In relation to this project, primitivism refers to certain modernist poets who saw their breaking of traditional poetic conventions as a return to an earlier, often simpler or more vital aesthetic. However, more generally, primitivism is an ongoing and often idealized attitude towards the past that recurs throughout artistic and literary history, and views the past as something which can inspire the present. The rise of primitivism in modernist aesthetics coincided with the rise of comparative anthropology, embodied in works such as Frazer’s The Golden Bough, the height and subsequent decline of modern European imperialism, and the idea of a ‘primitive’ subconscious, which could be revealed by the burgeoning field of psychoanalysis. Romanian French poet Tristan Tzara, who would later go on to write the Dada manifesto, was an advocate for primitivism as an artistic movement, and Polish poets Anatol Stern and Aleksander Wat wrote the primitivist manifesto included in this database. However, many major modernist poets, including Ezra Pound and T.S.Eliot, were influenced by primitivism.
"The Golden Bough; a study in comparative religion by Sir James Frazer, 1894, from The Internet Archive | Public Domain.
It’s also important to note that primitivism’s idealization of the past sometimes uses racist and colonialist ideas such as the ‘savage’ or the ‘barbarian’ as both an ideal of vitality and a symbol of danger or rule-breaking. While primitivism can be appropriative, some modern authors across the African diaspora reclaimed some of its themes and characteristics in the philosophy and artistic movement of Négritude. Described by Etherington as “a cultural movement of black francophone middle class” that spread to America and coincided with the Harlem Renaissance. Prominent authors of the Négritude movement include Aimé Césaire, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and others.
References
Bell, Michael. Primitivism. London: Methuen, 1972.
Etherington, Ben. Literary Primitivism. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2018.
“Primitivism.” "Encyclopædia Britannica Online", Encyclopedia Britannica Inc, 2020.
Richardson, A, and O Hena. “Primitivism.” The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Princeton University Press, 2012.