Modernist Poetry

1914-1945
Characteristics of Modern Poetry

• A blanket condemnation of modern life and

modern society
• The confident bourgeois world before 1914 has been
irrevocably shattered, and the modernist poet believes
that the collapse of modern civilization into vulgarity
and triviality presages the complete dissolution of
Western culture.
Characteristics of Modern Poetry

• Autonomy of the individual and the poem

• Living in the midst of chaos, the modern poet
abandons all hope of social structure and
contemplates essentially the role of life for the
isolated individual. Each poem is therefore an
island unto itself, not to be related to other works
but solely to its own evocation.
Characteristics of Modern Poetry

• The private symbol

• The loss of any conscious universal symbols in
our fragmented society results in the purely
personal symbol, often incomprehensible to the
uninitiated and failing to communicate to many
readers.
Characteristics of Modern Poetry

• Purposeful difficulty
• As T. S. Eliot states, “A confused and complicated
age requires comparable expression, not a false
simplification.”
Characteristics of Modern Poetry

• Tension
• Modern poetry emphasizes tension rather than
seeking the time-honored resolution of it
through poetry. Such verse tends to disturb
rather than soothe, reflecting the contemporary
temper instead of placating it.
Characteristics of Modern Poetry

• Irrationality
• Regarding as grotesquely naïve the pre-1914
belief in man as a creature capable of solving his
problems rationally, modern poets tend to write
by free association (though their revisions are
frequently quite cerebral).
• Ideally, modern poetry consists solely of
symbolic and descriptive images, ignoring the
propositional, the denotative, and the explicit.
Characteristics of Modern Poetry

• Myth
• Not conscious but unconscious symbols,
archetypes from the collective unconscious of
man, fascinate modern poets. Tapping such deep
veins of hidden emotive concepts constitutes the
means of a communications with others.
Characteristics of Modern Poetry

• Aggressive unpopularity
• Modern poetry has sought to create a new elite,
since the 19th-century bourgeois triumph
obliterated the old stratification of society. Jose
Orgtega y Gasset (Spanish Philosopher) explains
recent 20th-century as “the art of a privileged
aristocracy of finer senses” united less by
aesthetic theory than by scorn for the non-
intellectual masses.
Characteristics of Modern Poetry
Defiantly Urban contemporary
The nature escape of the Georgians is blatantly scorned, as the subject now
is the tortured spirit in the industrialized jungle. Modern poets in their
language frequently spout the idiom of today. Instead of the traditional
poetic emphasis upon the cosmic, moderns concern themselves with the
everyday.
Characteristics of Modern Poetry
Unceasing experiment in form and technique
Modern poets have vastly increased the scope of poetry by subjects,
allusions, and phrasings never previously deemed appropriate to poetry.
Daring rhythms and irregular metrical patterns have often created an
exciting freshness unknown to earlier verse. Some modern poetry has
explored perhaps the limits of verbal magic and mood, minimizing rational
content.
Characteristics of Modern Poetry
emphasizes the individuality of the author, while at the same time the
author often hides behind a persona, or "mask of the self"; stresses interior
modes of consciousness while exhibiting "a concern to objectify the
subjective" (Bradbury 48--think of imagism). Poems often allude to past
cultures and avoid the formulaic and generic (e.g., Richard Watson Gilder).
Sometimes one poem will feature many voices or personae (e.g., The Waste
Land) from various time periods and social classes