20 pages • 40 minutes read
From the Wave
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Background
Literary Context: Formal Poetry in the 20th Century
Prior to 1900, most English poetry was formal. Early in the 20th century, however, Modernist poets became skeptical of meter, rhyme, and traditional forms. Modernist poets felt traditional social orders had been upended, and that meant traditional forms needed to be upended, too. As a result, Modernist poets like T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein largely eschewed meter, rhyme, and traditional forms and wrote free-verse poems instead. Additionally, the Modernist movement was so influential that most subsequent poets followed suit and wrote primarily in free verse as well.
Gunn, however, was an exception. His career spanned the latter half of the 20th century, a time when most of his contemporaries were writing in free verse, yet Gunn wrote primarily in form, and “From the Wave” is a good example. While later in his career, Gunn did experiment more with free verse, it never became his predominant mode.
Authorial Context: “From the Wave” and Moly
Gunn wrote of himself, “My life insists on continuities—between America and England, between free verse and meter, between vision and everyday consciousness” (Occasions, 184). “From the Wave” shows Gunn insisting on continuities in his poetry:
Gunn was devoted to maintaining continuities between what appeared to be oppositions in his life as well as in his art (England/America, meter/free verse, visionary/mundane experience). He preferred to think of himself as ‘Anglo-American’—a transatlantic hybrid (he never traded in his British passport, but visited England with diminishing frequency, and for shorter and shorter periods). This fusion of identity is worth keeping in mind when considering ‘From the Wave,’ a poem about surfers, themselves a hybrid of human and wave. The poem is from the book Moly (1971), which opens with a centaur poem […] Questions of identity and fusions of form are at the thematic heart of the book, and ‘From the Wave’ carries the reader from heroic legend into a contemporary world still vibrant with transformational possibilities (Weiner).
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