Modernist Invention: Media Technology and American Poetry

The media ecology of North America has long fascinated historians and literary scholars, but what does verse have to tell us about the way sound has evolved? What did it mean for modernist poets to make the mechanics of sound their business? And in what sense did their contriving ways to intervene in the culture of recording and transmission enable the articulation of a more or less 'authentic' voice than the kind earlier generations of poets had cultivated? For the writers considered in this study – Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and Langston Hughes – such questions were not always easy to resolve, but rather called for a kind of creative troubleshooting, a will to think laterally about the ways a lyric poem might accommodate or become entangled in the most ordinary of technological effects and processes, from telephony to radio waves, phonography to movie-going.