The great accomplishment of American poetry of the modernist period was to equal English poetry- not by the works of a single genius like Whitman or Dickinson, but rather by the productions of a long line of poets changing the face of the art. Dissatisfied with the historically aristocratic role of poetry in Europe, some modern American poets-Robert Frost, E.E.Cummings, William Carlos Williams- began writing poetry for a mass audience, a poetry in which that audience could find reflected its own environment and concerns. American readers on the whole were not prepared for the new poets, even the most accessible ones; all of the American modernists found themselves writing in a raw culture not ready for them.

     In the early part of the century, when the poets were exploring Europe and the European avant-garde writing, American was firmly isolationist. The writers of this era responded variously to american isolationism and provinciality. Many writers left America for Paris or London- among them was T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Ezra Pound, E.E.Cummings, and Robert Frost. The first books of poetry by Pound, Frost, and Marianne Moore were all published abroad, where public taste was more accustomed to avant-garde art. American taste preferred genteel Anglophilia or robust American good sense to the sort of experimentation being carried on by its new poets. In quiter ways, Frost, Wallace Stevens, and Moore were also influenced by international models. Frost wrote a rural poetry influenced not only by the English tradition from Wadsworth to Hardy, but also by Latin ecologues and georgic poetry. He rightly suspected that he might find a more cordial reception in England for such poetry than in America.

     Yet the modernist poets, whatever their early estranged relation with the immediate public, were not indifferent to the common life of their generation. Like everyone else of the period, they were affected by World WarI and the Depression and reacted variously to these events.

     Some poetry could be distinctively American in language. Frost learned from Longfellow and Whittier and Bryant the rural New England was a worthy poetic territory, as seen in "Birches" "The Road Not Taken," and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" He learned even more, stylistically, from the Latin poets, especially Horace and Lucretius. His domestication, in American poetry, of the language of Roman stoicism is a brillant native achievement. Prosody too is a distinguishing feature of modernist poetry: Both Frost and Pound, but in different ways, brought free verse into prominence.
 

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