as both an extension of pastoral tradition—an enclosed, aestheticized space insulated from practical pressures and identified with poetry itself—and as a new kind of experience whose energies might transform the rest of the world. Both of these versions of adolescence remain available for later poets. Many would draw on them in a handful of poems, and a few would make them the basis for a style. Some poets with strong interests in adolescence (such as Robert Lowell) would ally themselves politically with youth movements, then use their poetry to reconsider that alliance. Others (such as Thom Gunn) would find subjects in the adolescent subcultures, the badges of rebellious taste in music or in clothing, which became distinctive features of teen life both in Britain and in America by the end of the 1950s. Still other poets (such as Jorie Graham and Laura Kasischke, Larry Levis and Liz Waldner) would ground poems in later models of youthful experience, some of them peculiar to one gender or to one generation. Yet these poets—and the others whom we will see in the rest of this book—all share something with those we have already seen: all find in the modern adolescent a focus for their own concerns and a figure for the distinctively modern poem.