Modern Poetry

Course Outline
The course, Modern Poetry explores the distinctive techniques, concerns, and major poets of
modern poetry as it developed from the turn of the twentieth century up through the post-WWII
period. It covers some of the most renowned and influential poets of that period, ranging from
Yeats, Eliot, Auden and Pound, Stevens, Moore, Bishop, Frost to Harlem Renaissance poets and
Caribbean modernism. It examines the varying ways in which these poets challenged
conventional ideas of poetry to meet the changes of the modern world. This involves looking
closely at selected poems' various formal and stylistic innovations such as free verse, futurism
and imagism. The course also examines key poetic debates and thematic concerns such as gender
and sexuality, history and temporality and the shaky politics of the time. The study will employ
diverse methods of literary criticism such as historical, gender, race theory, psychoanalysis,
Feminist, Marxist and Postcolonial criticism.
Course learning objectives
At the end of this course, learners should be able to:
1) Establish an understanding of the cultural context of modern poetry.
2) Recognize and describe key features of modern poetry.
3) Display a detailed knowledge of key texts of modern poetry.
4) Interpret the literary techniques and poetic experimentation of selected modern poets.
5) Evaluate modern poetry using appropriate literary critical techniques.
6) Demonstrate an understanding of modern poetry's major poetic debates and thematic
concerns.
7) Make an oral presentation of the results of research undertaken individually or as part of a
small group.
8) Respond judiciously to the results of research undertaken by others.
Modernism: Towards a Definition
 Modernism is a comprehensive but vague term for a movement that began to get underway in
the closing years of the 19th Century.
 The term pertains to all the creative arts, especially poetry, fiction, drama, painting, music
and architecture produced at the end of the 19th century and early 20 th century (1890s -
1940s).
 Modernism aimed to counter earlier schools of poetry —, which often focused on religion
and elevated language – and instead give voice to an intellectual, sensory, and evolving
world.
 Modernism was driven by the belief that one could no longer rely on religion, politics, or
society.
 The society was becoming increasingly divided with no common system of beliefs, values,
and images, with potentially disastrous consequences.
 Artists and intellectuals believed the previous generations had created a cultural dead end,
and they sought to break free from the constraints of Victorian traditions.
 The values of the past were lost in the great destruction, and literary concerns had shifted
from optimism to despair and distrust.
 Modernists believed literature should unsettle and challenge their readers.
 The goal of Modernist authors was to reflect present-day the way it was: there was no
exaggeration or unrealistic happy conclusions.
 Because life was so uncertain, the theme in literature was often not directly stated but rather
implied.
 Modernism, therefore, emerged as a repudiation of all that had come before.
 The rise of capitalism, along with rapid industrialization, helped bring about the modernist
movement.
 Literature before this time focused on romantic works that focused on nature.
 The modernist movement began to move away from these ideals.
 Much that is loosely categorized under modernism was avant-garde (denoting exploration,
pathfinding, innovation and invention; something new, something advanced)
 Modernism reveals a breaking away from established values, traditions, and conventions,
fresh ways of looking at man’s position in the universe and many experiments in form and
style.
 It is particularly concerned with language and its use, and with writing itself.
 Modernist works often contain non-linear narratives and free-flowing interior monologues
that emphasize the experiences and emotions of the individual.
 The beginnings of modernism, as its endings are largely indeterminate, a matter of traces
rather than of clearly defied historical moments.
 Modernism appears to have developed rather suddenly, to have had a brief period of creative
flowering, and then to have dwindled well before the end of World War II.
 There have been various theories as to whether the modernist movement ended.
 Some scholars have suggested that modernism ended in the late 1940s when postmodernism
began.
 Other scholars argue that modernism did not flower briefly in the early decades of the 20th
century and fade away; it is an ongoing tradition that is still vibrant in the 21st Century.
 Literary movements, of their nature, do not just start and stop; the evolution is gradual, so
they cannot be periodized so easily, and this applies to modernism.
 The impetus and energy of one movement diminishes as the momentum of another burgeons.
 Although modernism ended after World War II its influence is still discernible in the
literature of the 21st Century.
 J.H. Prynne and Susan Howe, for instance, are twenty-first-century modernists.
 The adjectives “modern” and “modernist” are both characterized by innovation.
 For the purposes of this course, however, we will use modernist since modern has a variety
of uses in common parlance.
 Writers produced modernist texts during a historical period of momentous cultural, social,
economic, and political upheavals.
 The following events occurred during this time:
 World War I (1914 -18)
 The Russian Revolution (1917)
  Mussolini’s March on Rome (1922)
 Irish independence (1922)
 The British General Strike (1926)
 The Wall Street Crash (1929)
 Hitler’s rise to power (1933)
 The Spanish Civil War (1936)
 World War II (1939 – 1945)
 The period also witnessed the introduction of revolutionary political and intellectual ideas
that define the contemporary world:
 Charles Darwin (1809 – 82) – theory of evolution by natural selection
 Karl Marx (1818 - 83) – establishment of a classless and stateless communist state
 Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900) – the philosophy of existentialism
 Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939) – Freudian theory that postulates the id, the ego, the
superego

 These ideas shattered people’s perceptions about religion, politics, class and money.
 The ideas placed intellectual revolution at the heart of cultural activity.
 The term Modernism originally referred to the modernizing tendencies in the Christian
Church.
 However, writers and other artists occasionally adopted the term before World War II.
 Modernism was committed to renewing the arts through various kinds of experimentation.
 Everything modern is necessarily new, while not everything new is necessarily modern:
innovation therefore is the core element o in any academic definition of modernism.
 In this era, culture became mass culture in the modern sense of the word.
 The period witnessed the development of mas-distribution cinema in the 1910s, and the
creation of two competing centers of film production: Hollywood and Moscow.
 Writers both embraced and incorporated the new visual language of cinema and attacked it as
a dead mass medium.
 Cultural mass forms were the product of rapid industrialization and technological innovation.
 Newspapers became vehicles for the mass distribution of news and entertainment and
publishers began to manufacture books on a huge scale.
 A sense of uncertainty towards technological modernization generally informed the writing
of this period.
 The Modernists saw these changes as an opportunity to reinvent language to express the new
reality.
 They wanted their poems to reflect all aspects of life, even those things that were ugly or
uncomfortable.
 Their poetry aimed to capture what it was like living during such tumultuous times.
 Modernism in these texts appeared both in their thematic engagement with the conflicted
history and new technologies as well as their techniques of presenting these conflicts.
 The poetry of Baudelaire and Laforge, the fiction of Dostoevsky and Flaubert and the plays
of Chekhov and Ibsen among others are some of the works that influenced Modernist writers.
 The different legacies of nineteenth-century Aestheticism, decadence, expressionism and
symbolism all fed into modernism.
 Several scholars use the term ‘late modernist’ to refer to contemporary poetry that portrays
elements of modernism.
Modern Poetry
 Modern poetry is a departure from traditional poetic forms and topics and reflects the attitude
and culture of the 20th century.
 It was born after World War I when poets like T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, W.
B. Yeats, Edward Robinson, and others began to question everything about life.
 Modern poets, affected by events such as World War I and the effects of industrialization on
society, wrote about everyday life, including the ugly and challenging aspects.
 They saw that the world had changed drastically, moving from a rural and agrarian society to
a more urban and industrial one.
 Modern poets believed in illustrating the dramatic, nuanced shifts occurring all around them
— from war to new technology.
 They did this by breaking away from Romantic language, searching for fresh images and a
completely new diction.
 The poet was no longer a singer of sweet verses who used conventional romantic imagery to
convey self-indulged personal emotion.
 Rather, he was the explorer of experience of any shade who used language in a more
complex, allusive and intellectual way.
 The new movement began with a revolt against every kind of verbal imprecision and
lushness.
 Modern poetry mirrors the despair, disillusionment, loneliness and isolation of man, the
spiritual barrenness and sterility of the times.
 Modernist poetry has seen over a century of formal, prosodic (connected with the patterns of
sounds and rhythms in poetry) and linguistic experimentation.
 The history of modernist poetry is a history of radical innovation in form, prosody (patterns
of sounds and rhythms in poetry) and language.
 Modernism initially involved a break from conventional poetic verse- forms, experimentation
with other forms of prosody and a rejection of the earlier conventional poetic language.
 English modernist poets were self-consciously open to other cultures: they explored
contemporary developments in French, Japanese, and Chinese poetry.
 Thus, internationalism, cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism are integral to modernism.
 Modernist poets were also aware of developments in other arts such as collage, montage, etc.,
and these influenced their own practice.
 The question of complexity and “difficulty” was paramount in essays about modern poems.
 Many writers described modernist poetry as ‘difficult’ when compared to traditional poetry.
 They argued that modernist writing was necessarily distanced from the ‘plain’ or ‘ordinary’
reader.
 T.S. Eliot explained that poets needed to be ‘difficult’, either because they could only express
themselves in an obscure way or because complexity was the result of their experiment in
form.
 The publication of his poem The Waste Land served to confirm the truth of this
pronouncement.
 Modernist poets struggled with the dilemmas and contradictions of the modern world and
sought values or patterns of knowledge to order these conflicts.
 Although these poets expressed contradictory attitudes towards politics, tradition, obscenity,
and progress, they shared the desire to experiment with form.
 The innovations in form involved types of writing which moved beyond existing genre
distinctions.
 Modernist poets believed that the innovative techniques captured experiences that were
simply beyond the range of familiar language and standard grammar.
 Subject matter that often makes a statement about society and realistically conveys everyday
life characterizes modern poetry.
 Modernist poetry is remarkable for its inventive use of language, use of allusion and
eagerness to break with poetic tradition and establish new rhythms and idioms in poems.
 Modern poets were in constant conversation with the historical trauma of wars and
revolutions, the excitement of new political initiatives and the new sciences.
 As a result, these poets experimented with diction and form to evolve a poetry that could
speak from the deepest experiences of their generation.
Literary Movements under Modernism
Within the general movement, there were subsidiary and identifiable movements.
These artistic and literary movements include Imagism, Surrealism, Expressionism, Futurism,
and Formalism. Others are Vorticism, Cubism, Dada and Symbolism.
Imagism
 Imagism was a 20th-century movement in English poetry influenced by the theories of
English philosopher and poet, T.E. Hulme, and its leading proponent in Ezra Pound.
 Hulme advocated for a style in poetry based on an accurate presentation of its subject, with
no excess verbosity.
 Imagism was viewed as a reaction against Romantic and Victorian poetry, which encouraged
long, embellished descriptions of events and things.
 Romantic and Victorian poets tended to describe images at great length with many words and
linked the mages to philosophical concepts.
 In contrast, imagism emphasized simplicity, clarity of expression, and precision through the
use of exacting visual images.
 Modernist poets started to believe that using simple language to describe events, objects, and
subjects was a better way to write poetry.
 They moved away from fixed meters and moral reflections, subordinating everything to what
Hulme called the “hard, dry image.”
 The movement abandoned conventional poetic materials and versification, and was free to
choose any subject and to create its rhythms.
 Tenets of imagism include the choice of a subject matter dealing with a single experience,
conciseness of expression, concreteness of imagery and rhythm based on the musical phrase.
 The three tenets of imagist poetry include the following:
 Direct analysis of the subject (no use of decorative language to describe the subject).
 Simple language (no use of extra words that do not add to the description of the subject).
 Imagist poetry must be written in the rhythm of the musical phrase, not in the
metronome.
Surrealism
 Surrealism is a literary movement that developed in the aftermath of World War I.
 The movement is essentially about disregarding convention, transgressing artistic boundaries,
and unleashing the inner workings of the human mind.
 The artistic practice transgresses the bounds of reality to create dreamlike and powerful
images that initially confuse the reader.
 In his Surrealist Manifesto (1924), André Breton affirmed the supremacy of the
“disinterested play of thought” and the “omnipotence of dreams” rather than reason and
logic.
 Influenced by the theories of Sigmund Freud, poets drew upon the private world of the mind,
traditionally restricted by reason and societal limitations, to produce unexpected imagery.
 The movement experimented with a new mode of expression called automatic writing, or
automatism, which sought to release the uninhibited imagination of the subconscious.
 Through automatic writing and hypnosis, surrealists intended to express, either verbally or in
writing, the true function of thought.
 This thought could be dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, and outside all
aesthetic or moral preoccupations.
 Thus the use of psychic automatism could free the unconscious mind to express itself, often
resulting in the depiction of illogical or dreamlike scenes and ideas.
 Surrealist poetry is often marked by run-on sentences, strange associations, automatic
writing, and political overtones.
Expressionism
 Expressionism arose as a reaction against materialism, complacent bourgeois prosperity,
rapid mechanization and urbanization during and immediately after World War I.
 World War I, which lasted from 1914 to 1918, called into question human existence as a
whole.
 It was waged with so far unknown dreadful weapons, such as the use of gas in combat.
 Expressionism is known for its emphasis on subjective experience and emotional expression
rather than objective reality.
 The movement prioritized emotional truth over realistic representation, rejecting traditional
aesthetic values.
 It aimed to convey subjective, emotional experiences rather than objective reality,
challenging traditional narrative forms in literature and art.
 In expressionism, truths, thoughts and experiences seen mentally are of expression in a
manner that is radical and subjective.
 It explored themes of alienation, anxiety, and spiritual crisis in modern society, using
distortion and exaggeration to heighten emotional impact.
 Expressionists also dealt with subjects of war, destruction, disintegration, confusion, loss of
self, love, etc. in a strongly subjective manner.
 Political despair, advancing industrialization and urbanization became recurring themes.
 Thus expressionism was the response to a world that was completely turned upside down,
and which posed enormous problems for humanity at the beginning of the 20th century.
 The movement drew from Friedrich Nietzsche's ideas on individualism and rejection of
societal norms.
 It also incorporated Sigmund Freud's theories on the unconscious and dream interpretation
 Key characteristics included:
 The prioritization of emotional truth over realistic representation.
 Rejection of traditional aesthetic values in favor of raw expression
 The exploration of themes of alienation, anxiety, and spiritual crisis in modern society.
 Emphasizing inner emotional states.
 Utilization of the stream-of-consciousness narration to convey characters' thoughts.
 Employment of non-realistic, often grotesque imagery to heighten emotional impact.
 Exaggeration of physical features or personality traits of characters to represent inner
turmoil.
 Distortion of language through fragmented syntax and unconventional grammar.
Futurism
 Futurism was an artistic movement that emphasized the dynamism, speed, energy, and power
of the machine, as well as the vitality, change, and restlessness of modern life.
 The Italian poet, Filippo Marinetti coined the word Futurism to reflect his goal of abandoning
the art of the past and celebrating change, originality, and innovation in culture and society.
 Marinetti wrote a manifesto that glorified the new technology of the automobile and the
beauty of its speed, power, and movement.
 In the manifesto, Marinetti declared that artistic work without an aggressive element could
not be considered a masterpiece.
 He insisted on a language free of syntax and logical ordering to allow the poet to convey
intense emotion rapidly.
 Marinetti advocated for the maximum freedom of imagery and metaphor.
 The poets who embraced literary Futurism sought to develop a language appropriate for what
they perceived to be the speed and ruthlessness of the early 20th century.
 The Futurists wished to revolutionize culture by depicting the beauty of modern life -
machines, speed, and violence!
 They established new genres, such as ‘free-word poetry’, which liberated poetry from the
constraints of linear typography and conventional syntax and spelling.
 This led to the expressive use of typography—a varying of font sizes and styles within a
word or on the same line and free display of words on the printed page.
 The poets associated with this movement valued concise language, new styles, and new ways
of using meter and irony.
 It promoted artistic innovation, experimentation, and a focus on new art, technology, and
politics, commonly manifested through primitivism.
Formalism
 Formalism is a theoretical position that favours form over the thematic concerns within a text
or its relationship with the world outside.
 Its preference for form, linguistic elements, and literary devices gives this school of literary
theory its name.
 Formalism provides principles for interpreting and analyzing a literary text as a self-
contained object.
 The approach analyzes a text's structure and literary devices, rather than its context or author.
 It focuses on analyzing the formal elements of a text, such as structure and language, rather
than historical context.
 The formalists argued that the study of literature should be exclusively about form,
technique, and literary devices within a work of literature.
 Formalism analysis sidelines factors such as authorial intent, and the cultural and
sociopolitical background of a text from its study.
 The main idea in formalism is that the most important aspect of a work is its form.
 Formalist literary theory is closely associated with structuralism, another school of literary
criticism that was popular during the twentieth century.
 Structuralism and formalism were both influenced by the theory of language proposed by the
Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure.
 Saussure's theory of semiotics describes language as a system of signs that accrue meaning
arbitrarily through social convention.
 Formalist critics believe that the meaning of a text can be found within the text itself.
 Formalists analyze the arrangement of words, genres, modes, and discourse, and they
disregard the author's intent, culture, or historical context.
 In poetry, formalism analysis means focusing on the structural elements, like meter, rhyme
scheme, diction, imagery, and syntax.
 Formalism does not consider external factors like the author's life, historical context, or
cultural implications as important to understanding the poem's meaning and aesthetic impact.
 It does not concern itself with the biography of the author, historical events outside of the
story, literary allusions, mythological patterns, or psychoanalytical traits of the characters.
 A formalist critic examines the form of the work as a whole, the characters, the settings, the
tone, the point of view, the diction, and all other elements, which join to make it a single text.
 After analyzing each part, the critic then describes how the parts work together to give
meaning (theme) to the text.
Main Characteristics of Modern Poetry
 Modern poetry is marked by a significant departure from the Romantic and Victorian
traditions that preceded it.
 It embraced experimentation, fragmentation and a sense of disillusionment with established
order reflecting the tumultuous and rapidly changing world of the early 20th century.
 Common features often associated with modern poetry include:
Free verse
 Modern poetry frequently abandons traditional rhyme and meter in favor of free verse.
 Poets experiment with irregular rhythms, line breaks and sentence structures, allowing for
greater flexibility and innovation in their work.
Fragmentation
 Many modern poets use fragmentation and disjointed language to reflect the fragmented
nature of contemporary life and consciousness.
 This fragmentation can manifest itself in the form of abrupt shifts in tone, imagery or syntax.
Symbolism and Imagery
 Symbolism and vivid imagery are central to modern poetry.
 Poets use evocative and often abstract images to convey complex emotions, ideas or
experience.
 These images may be open to multiple interpretations.
Ambiguity
 Modern poetry often embraces ambiguity and open-endedness.
 Poets may leave meanings unresolved, allowing readers to engage actively with the text and
interpret it in various ways.
Experimentation
 Modern poets are known for their experimental approaches to language and form.
 They may play with typography, use unconventional punctuation or incorporate multimedia
elements into their poetry.
Themes of Alienation and Disillusionment
 May modern poets explore themes of alienation, disillusionment and a sense of
fragmentation in the face of rapid societal changes.
 This can reflect the upheavals of the modern era including war, industrialization and
urbanization.
Social and Political Critique
 Modern poets often engage with social and political issues critiquing power structures,
inequalities and injustices.
 They may use poetry as a platform for activism and social change.
Stream of Consciousness
 Modern poets employ a stream-of-consciousness narrative style, allowing readers to glimpse
the inner thoughts and feelings of the speaker.
 This style can create a sense of immediacy and intimacy
Urban and Industrial Themes
 With the rise of urbanization and industrialization in the modern era, many poets explore the
impact of these changes on human experience.
 Urban industrial settings often feature prominently in modern poetry.
Cultural and Identity Exploration
 Many modern poets explore questions of cultural identity, heritage and the search for
meaning in a rapidly changing world.
 This exploration may involve drawing from various cultural traditions and voices.
Rejection of Romanticism
 Modern poetry often rejects the idealized and sentimental themes of Romantic poetry in
favor of a more realistic view of the world.
Major Modernist Poets
 Modernist poets wrote their poetry between 1890 and 1950 in the tradition of modernist
literature.
 The major poets of this movement include T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, T.E. Hulme, D.H.
Lawrence, W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden E.E. Cummings, Robert Frost,
 Others are William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, Carol Ann Duffy,
and Maya Angelou.
T.S. Eliot
 Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965), an American-born poet is considered a central figure in
the Modernist movement.
 T.S Eliot was one of the twentieth century’s major poets primarily due to the way his unique
poetic style changed the face of Modernism.
 Eliot is highly distinguished as a poet, a literary critic, a dramatist, and an editor.
 The works of Ezra Pound, Matthew Arnold, and Immanuel Kant influenced T. S. Eliot.
 In 1915, Eliot attracted widespread attention for his poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock,” a masterpiece of the Modernist movement.
 It was followed by some of the best-known poems in English language, including “The
Waste Land” (1932), “The Hollow Men” (1925), and “Ash Wednesday” (1930).
 Eliot’s other notable works include Four Quartets (1943), and the plays Murder in the
Cathedral (1935) and The Cocktail Party, which won the 1950 Tony Award for Best Play.
 Eliot’s awards and honors include the British Order of Merit and the1948 Nobel Prize for
Literature.cd5
 His poetry implies modernism: he wrote using different styles, images and verse structure,
which differed distinctly throughout his poetic career.
 His style was unique in its use of myth to illustrate modern experience; its collage-like
juxtaposition of different voices and traditions; and its focus on form as the carrier of
meaning.
 A notable of modernism in Eliot’s poetry modern is the bridging of different voices, tones
and the dramatic levels.
 Eliot's poetry explores themes of alienation, disillusionment, and the search for meaning.
 Eliot’s name is largely associated with Modernism due to his approach on bringing notions
and voices – polar opposites at face value – and having them coalesce.
 Eliot believed that in poetry the present should alter the past as much as the present is
directed by the past.
 According to him, no artist has complete meaning in isolation, but must be judged ‘for
contrast and comparison, among the past.
 His poetry thus abounds with allusions to the great works of literature, and quite often these
are merged together in a seemingly disoriented way.
 However, the new links that are formed between these classical tales establish new
relationships out of seeming contradictions.
 He purposely interweaved fragments from different texts in order for readers to glimpse at
the traditions of the past.
 Many of the contrasting notions come from the various voices he uses in his poetry.
 In The Waste Land, for example, Eliot allows people to know the past – where references
were taken from – and to make new connections in relation to the modern world.
 The Waste Land expresses with great power the disenchantment, disillusionment, and disgust
of the period after World War I.
 The constant rhetorical shifts and its juxtapositions of contrasting styles expresses the poem’s
ultimate theme of hopelessness and confusion of purpose of life in the secularized city.
 In a series of pieces, linked by the legend of the Grail, it portrays a sterile world of panicky
fears and barren lusts, and of human beings waiting for some sign or promise of redemption.
 The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock contains the fragmented thoughts of the protagonist
Prufrock, while he is struggling to conduct himself in a social situation.
 The poem reinforces ‘the note of boredom with different images of staleness.’
 The poem is littered with symbols, all of which represent certain emotions.
 The corruption of city life is described with the imagery of ‘half-deserted streets,’ ‘cheap
hotels,’ and ‘sawdust restaurants.’
 Eliot’s use of figurative language in this poem reflects his fragmentation from the rest of
society.
 Eliot discusses humanity using; the reference to detached human body parts – hair, hands,
eyes, faces.
 This reinforces the idea of the loss of humanity by reducing human beings to fragments.
 Prufrock seems to think of himself only in terms of the ‘bald spot in the middle of [his] hair.’
 He worries about the face he must present to the world; even though his ‘necktie is rich and
modest,’ he worries about what ‘[t]hey will say: ‘But how his arms and legs are thin!’
 This objective correlative in ‘Prufrock,’ ‘implies that people are isolated from each other just
like their body parts in the modern world and this leads to loneliness among people.