Clement Wood

20th century Alabama poet and writer

I am one of the only literary scholars of forgotten Modernist poet, Clement Wood. I discovered him in undergrad and wrote my honors thesis on his life and work. Since then, I have continued advocating for wider recognition of Wood's literary merit, through research and cataloging of documents from the Clement Wood Collection housed at Brown University, which I had the opportunity to visit for my thesis.

Who was Clement Wood?

Southern Roots

1888-1950. Born and raised in Birmingham, AL, near Red Mountain. His passion for the south is one of the main themes of his work. He was largely inspired by the romanticism of his poet grandfather Warfield Creath Richardson and aunt Belle Richardson Harrison. One of his poems is even called 'when I die, bury my heart in the south."

Early Life & Career

Wood was educated as a lawyer at Yale to follow in his father's footsteps. He abandoned law for the life of a poet in the early 1920s, and moved to NYC, where he joined up with Louis Untermeyer, Edwin Markham, and James Oppenheim, who formed his literary circle. As he describes it in his Autobiography, "At the unripe age of twenty-five I came on to New York, to devote my life to Literature."

Literary Reception

Wood was both a writer and critic in the literary scene. He was picky and precise in his likes and dislikes of literary styles, and was quick to say so. He admired poets like Whitman, Oppenheim, and Untermeyer, and had mixed feelings about poets like Frost, Eliot, and Pound. The others felt the same about Wood, and so he had several 'enemies' in the literary world.

Themes & Values

Wood was an activist for women's and workers rights, who valued man and nature over machine. The major themes in Wood’s poetic work fit into these categories: natural, social, and spiritual. This was due to his upbringing in rural Alabama, his inside view into the political justice system as a young socialist, and his ´focus on the natural and social resulted in a kind of human-centered ‘religion.’

Current Research

In 2015, I published my honors thesis with the University of Northern Iowa's ScholarWorks, available for free online here. This thesis, titled "'Wandersoul of the South: Situating 20th Century Alabama Poet, Clement Wood, in a Literary Tradition," aimed to categorized what poetic movement Wood was part of during his life. My conclusion in this study was that Wood is an outlier, and did not fit neatly into the main movements at the time, Modernism or Realism.

However, through my subsequent research in a class in the English department on Modernism at Harvard University during my time at the Divinity School, I continued my research and discovered that, not only was Wood indeed a Modernist, in fact, he was one of the pioneer's of Modernism in America in the 1920s-1950s. This I discovered from documents in the Clement Wood Collection at Brown University, which I have digital copies from my visit there in 2015 for my initial honors thesis research.

It is presently my aim to continue advocating for recognition of Wood, by cataloging my research from Brown's collection, and making his work more widely available online.

Why Wood Matters

Clement Wood, forerunner of American Modernism, pioneered Free Verse poetry, which he termed 'Polyrhythmic Verse.' In essence, Wood was one of the first to embrace 'free verse' as a type of verse, though he was also adept at meter and rhyme. Wood also invented a poem form called the 'Canopus,' named after his poem of the same name. Wood wasn't afraid to speak his mind and had strong opinions on the great authors of his day. He was a lecturer, scholar, and husband, aside from being a poet. As I see it, Wood's poetry has lasting merit for the tradition of American Modernism.

Clement Wood Fun Facts

Late for the Train

One time, when running late for the train, Wood was so frustrated it left without him that he threw his suitcase into the train window as it passed. This got him arrested and his fingerprints taken, of which the document is in the collection at Brown University.