American Modernizm: Ezra Pound, T.S.Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams. Harlem Renaissance.

American modernism like modernism in general is a trend of thought that affirms the power of human beings to create, improve, and reshape their environment, with the aid of scientific knowledge, technology and practical experimentation, and is thus in its essence both progressive and optimistic. The idea that individual human beings can define themselves through their own inner resources and create their own vision of existence without help from family, fellow citizens, or tradition is a large trend.

Modernism—in general—evolved from Enlightenment philosophies, yet rejected all historical reference. Early modernists married to the Enlightenment ideal—the progressiveness, the break with history, the embrace of the “transitory”, the “fleeting”, and the “maelstrom of change”-- yet, with the lacuna of war, these optimistic views were abandoned.

Ezra Pound (1885–1972) was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry. He became known for his role in developing Imagism, which, in reaction to the Victorian and Georgian poets, favored tight language, unadorned imagery, and a strong correspondence between the verbal and musical qualities of the verse and the mood it expressed.

“The Cantos” by Ezra Pound is a long, incomplete poem in 120 sections, each of which is a canto. It is a book-length work, widely considered to present formidable difficulties to the reader. Strong claims have been made for it as the most significant work of modernist poetry of the 20th century. As in Pound's prose writing, the themes of economics, governance, and culture are integral to its content. The most striking feature of the text, to a casual browser, is the inclusion of Chinese characters as well as quotations in European languages other than English. Recourse to scholarly commentaries is almost inevitable for a close reader. The range of allusion to historical events is very broad, and abrupt changes occur with little transition. References without explanation abound.

Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot (1888–1965) was an American-born English poet, playwright, and literary critic, arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.

“The Waste Land” is a 434-line modernist poem by T. S. Eliot. It has been called "one of the most important poems of the 20th century." Despite the poem's obscurity—its shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its elegiac but intimidating summoning up of a vast and dissonant range of cultures and literatures—the poem has become a familiar touchstone of modern literature. The style of the poem overall is marked by the hundreds of allusions and quotations from other texts (classic and obscure; "high-brow" and "low-brow") that Eliot peppered throughout the poem. In addition to the many "high-brow" references and/or quotes from poets like Baudelaire, Shakespeare, Ovid, and Homer, Eliot also included a couple of references to "low-brow" genres.

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) was a major American Modernist poet.

“Harmonium” is a book of poetry by U.S. poet Wallace Stevens. The collection comprises 85 poems, ranging in length from just a few lines ("Life Is Motion") to several hundred ("The Comedian as the Letter C").

Stevens is often called a symbolist poet. Vendler notes that the first task undertaken by the early critics of Stevens was to "decode" his "symbols". Color symbolism is a vital part of Stevens' poetic technique, according to the symbolist critic Veena Rani Prasad.

William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. Williams "worked harder at being a writer than he did at being a physician"; but during his long lifetime, Williams excelled at both. “Poems” is an early self published volume of poems by William Carlos Williams.

The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement". It was centered in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City.

Historians disagree as to when the Harlem Renaissance began and ended. The Harlem Renaissance is unofficially recognized to have spanned from about 1919 until the early or mid 1930s. Many of its ideas lived on much longer. The zenith of this "flowering of Negro literature" was placed between 1924 and 1929.

James Hughes (1902–1967) was an American poet, novelist, playwright, and columnist. He was one of the earliest innovators of the new literary art form jazz poetry. Hughes is best-known for his work during the Harlem Renaissance.

Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) was an American folklorist, anthropologist, and author during the time of the Harlem Renaissance. Of Hurston's four novels and more than 50 published short stories, plays, and essays, she is best known for her novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God”.

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