Description
Aadi Publications Dealing with Dilemma An Existentialist Study of Select Poems by William Carlos Williams Robinson Jeffers and Theodore Roethke by Mondal P
One way of categorising the major American Modernist poets is to segregate those who left the United States and wrote most of their poetry as expatriates in Europe under the umbrella of ‘International Modernism’ from those who stayed on America. Among the expatriates are Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and others. But there was also an indigenous Modernism in America of William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962), and Theodore Roethke (1908-1963). They can be deemed ‘Modernist Romantics’. The practice of Modernist poets, generally, is oriented towards the cultural fragmentation characteristic of Modernity. But Williams, Jeffers, and Roethke can be said to merge the streams of both Romanticism and Modernism seamlessly. All of them try to find beauty in the commonplace, un-poetic or even anti-poetic materials, just before their ardent eyes. The book attempts to show how Williams, Jeffers, and Roethke were influenced by or came close to the core ideas of Camus, Sartre, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard in their select poems. Since, man has a life to live and to be able to relish it also, he tries to find meaning out of his existence but the universe remains resolutely silent/neutral. It is painful for one to accept the silence or callousness of the universe. This is the ‘absurdite’ Camus talks about and this is the particular problem felt by each of the poets. All of the three poets express the necessity of having the inner urge to insert meaning into life in order to make it meaningful.