MODERNISM

Edited by
ANNA ANSELMO

Milano 2009
© 2009 Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore - Diritto allo studio
Largo Gemelli 1, 20123 Milano - tel. 02.72342235 - fax 02.80.53.215
e-mail: [email protected] (produzione); [email protected] (distribuzione)
web: www.unicatt.it/librario
ISBN: 978-88-8311-648-3
 CONTENTS

MODERNISM........................................................................................................................ 5
THOMAS HARDY (1840-1928)...................................................................................39
Hap.................................................................................................................................41
The Convergence of the Twain (Lines on the loss of the ““Titanic””)..............43
In Time of ““The Breaking of Nations”” .............................................................45
T.S. ELIOT (1888-1965)................................................................................................47
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock..................................................................49
D.H. LAWRENCE (1885-1930)................................................................................... 55
Piano..............................................................................................................................57
Snake .............................................................................................................................59
Bibliography......................................................................................................................63
Suggestions for further reading...................................................................................65

3
MODERNISM
 ““Il faut être absolument moderne””.
ARTHUR RIMBAUD

The term ““modernism”” serves as a label for a variety of tendencies,

attitudes, convictions, and for works of art disparate in quality and
meaning, but alike in spirit and, sometimes, conception. Critics have
been at pains to define modernism; some even wonder whether it
should be defined at all. This introduction aims at presenting a number
of critical attitudes to modernism in the hope of offering readers both
a critical landscape and the necessary coordinates for the discovery of
the literary and cultural patchwork of which modernism is composed.

The Oxford English Dictionary identifies ““modernism”” as the

portmanteau term for ““[a]ny of various movements in art, architecture,
literature, etc., generally characterized by a deliberate break with
classical and traditional forms or methods of expression;””1 moreover,
‘‘modernism’’ refers to ““the work or ideas of the adherents of such a
movement””2. The definition is sufficiently informative, but it offers no
chronological coordinates and is rather general. Every new artistic
movement is characterized by ““a deliberate break with classical and
traditional forms or methods of expression””; in this respect, the
Elizabethans were modernists, as were the Romantics; moreover, the
definition not only considers ““modernism”” as referring to ““various
movements””, but also mentions such disparate fields as ““art,
architecture, literature, etc.””.

1
The definition is taken from the Oxford English Dictionary at www.oed.com
(hereafter OED). All following definitions will be taken from here unless otherwise
indicated.
2
Ibid.

7
 Modernism

In pointing out the limits of the OED definition, I do not intend to

question the lexicographers’’ ability; on the contrary, I intend to set
forth a hypothesis: when attempting to define modernism, every
effort, even the most accurate and refined, falls short of the mark,
because modernism simply defies definition, as would any artistic
movement which counts relative chronological indeterminateness and
inherent diversity among its more interesting peculiarities.
Furthermore, the idea of modernism is perhaps more enticing and
familiar than the reality of it, it is thus hard to step away from
prejudices and commonplaces to look at the object of study itself.
““Modernism,”” Lawrence Rainey writes, ““is preceded by its reputation,
or even by several reputations: it is endowed with authority so
monumental that a reader is tempted to overlook the very experience
of encountering modernist works; or it is attended with such
opprobrium (the modernists were all fascists or anti-Semites, or if not
that, ““elitists””) that one might wonder why anyone had bothered to
read them at all. It is easy, too easy, to slight the grisly comedy or miss
the mordant wit, to skim the surface of dazzling surprises, to neglect
the sheer wildness and irredeemable opacity at the heart of modernist
work””3.

1. Modernism: meaning and usage of the term

Lawrence Rainey notes that ““one reason why the term ‘‘modernism’’
has undergone such a remarkable extension in the range of materials it
can cover in English may be simply the result of a historical-linguistic
accident””4. The cognate Italian term ‘‘modernismo’’, for example, was
religiously connoted as it designated a group of Catholics who worked
for the modernizing of Catholic institutions; the French ‘‘modernisme’’
and the German ‘‘der Modernismus’’ both refer to the same

3
L. Rainey (ed.), MODERNISM –– An Anthology, Oxford, Blackwell Publishing,
2005, Introduction, p. xix (hereafter Rainey).
4
Ibid., p. xx.

8
 Modernism

phenomenon. ““In the predominantly Protestant culture of the English-

speaking world, instead, ‘‘modernism’’ was an invitingly empty term, a
noun awaiting semantic content””5.

The nomen agentis referring to ‘‘modernism’’, that is, ‘‘modernist’’

dates from the late sixteenth century where it named a modern
person; in the eighteenth century it came to denote a follower of
modern ways as well as a supporter of modern over ancient literature.
The all-encompassing term ‘‘modernism’’ was first used in the early
eighteenth century to denote characteristics of modern times, and
came to imply sympathy with those characteristics, opinions, and
expressions.

In literature, traces of its use are found from the end of the
nineteenth century: there is a reference to the ‘‘ache of Modernism’’ in
Hardy’’s Tess of the D’’Urbervilles (1891). In critical studies, the term
was first used in an essay by Robert Graves and Laura Riding called A
Survey of Modernist Poetry and dating from 1927. In the 1960s it gained
currency and was widely used to refer to a specific literary phase
which was identifiable and mostly considered to be over, even though
some critics still wrote that ““the years between 1910 and the Second
World War saw a revolution in the literature of the English language
as momentous as the Romantic one of a century before...[and which]
has not yet acquired a name””6.

Defining the meaning of the term ‘‘modernism’’ has become

something of an academic obsession. For many years, it was used
without reflection on its origins: Bradbury and McFarlane in 1976
““expressed regret that a historical period had come to be labelled with

5
Ibid.
6
G. Hough, Image and Experience: Studies in a Literary Revolution; quoted in
Rainey, p. xxi.

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 Modernism

a term that should always be relative to the present moment””7. In 1977,

Calinescu noted that the notion of modernism ““gained wider
acceptance and legitimacy only after the 1920s””8. According to Stan
Smith ““‘‘modernist’’ [is] an epithet applied in hindsight to a disparate
collection of writers””9. This statement finds support elsewhere: Rabaté
believes that the term had no currency among the intellectuals and
writers of the 1910s and 1920s10; McNeil, Brooker and Perril maintain
that ‘‘modernism’’ is a label, a term coined in retrospect11. It is
undoubtedly true that ““modernists defined themselves by creating
distinctive groups and by contrasting their practices with those of a
previous generation. [...] [T]hey did not consistently refer to themselves
as ‘‘modernists’’ nor to their movement as ‘‘modernism’’””;12 but, even
though artists of the time preferred to refer to themselves and their
work as ‘‘the modern movement’’, the terms ‘‘modernism’’ and
‘‘modernist’’ were already available and in use in 1908.

As stated above, ‘‘modernism’’ and ‘‘modernist’’ were used widely at

the beginning of the twentieth century in relation to the so-called
modernist movement within the Roman Catholic Church; but in their
aesthetic meanings, they were used by actual artists and writers of the
1910s and 1920s. The OED gives instances of the term ‘‘modernism’’
starting from 1879, but the decisive year is 1908 with a study by R.A.

7
M.H. Whitworth, Modernism, Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, 2007, p. 39
(hereafter Whitworth).
8
M. Calinescu, Faces of Modernity, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1977, p.
69.
9
S. Smith, The Origins of Modernism –– Eliot, Pound, Yeats and the Rhetorics of
Renewal, New York, London, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994, p. 11.
10
J.M. Rabaté, The Ghosts of Modernity, Gainesville, University Press of Florida,
1996, p. 203.
11
H. McNeil, ‘‘Vortex Marsden: A Little Magazine and the Making of Modernity’’
in Kate Campbell (ed.), Journalism, Literature and Modernity, Edinburgh, Edinburgh
University Press, 2000, p. 142; Peter Brooker and Simon Perril, ‘‘Modernist Poetry and
its Precursors’’, in Neil Roberts (ed.), A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry,
Oxford, Blackwell, 2001, p. 21.
12
Whitworth, p. 39.

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 Modernism

Scott-James called Modernism and Romance and, more importantly,

with T.E. Hulme’’s13 ‘‘Lecture on Modern Poetry’’, in which the critic
refers to Imagist poetry and techniques as denoting ““extreme
modernism””14. Between 1911 and 1922 the two terms may be found in
several magazines and journals (e.g. Rhythm, The New Age, The
Freewoman, The New Statesman, etc.). Between 1923 and 1939 there are
further examples in The Criterion, The Fugitive, The Transatlantic
Review. A significant number of these references appear in connection
with painting, sculpture and architecture; the references to literature
are rarer and their use is justified by their adoption in the field of
visual arts. By the mid-1930s the terms were currently used by
reactionary critics censuring the ‘‘new’’ literature.

““The idea that modernism was a retrospective construction is a

myth[,]”” Whitworth writes, ““not in the sense of being a complete
falsehood, but in the sense of being a partial, ideological truth.
Modernism has been constructed retrospectively [...], [in the sense
that] it has accumulated on foundations laid down by the writers now
known as modernists””15.

2. Dating modernism
Periodization is an attempt to categorize time by dividing it into
discrete blocks. As such, it produces a descriptive abstraction that,
while being to a certain degree arbitrary, nonetheless provides a useful
hold on periods of time with relatively stable characteristics. The
history of a people, of their culture and literature is fluid, a constant
flux of change and becoming in which it is impossible to single out
beginnings and ends without recurring to processes of abstraction.
Periodization is thus a fundamental part of our cognitive processes and

13
T.E. Hulme (1883-1917) was an English writer and critic who exerted a notable
influence on London modernism.
14
T.E. Hulme, Lecture on Modern Poetry, quoted in Whitworth, p. 40.
15
Whitworth, p. 41.

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 Modernism

of our understanding of the past, but it offers several degrees of

difficulty: while some periods of time are more easily identifiable
because their peculiar characteristics and idiosyncrasies are in relief
enough to allow scholars to discern a beginning and an end, others
have more blurred chronological boundaries and more diverse
distinctive features.

““Modernism,”” Peter Childs writes, ““is regularly viewed as [...] a time-

bound [...] art form””16. This means that there is at least partial
consensus on the part of scholars and academics with regard to the
period in which the phenomenon commonly referred to as modernism
took place. Indeed, the existence of modernism is commonly placed
somewhere between the second half of the nineteenth century and the
first half of the twentieth century. It is when one tries to be more
specific that hypotheses abound and multiply.

Several dates have been proposed by scholars for the beginnings of

modernism; the most recurrent and most widely accepted by the
literary history canon is 1890. In Modernism, editors Malcolm Bradbury
and James McFarlane identify the beginning of the ‘‘movement’’ in
189017. 1890 is again proposed as a reasonable beginning date by
Michael H. Whitworth in his monographic study on modernism18. In
the introductory essay on the literature of the twentieth century in the
Norton Anthology of English Literature, the editors state that ““the
modern period [……] begins really with the late nineteenth [century],
when the sense of the passing of a major phase of English history was
already in the air””19. Then the authors proceed to provide the readers
with a few reference dates, all of which surround 1890, thus keeping

16
P. Childs, Modernism, London, NY, Routledge, 2000, p. 18 (hereafter Childs).
17
M. Bradbury and J. McFarlane, Modernism –– 1890-1930, London, Penguin Books,
1991.
18
Whitworth, p. 18.
19
S. Greenblatt and M.H. Abrams (eds.), The Norton Anthology of English
Literature –– The Major Authors, New York, London, Norton (eighth edition), p. 2271.

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 Modernism

fundamentally in line with the abovementioned proposals. The dates

are all related to the final part of Queen Victoria’’s reign: 1887, the year
of her Jubilee, 1897, the year of her Diamond Jubilee, and 1901, the
year of her death.

Other hypotheses on the initial date of modernism were put

forward by modernists themselves: they not only perceived the change
in attitude and feeling at the turn of the century with remarkable
lucidity, but they also clearly recognized their work as fundamentally
different from anything that had been done in the past.

Best-known among these writers is Virginia Woolf: in 1924 she

observes that ““on or about December 1910 human character
changed””20. ““Woolf’’s remark,”” Whitworth states, ““is atypical in that,
with the magnitude of the claim being so far out of key with the
precision of the date, it seems to parody the usual mode of historical
boundary-making””21. Nevertheless, there is real substance behind
Woolf’’s claim since 1910 really was a watershed year: it was the year in
which the media focused their mostly outraged attention on Roger
Fry’’s22 exhibition of post-impressionist painting; it was the year in
which King Edward VII died. His death and two general elections in

20
V. Woolf, ‘‘Character in Fiction’’ [1924], in Andrew McNeillie (ed.), Essays of
Virginia Woolf, to be six vols., quoted in Whitworth, p. 23.
21
Ibid.
22
R.E. Fry (1866-1934) English artist and art critic. Even though he initially
focused on the work of the old masters, he soon developed an interest in
contemporary French painting becoming the first figure to raise public awareness of
modern art in Britain. He was also member of the Bloomsbury group, a group of
intellectuals whose works greatly influenced British literature, art, criticism, and
aesthetics. Their work also had social resonance in that it brought about modern
attitudes towards feminism, pacifism and sexuality. Its initial members were novelists
and essayists Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, and Mary MacCarthy, the biographer and
essayist Lytton Strachey, the economist John Maynard Keynes, the painters Duncan
Grant and Vanessa Bell, and the critics of literature, art, and politics, Desmond
MacCarthy, Clive Bell, and Leonard Woolf.

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 Modernism

just a few months seemed to have prepared the country for a

transition.

Other modernists made similar claims for different dates. Ezra

Pound, writing in 1918, indicated the spring or early summer of 1912 as
the date at which he, H.D.23, and Richard Aldington24 had set down the
principles of Imagism. A strong case was made for the year 1913: it was
at this time that an exhibition of impressionist, post-impressionist, and
cubist painting known as ““the Armory Show”” was set up in New York,
marking the beginning of American Modernism. The year 1914 was
also proposed and not only for matters connected with the literary
canon: on the one hand, the outbreak of World War I was an
unprecedented event that deeply affected the whole generation of
writers who witnessed it; on the other hand, 1914 was the year in
which Vorticism saw the light of day with the publication of the first
issue of its representative journal BLAST. Wyndham Lewis25 would
later refer to Pound, Eliot, Joyce, and himself as the ““men of 1914””26. In
1924, D.H. Lawrence identified 1915 as the year in which, because of
the war, the ‘‘old world’’ had ended.

““The tactic of defining epochal dates””, Whitworth writes, ““is one

that has survived from modern writers through to later critics of
modernism. Not only have later critics made choices between 1910,
1912, 1913, and 1914, but many have identified 1922 as the high point or
the annus mirabilis of modernism: the year in which [Eliot’’s] The
Wasteland and [Joyce’’s] Ulysses were published [……]””27.

23
H.D. (1886-1961), born Hilda Doolittle, was an American poet, novelist and
memoirist.
24
Richard Aldington (1892-1962) was a British writer and poet.
25
P.W. Lewis (1882-1957) was an English painter and author. He was a co-founder
of the Vorticist movement in art, and edited the literary magazine of the Vorticists,
BLAST.
26
Whitworth, p. 24.
27
Ibid.

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The task of identifying an end is no less problematic than that of

discerning a beginning. Lawrence Rainey tells us that ““Declaring
modernism ‘‘finished’’ and ‘‘over’’ and ‘‘dead’’ has been a recurrent gesture
in academic literary studies””28. However, it remains an arduous
enterprise to account for the later developments of a phenomenon as
awkwardly shaped and ‘‘slippery’’ as modernism.

The date around which relatively widespread consensus has

gathered is 1930 since the works which have now come to epitomize
modernism had already been produced at that point: Conrad’’s Heart of
Darkness was serially published in Blackwood’’s Magazine between
1898 and 1899; the first futurist manifesto dates from 1910, whereas
the principles of imagism were laid down in 1912; in 1914, as already
mentioned, the first Vorticist publication –– the journal BLAST ––
appeared; James Joyce’’s Dubliners was published in 1914 and his
Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man in 1916; 1922 was –– as mentioned
above –– the annus mirabilis of modernism with the publication of
Joyce’’s Ulysses and Eliot’’s The Waste Land; Forster’’s A Passage to India
was published in 1924, Virginia Woolf’’s To the Lighthouse in 1927 and
her pioneering essay A Room of One’’s Own in 1929.

Rainey, instead, suggests 1956 as the watershed date: by that time

most writers belonging to the first generation of modernists were dead
(Yeats died in 1939, Woolf and Joyce in 1941, Gertrude Stein29 in
1946). Those who were still alive and writing (Eliot) had either
abandoned the polemic so that their productions lacked the startled
and disturbed power of their previous works; or they had grown too
old and tired to keep up the fierceness of their literary struggle.

The end of modernism could be set at an even later date because

some modernist writers were active after 1956. In fact, Wyndham
28
Rainey, p. xix.
29
G. Stein, (1874-1946) was an American writer who spent most of her life in
France, and who became a catalyst in the development of modern art and literature.

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Lewis died in 1957, Eliot in 1965, Marianne Moore30 and Ezra Pound in
1972. Samuel Beckett who is, according to some, the last modernist
writer, continued to work well into the 1980s and died in 1989, which
would question the claim that modernism extinguished itself in the
first half of the twentieth century. As Rainey ironically asks, ““Would it
never end?””31.

3. Modernism: characteristics
According to Ezra Pound the art of his time was animated by the
fundamental, fierce struggle ‘‘to make it new’’32. In poetry, this meant
upsetting metrical conventions by recurring, for example, to the
widespread use of vers libre; in prose, the modernist attempt at radical
renewal manifested itself in the need to represent the human mind and
soul, human subjectivity in all its impalpable complexities. Modernists
stretched the boundaries of conventional creativity, imposed a
metamorphosis on the literary world as they knew it, shaping the word
to a world which demanded new categories for understanding and
representation. Modernist writing thus shows ““elements of religious
scepticism, deep introspection, technical and formal experimentation,
cerebral game-playing, linguistic innovation, self-referentiality,
misanthropic despair overlaid with humour, philosophical speculation,
loss of faith and cultural exhaustion[...]””33.

Michael Whitworth identifies twelve important features which

characterize modernist writing and account for its distinctive
experiments in form, style, and subject matter34 and which will be
presented in what follows.

30
M. Moore (1887-1972), American modernist poet and writer.
31
Rainey, p. xx.
32
Quoted in Childs, p. 4.
33
Childs, p. 5.
34
Whitworth, pp. 10-16.

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1. First of all, modernist writing is concerned with modern life. It

especially describes urban life, but shows ambivalence towards it:
on the one hand, there is futurism with its love of modernity,
unrelenting movement, and technology; on the other hand, there is
a more reflective approach to the matter, which takes into
consideration the undeniable ugliness of the new city, with its
deafening hustle and bustle. The world has changed,
metamorphosed into something almost unrecognizable, which
poses the question of the role of art within it and the value of the
work of art.

2. Modernist writing is complex: it makes use of a sometimes

extremely wide range of references (cultural, literary, and
linguistic); it is verbally ambiguous and paradoxical, sometimes even
purposefully nonsensical; it also aims at disorienting the reader by
removing conventional literary devices, thus complicating the
process of the understanding of the text. It plunges the reader into a
world in which he or she is compass-less, unaided by the
conventional preambles or descriptions which constitute such a
large part of realist literature. In his essay, The Metaphisical Poets,
Eliot writes: ““poets in our civilisation, as it exists at present, must be
difficult. Our civilisation comprehends a great variety and
complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined
sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet
must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more
indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his
meaning””35.

3. Modernists inhabit a world governed by chaos and fragmentation:

their works show not only a deep awareness of this fact, but also an
effort to produce unity, to force coherence on a shapeless world.
Artists working at this time perceive the past as a distant universe

35
T.S. Eliot, The Metaphysical Poets, to be found at www.usask.ca/english/prufrock.

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in which order and meaning were possible, they ““are all conscious of
the present as chaotic [...] and of the past as an altogether more solid
ground””36. Eliot’’s The Waste Land contains many instances of
references to the past, both literary and existential: for example, it
alludes to Spenser’’s Prothalamion and the river Thames in Spenser’’s
poem is contrasted with the river in the present day, dirty and filled
with the debris of a twentieth-century city.

4. To modernists history is a story of decline: the ordered past gives

way to the chaotic and destructive present. Salvation and the
restoration of order can be found, as alluded to above, in the work
of art. Art transcends the disorder inherent in nature; it organizes
nature, gives it sense and method.

5. Modernist writing is notorious for its dauntless experimentation

with the category of time. Time is no longer handled in a linear
fashion as in realist writings. ““It has been argued,”” Whitworth
writes, ““that modernist literature possesses ‘‘spatial form’’: that is, we
are forced to read it as if every part of the text were simultaneously
present, even when, with texts as long as Ulysses and The Cantos,
the feat is impossible to achieve on a single reading””37. The most
apparent consequence of this is that more attention and active
participation are required on the part of the reader, who is asked to
make the effort of chronological reconstruction and understanding.
This interpretation of the concept of time also manifests ““[t]he idea
that all moments are simultaneously present, [which in turn]
implies a grand narrative of history in which there is neither
progress nor decline, but simply eternal recurrence””38.

6. Modernists show a penchant for myth in their writings. They recur

to mythic allusion and patterning as organizing structures. Eliot
36
S. Spender, The Destructive Element, London, Jonathan Cape, 1935, p. 12.
37
Whitworth, p. 12.
38
Ibid.

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commented on the modernist use of myth in his review of Joyce’’s

Ulysses: ““In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel
between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr Joyce is pursuing a
method which others must pursue after him [...] It is simply a way
of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the
immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary
history. It is a method already adumbrated by Mr Yeats, and of the
need for which I believe Mr Yeats to have been the first
contemporary to be conscious. [...] Instead of the narrative method,
we may now use the mythical method””39. The use of myth is not
the only organizing principle on which most modernist narratives
are built, but it emphasizes the presence of recurrent deep
structures in modernist works. Once again, this says something
about the modernist stance when it comes to the grand narratives
of human history: just as there is no progress, but only eternal
recurrence, so there is no real narrative, but continual repetition of
the same mythic pattern.

7. Modernist literature is often concerned with man in his primitive

state and uses it as a point of reference. This, it must be noted, is
not a return to the eighteenth century myth of the bon sauvage; on
the contrary, it is a genuine, almost scientific, interest in native
culture and language. The British Empire was so vast as to
encompass a very large part of the world; in it, diversity of language,
culture, skin colour, creed was common currency; this elicited
curiosity which was aided by a relatively superior ease in
communications. Natives represented what was most primitive,
most feral, violent and, sometimes, base in man and as such they
were feared by some (cf. the depiction of the native in Conrad’’s
Heart of Darkness) and loved by others (cf. D.H. Lawrence’’s praise
of the native as being a relief from the empire of rationality.)

39
T.S. Eliot, Ulysses, Order and Myth, (1923), in Frank Kermode (ed.), Selected
Prose of T.S. Eliot, London, Faber and Faber, 1975, pp. 177-178.

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8. Modernist literature is more concerned with the mind than the

body. In other words, it focuses on the representation of the inner
workings of the mind and how they affect the body. It shows
awareness of the fluidity of consciousness, of the force of the
unconscious, of the division between consciousness, which
epitomizes the personal self, and conduct, which epitomizes the
social self. Stylistically this awareness produces the use of free direct
or free indirect discourse40, a recourse to a mélange of registers
aimed at signalling different levels or centres of consciousness, and,
more obviously, to the use of the interior monologue or the stream
of consciousness41 technique. And this in spite of the fact that ““[t]he
term ‘‘stream of consciousness’’,”” as Whitworth reminds us, ““is
problematic primarily because it is a psychological hypothesis rather
than a formal stylistic description, and secondarily because it does
not distinguish between the different levels of consciousness, and
because it does not by itself indicate whether individual or
collective consciousness is being referred to””42.

9. Another common feature of modernist literature is the dichotomy

between ‘‘self’’ and ‘‘mass’’ (which is also commonly and demeaningly

40
‘‘Free indirect speech’’ is a style of third-person narration which combines some
of the characteristics of third-person report with first-person direct speech. What
distinguishes free indirect speech from normal indirect speech, is the lack of an
introductory expression such as ““He said”” or ““he thought””.
41
J.A. Cuddon, in his Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, London,
Penguin Books, 1999 (fourth edition) defines ‘‘stream of consciousness’’ as follows: ““A
term coined by William James in Principles of Psychology (1890) to denote the flow
of inner experiences. Now an almost indispensable term in literary criticism, it refers
to that technique which seeks to depict the multitudinous thoughts and feelings
which pass through the mind. [...] [I]t seems that it was a minor French novelist,
Edouard Dujardin, who first used the technique (in a way which proved to prove
immensely influential) in Les Lauriers sont coupés (1888). James Joyce, who is
believed to have known this work, exploited the possibilities and took the technique
almost to a point ne plus ultra in Ulysses (1922) [...]””.
42
Whitworth, p. 14.

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referred to as ‘‘herd’’). In other words, modernists, more than their

predecessors, feel that there is a gap between the artist (to be
conceived as part of an élite) and the mass. Despite what some
critics argue, the modernist dislike for the mass market was
probably not the outward manifestation of a deep-seated contempt
for the general public; it was, on the contrary, a dislike for the
““homogenisation and trivialisation of literature that characterised
the mass market. The circulating library system, for example,
encouraged readers to think of literary works as interchangeable.
Literature, to modernist writers, was not a form of entertainment,
but a form of knowledge””43.

10. Modernist writers claim to prefer abstraction44 to empathy. While

the realist writer yearned for the reader’’s empathy, actually sought
it, thus producing recognizable, life-like characters and situations in
which the reader could find his or her own reflection, the
modernist writer provokes a disruption of the conventional silent
agreement between artist and potential recipient. In the modernist
novel, the technical and stylistic devices which would allow the
reader to identify with a character are avoided: the novelist, for
example, opts for the use of complex, non-linear time schemes thus
disrupting continuity and impeding identification. In poetry, the
traditional lyrical ‘‘I’’ is either replaced by a more impersonal voice or
framed in unfamiliar contexts.

11. Modernist literature prefers the concrete to the abstract45, in that it

revels in the uncompromising representation of the complexities of

43
Ibid.
44
By ‘‘abstraction’’ I do not mean the process of distancing oneself from the
concreteness of reality, but the process through which the artist operates the loss of
traditional reference points within his or her work, thus requiring the reader’’s effort
and active participation in the decoding and unveiling of the work’’s meaning.
45
The noun ‘‘abstract’’ here actually refers to the process of distancing oneself from
the concreteness of reality.

21
 Modernism

self and reality. The particular is more interesting than the general,
the perceptual is more immediate and effective than the
conceptual. In Ezra Pound’’s words: ““go in fear of abstractions””46

12. Finally, the subject matter of most modernist writing is not as easily
identifiable or liable to categorization as the subject matter of the
literary production preceding it. Moreover, it is, more often than
not, controversial: several modernist works, at least several which
are central to canon, were officially censored (e.g. Ulysses, D.H.
Lawrence’’s The Rainbow); other texts were heavily revised in order
to forestall the publishers’’ or the public’’s criticisms (Joyce’’s
Dubliners, Lawrence’’s Sons and Lovers). ““Modernists found
themselves in trouble with the censor because they wished to
represent the body and sexuality as fully as possible, and, more
generally, wished to depict the full range of human behaviour
without having to place it in a moral frame””47.

Modernist writing brings to the fore of the literary world the

opposition between what Roland Barthes calls the ‘‘readerly’’ and the
‘‘writerly’’ text48. Whereas ‘‘readerly’’ texts rely upon shared conventions
between writer and reader, inviting the reader to be passive, ‘‘writerly’’
texts are experimental, refuse conventions and require the reader to be
more productive of the text’’s meanings, which are usually ambiguous.

All in all, modernist writing is rich in irreverence and known for ““its
experimentation, its complexity, its formalism, and for its attempt to
create ‘‘a tradition of the new’’. Its historical and social background
includes the emergence of the New Woman, the peak and downturn
of the British Empire, unprecedented technological change, the rise of
the new Labour Party, the appearance of factory-line mass production,

46
Quoted in Whitworth, p. 15.
47
Ibid.
48
R. Barthes, S/Z, translated into Italian by Lidia Lonzi, Torino, Einaudi, 1973, p.
10.

22
 Modernism

war in Africa, Europe, and elsewhere. Modernism has therefore almost

universally been considered a literature of not just change but crisis””49.

4. The Modernist Novel

““Modernist writing,”” Peter Childs writes, ““arises at a certain time in
history and at a particular point in literary history””. In terms of the
novel, it is seen as a reaction to the hegemony of realism. Modernists
did not criticize realism in aesthetic representation or the possibility of
art as mimesis, but the realist fiction which, during the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, went under the name of realism. Classic realism
flowered in the nineteenth century and can be identified as possessing
certain characterizing features: reliable narrators and representative
characters immersed in recognizable settings and in a recognizable
social system.

““Classic realism,”” Catherine Belsey writes, ““presents individuals

whose traits of character, understood as essential and predominantly
given, constrain the choices they make, and whose potential for
development depends on what is given. Human nature is thus seen as a
system of character-differences existing in the world, but one which
nonetheless permits the reader to share the hopes and fears of a wide
range of kinds of characters. This contradiction –– that readers, like the
central figures of fiction, are unique, and that so many readers can
identify with so many protagonists –– is accommodated in ideology as a
paradox””50. Other than presenting the potential reading public with
recognizable characters with whom people could promptly identify,
realism offers other reference points: narrative authority and reliability,
a contemporary setting, representative locations, ordinary speech,
linear plots and extensive use of free indirect discourse.

49
Childs, p. 14.
50
Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice, London, Methuen, 1980, pp. 74-75.

23
 Modernism

Modernism reacted against these technical and compositional

conventions, aiming at the disorientation of the reading public:
modernists innovated in fields of narrative techniques, character
portrayal, self-referentiality and linearity of plot. Change and
innovations, however, did not come about abruptly; on the contrary,
they were the result of a process which can be traced as far back as
Gustave Flaubert, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Émile Zola and Henry James.

Henry James innovated on existing conventions by producing what

he called not social, but ‘‘psychological’’ realism: the channelling of the
narrative through the sensations and perceptions of a single character.
James concentrates on character, detailing actions and moral values; his
research for truth in character leads him to play and experiment with
the ‘‘point of view’’: he filters the entire story through the eyes and
minds of certain characters, in a style which seems to foreshadow the
Joycean technique of the stream of consciousness. ““Placing the
consciousness of characters at the heart of the narrative world is one of
James’’s chief determining influences on the Modernist fiction that
followed””51.

James’’s later work requires more and more the active participation
of the reader, who is asked to infer meaning: in fact, James relies on
ambiguity, slow revelation and a ‘‘displacement’’ of point of view.
James’’s narrators are neither third-person and omniscient nor first-
person and pseudo-autobiographical. The novelist relies on centres of
consciousness to tell his stories.

Where James innovated in terms of point of view and narrative

voice, Joseph Conrad experimented with the temporal ordering of the
chronological story. Conrad frequently narrates through the use of
time-shifts, flashbacks and juxtapositions of events. His novels are
complex mosaics which often require the reader’’s reconstructive

51
Childs, p. 75.

24
 Modernism

effort. Moreover, he introduced reappearing ‘‘tellers’’ of his tales, such as

Marlow (Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, and other stories). Conrad’’s work
is also impressively innovative in that it deals, critically, with
economic, political and social pretentions; he explores man’’s greed,
rapacity, and exploitation of his fellow human beings. His stories are
about individuals at a time of crisis where they falter in trying to
acquire knowledge about themselves, others, and the world. Yet, what
is truly important in Conrad’’s novels is not so much the subject matter
as the style in which they are written: ““[t]here are unexpected
juxtapositions of events from different times [in his work]; and Conrad
is fond of delaying our decoding of large and small effects: experiences
are thrust at us before we are in a position to comprehend their
significance””52.

To better illustrate the break from realism achieved by modernist

literature one only needs to draw comparisons between two authors
who were contemporaries, but proved to have very different views on
literature and its role in society: the aforementioned Henry James and
H.G. Wells53. The two were writing at the same time and eventually
engaged in a kind of epistolary ‘‘querrelle’’ concerning the modes of
novel writing. Wells began by criticizing James: he believed that James
saw literature as an end, in and of itself, whereas Wells himself
thought of literature as a means to an end, an instrument which had to
have a purpose. James replied by saying that art is a process which
produces life, interest, importance. For Wells, instead, the novel had to
be put to concrete use: it was supposed to deal with education, social
criticism, entertainment. James, on the other hand, found his purpose
in the actual production of the work of art. Furthermore, he did not
believe there should be a distinction between a purposeful art and a

52
C. Watts, A Preface to Conrad, London, Longman, 1982, p. 145.
53
H.G. Wells (1866-1946), English writer remembered today as one of the
founders of the modern science fiction novel. His best-known works as far as the
genre is concerned were published between 1895 and 1901 and include The Invisible
Man and The War of the Worlds.

25
 Modernism

purposeless art; art, as a means of expression, is two-faced: it always

has a purpose and it is always aesthetically determined.

Another modernist novelist is Virginia Woolf with her pioneering

and revealing reflections on writing and novel-writing in particular.
Woolf wrote two essays in which she strongly criticizes the writers of
the time, men and women she contemptuously called ‘‘materialists’’ or
‘‘Bond Street tailors’’: the first essay is called ‘‘Modern Fiction’’ (1919);
the second is ‘‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’’ (1924).

Woolf’’s primary accusation regards the impressive amount of

descriptive detail writers like Bennett54 and Wells assembled in their
writing. She appreciates precision and the effort to achieve
verisimilitude, but, in her opinion, it is precisely verisimilitude that is
lacking in works so full of details: ““life escapes,””55 she writes, which
implies that freezing every tiny particle of reality is not a means for
achieving permanence. The modern writer, according to Woolf, has, or
rather should have, more ample concerns, namely ““the dark places of
psychology””. ““Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary
day. The mind receives a myriad impressions –– trivial, fantastic,
evanescent, engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they
come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms. [……] Life is not a
series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged but a luminous halo, a semi-
transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of
consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey
this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever
aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the
alien and external as possible?””56.

54
A. Bennett (1867-1931) was an English novelist. His best-known works are the
Clayhanger trilogy (where he traces the history of the Clayhanger family) and The
Old Wives’’ Tale.
55
V. Woolf, Modern Fiction (1919), quoted in Childs, p. 80.
56
Ibid.

26
 Modernism

Woolf’’s ulterior accusation regards characterisation: in her opinion,

what makes a character recognizable and believable for us is the insight
we are given into his/her thought processes. A physical, external
description, however precise or true to life it may be, can never tell us
the truth of a character. Only when we are shown memories, thoughts,
only when we look at the character from the inside, not the outside,
do we really understand who he/she is. ““You have overheard scraps of
talk that filled you with amazement. You have gone to bed at night
bewildered by the complexity of your feelings. In one day thousands of
ideas have coursed through your brains: thousands of emotions have
met, collided and disappeared in astonishing disorder. Nevertheless,
you allow the writers to palm off upon you a version of all this, an
image of Mrs Brown, which has no likeness to that surprising
apparition whatsoever””57. There is only one way in which the fine art
of storytelling can evolve and that is through the violation of
conventional representational devices. Here Woolf also touches on the
category of time and its handling. ““The literary convention of time is so
artificial [……] that, naturally, the feeble are tempted to outrage, and the
strong are led to destroy the very foundations and rules of literary
society. Signs of this are everywhere apparent. Grammar is violated;
syntax disintegrated””58. Everything must change if literature is to be still
relevant.

5. Modernist Poetry
““The two most powerful foreign forces on Modernist poetry in
Britain came from France and the United States””59. The former
contributed with symbolism and vers libre whereas the latter produced
Imagism and the poetry of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot.

57
V. Woolf, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown (1924), quoted in Childs, pp. 81-82.
58
Ibid.
59
Childs, p. 94.

27
 Modernism

Between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the

twentieth century poetry in Great Britain was at one of the lowest
points in its history; it was conservative, repetitive and insular. The
only prewar writers who proved to be innovative and willing to
experiment with form and language were Thomas Hardy and Rudyard
Kipling; and the main reason why they were very well-known in their
time was because they were writers of prose.

The war brought novelty to poetry; the so-called war poets

achieved changes in both subject matter and poetic diction. Their
influence was however eclipsed by that of modernist poetry.

The roots of the modernist revolution in poetic diction, form and

subject matter is to be traced back to the French symbolists. Rimbaud,
Mallarmé and their precursor Baudelaire (whose poem ““Correspondances””
was particularly influential) were introduced to the British public by the
Decadent poet Arthur Symons60, whose study on ““The Symbolist
Movement in Literature”” (1899) had notable resonance. The influence of
symbolism on modernist poetic expression was so great that some scholars
have gone so far as to call modernism a second generation of symbolism.

Symbolist poets believed in indirect expression, reverie, and

inspiration. Taking their cue from Baudelaire they believed that poetry
could produce unity and beauty: unity as an escape from the chaos and
fragmentation in their real world; beauty as an escape from the grind
and ugliness of everyday life. Poetry and art in general were not meant
to be mimetic in purpose and realization; on the contrary, they were
to be a step back from reality, an escape, a recreation of order.
Symbolists advocated a renewed appreciation of language: writing is a
craft and writers are craftsmen, artisans of the word. According to the
symbolists ““the poet need[s] to revel in sensuality and in language [……].
Words should be chosen with precision for their intensity, the

60
A. Symons (1865-1945), British poet, critic, and magazine editor.

28
 Modernism

everyday transcended in the ideal, and linguistic profundity achieved

by typographical experimentation and lexical accuracy””61. Fin-de-siècle
French culture was assimilated in Britain in the 1890s; British artists
went to serve apprenticeships in Paris, while bohemianism, art
nouveau and aestheticism were exported across the channel to
London.

The English-speaking artist who was most influenced by symbolism

was W.B. Yeats, a poet interested in Celtic mythology, mysticism, and
esoterism. Initially he was influenced by Romanticism (Keats in
particular) and later he underwent symbolist influences. His works at
this time can only be considered modernist if they are seen as an
attempt to escape from materialism and urbanism; in short, if they are
seen as a reaction to a repressive, puzzling modernity. Later, his poetry
was also influenced by the works of Ezra Pound, by the political
energy of the woman he considered the love of his life, Maude Gonne,
and by the patronage of Lady Gregory. Under these diverse influences
his poetry became more and more complex. It is in his work of the
1920s that Yeats shows clean-cut modernist features, especially
melancholic disenchantment. He had a sceptical attitude towards the
notion of ‘‘truth’’, he was disoriented by modernity, he was often
pessimistic in his views on contemporary life, he was aware of living in
a world which was spiritually poor and culturally fragmented. Yeats
was one of the first modernists to recur to mythology as an ordering
structure for his works (see p. 9).

Strictly speaking, modernist poetry in Britain began with the

inception of the movement known as Imagism: it began as a group in
Soho led by T.E. Hulme in 1909 and ended with an anthology
published in New England in 1917. Hulme and his group felt the need
for a more precise and objective poetry. Their writing was inspired by
Japanese (e.g. haiku) and Chinese poetry. The name ‘‘imagism’’ was

61
Childs, p. 95.

29
 Modernism

actually coined by Ezra Pound in 1912. Pound had come to London in

1909 where he soon met Ford Madox Ford62 with whom he shared the
dislike and outrage for the state of poetry writing in England. Tired of
the current vogue for second-hand Romanticism and Elizabethan
poetry, he gathered a group of intellectuals in 1912 which unanimously
settled on the name ‘‘Imagism’’. Imagism was brought to the literary
world and to the world at large through two manifestos: Flint’’s
Imagisme and Pound’’s A few Don’’ts for Imagistes (both dating from
1913). Pound’’s manifesto was later incorporated into a retrospective
work on Imagism, aptly named A Retrospect (1918). Imagists produced
several anthological collections of their work: Pound’’s Des Imagistes in
1914 and Amy Lowell’’s63 three volumes, Some Imagist Poets (1915-17).

Imagists refused old poetical habits: they did not see the need for
the iamb and they disliked abstractions. They endorsed free verse
(which they were responsible for popularizing in England), but insisted
that it should be combined with attention to detail, accuracy and
scientific principles: poetry should be concrete, precise, semantically
rich; excess wordage was not condoned. The idea of ‘‘image’’ in this
context was particularly relevant as it embodied a poetic stance which
focused on conciseness and precision. ““The image,”” Pound wrote in
1916, ““[……] is a radiant node or cluster; it is [……] a VORTEX, from
which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly
rushing””64. He was also to define ‘‘image’’ as ““an intellectual and
emotional complex in an instant of time””65. In his quest for a
revolutionary poetics, Pound was joined and supported by T.E. Hulme

62
F. Madox Ford, (1873-1939) was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor
whose journals, The English Review and The Transatlantic Review, were instrumental
in the development of early 20th-century English literature. He is now best
remembered for The Good Soldier (1915) and the Parade’’s End tetralogy.
63
A. Lowell (1874-1925) was an American poet of the imagist school who
posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926. She was author of an
important biography of the Romantic poet John Keats.
64
Quoted in Childs, p. 97.
65
Ibid., p. 99.

30
 Modernism

and F.S. Flint66 in ““framing a new poetry with principles of precision,

discipline, objectivity, lucidity and directness””67.

Imagists believed in pure poetry, pure in that it should avoid all

extrapoetic influences; they also proposed a kind of writing which
should take sculpture as its model: it should thus be hard, direct and
show its maker’’s craft. Contrary to stereotypical convictions and
prejudices about modernist poetry, imagists were extremely concerned
with form: from its inception imagism marked a classic revival, a
return to principles and rules for composition. ““Romanticism was
rejected as metaphysical, indulgent, sentimental, mannered and
overemotional, and its view of reality as inherently mysterious, while
life for new poets was to be glimpsed in definite visual flashes or
images””68.

The founding principles of imagism are found in the first imagist

manifesto and are here reported in Pound’’s own words:
1. Direct treatment of the ‘‘thing’’ whether subjective or objective;
2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the
presentation;
3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical
phrase, not in sequence of a metronome69.
Poetry, according to the imagists, needs to be mastered: it requires
craftsmanship and precision. It needs a study as attentive and constant
as music; its goal is technical mastery.

66
F.S. Flint (1885-1960) was an English poet and translator who was a prominent
member of the Imagist group. He is mostly known for his participation in the
““School of Images”” with Ezra Pound and T.E. Hulme in 1909, which was to serve as
the theoretical basis for the later imagist movement.
67
Childs, p. 98.
68
Ibid.
69
E. Pound, Imagisme (1913), in Rainey, p. 94.

31
 Modernism

The influence of imagism was enormous. Pound’’s poetry in

particular proved to be a constant source of inspiration for new poets.
T.S. Eliot drew confidence and several stimuli from Pound’’s work and
their personal relationship greatly contributed to Eliot’’s poetical
output (e.g. Pound edited The Waste Land).

The Waste Land is the epitome of modernist poetry in both form

and subject matter: it not only encompasses many of the principles of
imagism, but it also shows horror and confusion with regard to
modernity. It is the very first work to come to grips with the
consequences of the cultural and physical barbarity (e.g. World War I)
of the twentieth century. Eliot borrowed from ‘‘the classics’’
(Shakespeare, classical mythology), but also from Baudelaire, Eastern
religion, and paganism. Moreover, The Waste Land shows the
modernist obsession with language: it is dissonant and makes sudden
transitions and shifts in rhythm. It is a work which embodies and
perfectly expresses the chaos and fragmentation of modernity. ““If
objects and events in the real world are experienced as lifeless and
alienated, if history seems to have lost direction and lapsed into chaos,
it is always possible to put all of this ‘‘in brackets’’ [……] and take words
as your object instead. Writing turns in on itself in a profound act of
narcissism, but always troubled and overshadowed by the social guilt
of its own uselessness””70. In a way, Eliot’’s Waste Land is a desperate
attempt to bring artistic order to secular chaos. The literary
establishment needed to reassert itself, to fight the nihilism of war and
the superficiality of the fledgling mass culture by showing its own
symbolic and foundational usefulness, by proving itself able to
represent the multiple facets of modernity. The Waste Land is an
impressively rich and diverse work which draws on everyday language,
commerce, pollution, popular music and combines them with
archetypical mythology and erudite literary allusions. The aim of such
a work is the emancipation of the writer from the constraints of

70
T. Eagleton, Literary Theory, Oxford, Blackwell, 1983, p. 140.

32
 Modernism

traditional mimesis and the demands of a growing reading public. Eliot

rejects the idea that poetry should be emotional, subjective, romantic
in any way; poetry should, first and foremost, bring order to the world
and it can only achieve this objective by balancing thought and feeling.

6. Modernist Drama
Modernist drama does not produce considerable innovations until
the 1950s. Eliot turned to writing for the theatre in the 1930s, but his
works were surprisingly conventional. It was not until Beckett’’s
Waiting for Godot (1955) and John Osborne’’s Look Back in Anger
(1956) that something changed. ““In the light of this, it is fair to say that
modernism had less impact on writing for the theatre in Britain than
on fiction and poetry, to the extent that [one critic] has wondered if its
almost anti-modernist agenda might make a discussion of drama seem
contradictory in a consideration of literary modernism””71.

Drama in Britain was written by modernists such as the

aforementioned T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, D.H. Lawrence and Wyndham
Lewis, but real change was happening elsewhere. Most notably, one of
the founders of modern drama was the Norwegian writer Henrik
Ibsen72 who brought modern prose to drama writing. His most
influential plays centred on social issues and his stance was often
critical of conventions. His work had a great impact on the Irish
dramatist George Bernard Shaw73, who, as a socialist, was greatly
interested in the ideas and conventions of his time, which he often
ridiculed and stigmatized in his work: his plays aim at undermining
accepted opinions of class, morality and gender.

71
Childs, p. 102.
72
H. Ibsen (1828-1906) was a Norwegian playwright of realistic drama. He is
often referred to as the ““father of modern drama”” and is one of the founders of
modernism in the theatre.
73
G.B. Shaw, (1856-1950) was an Irish playwright. Although Shaw’’s first
profitable writing was music and literary criticism, his talent was for drama, and he
authored more than 60 plays.

33
 Modernism

A valid effort at revolution in Drama came from the Abbey

Theatre in Dublin. The theatre was founded and even directed for
some time by W.B. Yeats. Wishing to innovate literature and drama in
the light of Irish mythology, folklore and tradition, he wrote symbolist,
abstract plays and was later influenced by the Japanese Noh theatre74.
Most of Yeats’’s drama was written as part of a nationalist attempt to
develop both a national mythology and an Irish theatre in Dublin.

Real revolution in drama can be ascribed to another Irishman:

Samuel Beckett. He was the founder of what has since been called the
‘‘theatre of the absurd’’. Beckett’’s play Waiting for Godot shocked
London audiences in 1955: the reason for the relatively outraged
reaction was the lack of action in the play; nothing happens. ““Godot
depicted life as a purposeless if comic attendance on nothing but futile
endeavours, hopeless philosophies and inevitable death. In a barren
landscape, two friends called Vladimir and Estragon [……] wait for a
message from a man who never comes. Their memories fail as they
turn to reminiscences, pass the time in squabbles and speculations, and
seek refuge in talk [……] or action[……] to stave off the boredom of
waiting for something to happen, to give them some reason to think
their lives are not utterly pointless. Their only distraction is a couple of
travellers Pozzo and Lucky, who, joined by a rope, represent the
mutual degradation of master and slave, the only and worse alternative
to living life amicably; they also represent the only alternative to
Vladimir and Estragon’’s pointless stasis: pointless movement””75. Other
notable works by Beckett are Endgame (1957) and Happy Days (1961).

The most successful and most explicitly modernist playwright was

Bertold Brecht. As a Marxist he believed that the role of art was not in

74
A form of theatre which does not revolve around traditional notions of
dramatic representation and development of action. It centres on mimicry and
gesture playing on the archetypes of music and dance.
75
Childs, p. 106.

34
 Modernism

the representation of reality: art should bring about actual change, it

should produce change. That is the reason why he chose the shock
tactics of avant-garde modernist aesthetics as an expressive means. The
representation of reality as it is, according to Brecht, endorses the
status quo and contributes to the perpetration of establishment logic.
Art should instead produce in its recipients shock, outrage, abhorrence
for the establishment. Brecht purposefully constructed place so as to
alienate his audience from the characters and the action portrayed on
stage; he wished to denaturalise the status quo, make it seem strange,
foreign, so as to provoke a consciousness of what needed changing.
““Brecht also felt that as social conditions changed, as capitalist forces
adjusted to and assimilated revolutionary forms of art, those means of
artistic representation had themselves constantly to change in order to
force people to reappraise society and their relation to it””76. Brecht
used means as varied as simple staging, defamiliarization, montage and
non-linear, discontinuous narrative to achieve his own style which is
today known as ‘‘epic theatre’’. He urged his audience to re-evaluate the
meaning of the act of performing and its role in the performance. The
stage was no longer the place where a true-to-life story unfolds; the
performance no longer required its audience to suspend disbelief. The
play was now a performance with a message.

7. Conclusion
I wish to conclude this introduction on modernism by quoting two
critics who have chosen as their object of study the literary output of
the years between 1890 and 1930. The two quotations manifest
diametrically opposed attitudes to the study of modernism and thus
give voice to the critical difficulties and inherent complexity of the
movement which I have endeavoured to present here.

The first quotation is a relatively comprehensive definition of

modernism. ““Modernist art is, in most critical usage, reckoned to be
76
Ibid., p. 107.

35
 Modernism

the art of what Harold Rosenburg calls ‘‘the tradition of the new’’. It is
experimental, formally complex, elliptical, contains elements of
decreation as well as creation, and tends to associate notions of the
artist’’s freedom from realism, materialism, traditional genre and form,
with notions of cultural apocalypse and disaster. [...] We can dispute
about when it starts (French symbolism; decadence; the break-up of
naturalism) and whether it has ended [...]. We can regard it as a time-
bound concept (say 1890 to 1930) or a timeless one (including Sterne,
Donne, Villon, Ronsard). The best focus remains a body of major
writers (James, Conrad, Proust, Mann, Gide, Kafka, Svevo, Joyce,
Musil, Faulkner in fiction; Strindberg, Pirandello, Wedekind, Brecht in
drama; Mallarmé, Yeats Eliot, Pound, Rilke, Apollinaire, Stevens in
poetry) whose works are aesthetically radical, contain striking technical
innovation, emphasize spatial or ‘‘fugal’’ as opposed to chronological
form, tend towards ironic modes, and involve a certain
‘‘dehumanization of art’’””77.

The second quotation questions the very existence of modernism as

notion. ““Modernism as a notion is the emptiest of cultural categories.
Unlike the terms Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Mannerist, Romantic,
or Neo-Classical, it designates no describable object in its own right: it
is completely lacking in positive content. In fact, [...] what is concealed
beneath the label is a wide variety of very diverse –– indeed
incompatible –– aesthetic practices: symbolism, constructivism,
expressionism, surrealism. These, which do spell out specific
programmes, were unified post hoc in a portmanteau concept whose
only referent is the blank passage of time itself. There is no other
aesthetic marker so vacant or vitiated. For what once was modern is
soon obsolete. The futility of the term, and its attendant ideology, can
be seen all too clearly from current attempts to cling to its wreckage
and yet swim with the tide still further beyond it, in the coinage ‘‘post-

77
R. Fowler (ed.), A Dictionary of Modern Critical Terms, London, Routledge,
1987.

36
 Modernism

modernism’’: one void chasing another in a serial regression of self-

congratulatory chronology””78.

The matter continues to be the source of controversy and debate.

78
P. Anderson, ‘‘Modernism and Revolution’’, New Left Review, no. 144 (Mar.-Apr.
1984), pp. 112-113; quoted in Whitworth, p. 3.

37
THOMAS HARDY
(1840-1928)
 HAP

1 If but some vengeful god would call to me

From up the sky, and laugh: ““Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love’’s loss is my hate’’s profiting!””

5 Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die,

Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.

But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain,

10 And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?
- Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan...
These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.

1866 1898

41
 THE CONVERGENCE OF THE TWAIN
(Lines on the loss of the “Titanic”)

I
1 In a solitude of the sea
Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.

II
Steel chambers, late the pyres
5 Of her salamandrine fires,
Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.

III
Over the mirrors meant
To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls –– grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

IV
10 Jewels in joy designed
To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.

V
Dim moon-eyed fishes near
Gaze at the gilded gear
15 And query: ““What does this vaingloriousness down here?””

VI
Well: while was fashioning
This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything

43
 Modernism

VII
Prepared a sinister mate
20 For her –– so gaily great ––
A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.

VIII
And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

IX
25 Alien they seemed to be:
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history,

X
Or sign that they were bent
By paths coincident
30 On being anon twin halves of one august event,

XI
Till the Spinner of the Years
Said ““Now!”” And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

1912

44
 IN TIME OF “THE BREAKING OF NATIONS”

I
1 Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as they stalk.

II
5 Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onwards the same
Though Dynasties pass.

III
Yonder a maid and her wight
10 Go whispering by:
War’’s annals will cloud into night
Ere their story die.

1915 1916

45
 T.S. ELIOT
(1888-1965)
 THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK

S’’io credesse che mia risposta fosse

A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza più scosse.
Ma perciocché giammai di questo fondo
Non tornò vivo alcun, s’’i’’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’’infamia ti rispondo.

1 Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
5 The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
10 To lead you to an overwhelming question...
Oh, do not ask, ““What is it?””
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

15 The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
20 Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,

49
 Modernism

And seeing that it was a soft October night,

Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time

For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
25 Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
30 That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

35 In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time

To wonder, ““Do I dare?”” and, ““Do I dare?””
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
40 With a bald spot in the middle of my hair ––
[They will say: ““How his hair is growing thin!””]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin ––
[They will say: ““But how his arms and legs are thin!””]
45 Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all: ––

50 Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

50
 T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

55 And I have known the eyes already, known them all ––

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
60 To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all ––

Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
65 Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?

...

70 Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets

And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?...

I should have been a pair of ragged claws

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

...

51
 Modernism

75 And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!

Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep... tired... or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
80 Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in
upon a platter,
I am no prophet –– and here’’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
85 And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and
snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,

After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
90 Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: ““I am Lazarus, come from the dead
95 Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”” ––
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: ““That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all””.

And would it have been worth it, after all,

100 Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail
along the Floor ––
And this, and so much more? ––

52
 T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

It is impossible to say just what I mean!

105 But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a
screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
““That is not it at all,
110 That is not what I meant, at all””.

...

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
115 Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous ––
Almost, at times, the Fool.

120 I grow old...I grow old...

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

125 I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

53
 Modernism

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

130 By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

1911 1917

54
D.H. LAWRENCE
(1885-1930)
 PIANO

1 Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;

Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling
strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as
she sings.

5 In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song

Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour

10 With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for
the past.

1913

57
 SNAKE

1 A snake came to my water-trough

On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.

In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob tree

5 I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the
trough before me.

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the

gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over
the edge of the stone trough

And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,

10 And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small
clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long
body,
Silently.

Someone was before me at my water-trough,

15 And I, like a second comer, waiting.

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,

And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused
a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,

59
 Modernism

20 Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of

the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.

The voice of my education said to me

He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are
venomous.

25 And voices in me said, If you were a man

You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.

But must I confess how I liked him,

How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my
water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
30 Into the burning bowels of this earth.

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him?

Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him?
Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.

35 And yet those voices:

If you were not afraid, you would kill him!

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid,

But even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality
40 From out the dark door of the secret earth.

He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,

60
 D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930)

And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so

black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
45 And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.

50 And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,

And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and
entered farther,
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into
that horrid black hole,
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing
himself after,
Overcame me now his back was turned.

55 I looked round, I put down my pitcher,

I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.

I think it did not hit him,

But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed
in undignified haste.
60 Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.

And immediately I regretted it.

I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
65 I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human
education.
And I thought of the albatross

61
 Modernism

And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king,

Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
70 Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords

Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.

Taormina, 1923

62
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Reference Works:
Abrams, M.H. and Greenblatt, Stephen (eds.), The Norton Anthology of
English Literature –– The Major Authors, New York, London, Norton
(eighth edition), 2006.
Barthes, Roland, S/Z, translated into Italian by Lidia Lonzi, Torino,
Einaudi, 1973.
Belsey, Catherine, Critical Practice, London, Methuen, 1980.
Bradbury, Malcolm and McFarlane, James, Modernism –– 1890-1930,
London, Penguin Books, 1991.
Brooker, Peter and Perril, Simon, ‘‘Modernist Poetry and its Precursors’’,
in Roberts, Neil (ed.), A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry,
Oxford, Blackwell, 2001.
Calinescu, Matei, Faces of Modernity, Bloomington, Indiana University
Press, 1977.
Campbell, Kate (ed.), Journalism, Literature and Modernity, Edinburgh,
Edinburgh University Press, 2000.
Childs, Peter, Modernism, London, NY, Routledge, 2000.
Cianci, Giovanni (ed.), Modernismo/Modernismi –– dall’’avanguardia
storica agli anni Trenta e oltre, Milano, Principato, 1991.
Cuddon, J.A., (revised by C.E. Preston), Dictionary of Literary Terms
and Literary Theory, London, Penguin Books, 1999.
Eagleton, Terry, Literary Theory, Oxford, Blackwell, 1983.
Fowler, Roger (ed.), A Dictionary of Modern Critical Terms, London,
Routledge, 1987.
Kermode, Frank (ed.), Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, London, Faber and
Faber, 1975.

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 Modernism

McNeil, Helen, ‘‘Vortex Marsden: A Little Magazine and the Making

of Modernity’’ in Campbell, Kate (ed.), Journalism, Literature and
Modernity, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2000.
Rabaté, Jean-Michel, The Ghosts of Modernity, Gainesville, University
Press of Florida, 1996.
Rainey, Lawrence (ed.), MODERNISM –– An Anthology, Oxford,
Blackwell Publishing, 2005.
Roberts, Neil (ed.), A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry, Oxford,
Blackwell, 2001.
Smith, Stan, The Origins of Modernism –– Eliot, Pound, Yeats and the
Rhetorics of Renewal, NY, London, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994.
Spender, Stephen, The Destructive Element, London, Jonathan Cape,
1935.
Watts, Cedric, A Preface to Conrad, London, Longman, 1982.
Whitworth, Michael H., Modernism, Oxford, Blackwell Publishing,
2007.

Websites:

The Oxford English Dictionary:

http://www.oed.com

University of Saskatchewan (the Department of English):

http://www.usask.ca/english/prufrock

64
 SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

Textual Analysis
Heath-Stubbs, John and Wright, David (eds.), The Faber Book of
Twentieth-Century Verse, London, Faber, 1975.
Hollander, John and Kermode, Frank (eds.), The Oxford Anthology of
English Literature –– Modern British Literature (vol. 6), Oxford,
Oxford University Press, 1973.

Thomas Hardy
Bindella, Maria Teresa, Storia e figura nella poesia di Thomas Hardy,
Pisa, Pacini, 1979.
Hynes, Samuel (ed.), The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy,
Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1982.
Bailey, J.O., The Poetry of Thomas Hardy: a handbook and commentary,
Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press, 1970.

T.S. Eliot
Righetti, Angelo, Dittico eliotiano: Inquisizioni su ““Prufrock”” e ““Portrait
of a Lady””, Verona, Edizioni Universitarie, Negrar, Il Segno, 1984.
Sanesi, Roberto (ed.), Opere / T.S. Eliot, Milano, Classici Bompiani,
2005.
Sanesi, Roberto (ed.), Poesie / Thomas Stearns Eliot, Milano, Bompiani,
1961.
Southam, B.C. (ed.), T.S. Eliot: Prufrock, Gerontion, Ash Wednesday;
and other shorter poems: a casebook, London, Macmillan, 1998.

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 Modernism

D.H. Lawrence
Albertazzi, Silvia, Introduzione a Lawrence, Roma, Laterza, 1988.
Lawrence, D.H., The Complete Poems / D.H. Lawrence, London,
William Heinemann Ltd., 1957.

66