One way to understand "The Man-Moth" is as a critique of contemporary urban life and the modern city. The setting of this poem is lonely, senseless, and uncomfortable. Its denizens live atomized existences and travel the city in cramped, stressful trains, spending their days in a claustrophobic nightmare. The "third rail" of the train tracks is an ever-present threat, suggesting that the city is full of dangerous avenues for self-destruction and self-harm. Moreover, the city seems to psychologically degrade its inhabitants. While the "Man-Moth" of the title maintains a certain relentless hopefulness, those surrounding him have lost the will to change their circumstances or interrogate their surroundings. While the pastoral poem, exploring rural life, is often treated as a poetic genre unto itself, there is a rich tradition of poetry exploring, critiquing, celebrating, and reimagining the city. Here, we'll look at a range of poems about urban settings.
The Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries prompted massive urbanization and a dramatic growth in the size of British cities. Romantic poets were as a whole critical of industrialization, as well as of cities themselves. William Blake's "London" is perhaps the best-known Romantic critique of the contemporary city. Blake takes note of the unhappiness of London's residents, with descriptions of the "Marks of weakness, marks of woe," on their faces. The poem's concerns are both environmental and social, bringing together Romantic preoccupations with inequality and ecological degradation. Blake notes that "Every blackning Church appalls," in reference to the soot and smog that darkened London's buildings in the period, and calls attention to the plights of poor young people by describing the "Chimney-sweepers cry" and the "youthful harlot's curse." Here, the city is a hypermodern realm of danger, poverty, and chaos.
In contrast to both Blake's industrial London and Bishop's anonymous, surreal city, the version of New York depicted in Walt Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" is joyful, even ecstatic. In Whitman's portrayal, the chaos and overwhelming size of the city, with its countless unknowable individuals, is cause for delighted curiosity. "Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me!" Whitman wrote. In "The Man-Moth," the individual is overwhelmed by and isolated among the urban crowds, whereas the speaker of "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" instead experiences a profound and thrilling dissolution of the self into the broader urban population. Long, breathless lines and anaphoric lists of images contribute even further to this poem's euphoric tone, and to the sense of an endless, ever-evolving, yet comfortingly eternal urban rhythm.
Maya Angelou, in "Waking in New York," takes as her subject matter the same city as Whitman. Yet her approach is altogether different: spare where Whitman is effusive, and interested in the city as a site of endurance and survival rather than an energizing marvel. Angelou's oeuvre focused primarily on the difficulties and triumphs of 20th-century Black womanhood, and while the gender and race of this poem's speaker are not identified, the work suggests that for the speaker New York is a difficult place marked by exhaustion and conflict. However, this poem focuses in on a single moment of city life: early morning, before New York's hustle and bustle begin. Even as she anticipates the onslaught of the New York day, the speaker affirms her own dignity and personhood with a moment of quiet reflection. She describes herself as "an alarm, awake as a / rumor of war": prepared for the difficulties of the city yet momentarily separate from them.
Collectively, these works approach urban life in very different ways. Blake and Angelou both focus on the drudgery of life in the city, though Blake's poem takes a broad, sweeping approach and Angelou's focuses on a single quiet moment in the life of one speaker. Bishop, like Angelou, is interested in the separateness of a single individual within the wider city, but her focus is on a fantastical creature within an anonymous city. Meanwhile, Whitman and Blake share an approach oriented around the broad patterns of urban life, rather than on a single speaker or protagonist, but Whitman's version of city life is joyful while Blake's is marred by injustice. Meanwhile, these are a vanishingly small sample of poems. The theme of life in the city has been addressed across countless works of poetry, which explore metropolises large and small, ancient and modern, fictional and real.
