Modern Poetry (Theory)

Poetry
 The years leading up to World War I saw the start of a poetic revolution.
The imagist movement, influenced by the philosopher poet T. E. Hulme's
insistence on hard, clear, precise images, arose in reaction to Romantic
emotionalism in poetry. The movement developed initially in London, where
Ezra Pound was.
Like other modernists, the imagists somewhat oversimplified the nineteenth-
century aesthetic. Imagists insisted on "direct treatment of the 'thing,' whether
subjective or objective. Imagist and symbolist poetry celebrated the immediacy
of the image as the only means to capture experience.
Imagists wrote short, sharply etched, descriptive lyrics, but they lacked a
technique for the production of longer and more complex poems.
The full subtlety of French symbolist poetry also now came to be appreciated.
 T. S. Eliot was the one who encouraged the revival of John Donne's poems
that both reflected and encouraged a new enthusiasm for seventeenth-century
Metaphysical poetry.
The revived interest in Metaphysical "wit" brought with it a desire to introduce
a much higher degree of intellectual complexity than had been found among the
Victorians or the Georgians.
Irony and wit with the use of puns helped achieve that union of thought and
passion that Eliot saw as characteristic of the Metaphysicals and wished to bring
back into poetry.
Eliot extended the scope of imagism by bringing the English Metaphysicals
and the French symbolists to the rescue. Yeats was also interested in Metaphysical
poetry.
Eliot also introduced into modern English and American poetry the kind of
irony achieved by shifting suddenly from the formal to the colloquial, or by
oblique allusions to objects or ideas that contrasted sharply with the surface
meaning of the poem.
 Modernist writers wanted to bring poetic language and rhythms closer to
those of conversation, or the colloquial and even the slangy language.
 D. H. Lawrence began writing poems freer in form and emotion, wanting
to unshackle verse from the constraints of the "gem-like" lyric and approach.
 Between 1911 and 1922 (the year of the publication of The Waste Land),
a major revolution occurred in English. This modernist revolution was by no
means an isolated literary phenomenon.
 Writers on both sides of the English Channel were influenced by the
French impressionist, postimpressionist, and cubist painters' radical
reexamination of the nature of reality.
 Gerard Manley Hopkins combined precision of the individual image with
a complex ordering of images and a new kind of metrical patterning he named
"sprung rhythm," in which the stresses of a line could be more freely distributed.
 As World War II began, the neutral tone gave way to an increasingly direct
and humane voice and to the vehemence of what came to be known as the New
Apocalypse.
The poets of this movement owed something of their imagistic audacity and
rhetorical violence to the French surrealists, whose poetry was introduced to
English readers in translations and in A Short Survey of Surrealism (1936) by
David Gascoyne, one of the New Apocalypse poets.
Many of the surrealists, such as Salvador Dali and Andre Breton, were both
poets and painters.
 Ted Hughes began to write poems in which predators and victims in the
natural world suggest the violence and irrationality of modern history.
 Post—World War II Ireland—both North and South—was among the most
productive spaces for poetry in the second half of the twentieth century.
Seamus Heaney, Yeats’s most celebrated successor, responds to the horrors
of sectarian bloodshed in Northern Ireland.
 Postcolonial poets grew up with an acute awareness of the riches of their
own cultural inheritances, as well as a deep knowledge of the British literary
canon. They expanded the range of possibilities in English-language poetry by
hybridizing traditions of the British Isles with their indigenous images and speech
rhythms, Creoles and genres. (Like Derek Walcott.) At the same time poets from
India were bringing its great variety of indigenous cultures into English-language
poetry.
Modernism
➢ The roots of modern literature are in the late nineteenth century.
➢ The term modernism is typically used as a label for the period of Western
aesthetics between 1890s and 1930s. (or 1950s) It is associated with radical break
with 19 century aesthetic and morality, and with the celebration of “newness” as
th
an abstract ideal and virtue.

The term covers movements of tendencies in literature and the visual arts as
diverse as Cubism, Dadaism, Expressionism, Imagism, Surrealism, and
Symbolism. Also, Modernism deifies classical norms of beauty.
➢ Nationalist movements were gaining strength in the early years of the
century. The position of women, too, was rapidly changing during this period.
➢ Depression and unemployment in the early 1930s, followed by the rise of
Hitler and the shadow of Fascism and Nazism over Europe, with its threat of
another war, deeply affected the emerging poets and novelists of the time. The
1930s were the so-called red decade.
➢ It was a period of scientific revolution. In science, where Charles Darwin’s
evolutionary theories (The Origin or Species and the Descent of Man) had
revolutionized the image of the natural world already in the second half of the
late 19 century, the groundbreaking theories of Einstein, Heisenberg, and Bohr
th
further shattered the familiar image of the universe.

➢ There were also technical innovations and developments since the late 19 th
century (engines, vehicles communication technologies) that facilitated the life for
everyone and increased the speed of living.
➢ Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism led to new political movements and
parties and inspiring social conflicts that in the early 20 century led to the
th
reshaping of the political face of several European nations.

Also, Class conflicts (Imperialism) contributed to the worldwide political
tensions eventually led to World War I.
➢ Nietzsche’s philosophy’s principles of apocalypse, individual willpower,
and nihilism influenced some of the more destructive strands of modernist art.
➢ There was increasing emphasis on the universal’s psychic interior (Like
Freud’s psychoanalytical writings.)
➢ Psychoanalysis influenced the development of experimental forms like the
stream of consciousness and automatic writing.
➢ Uncertainty and tension were also the results of modernity’s impact on the
view of the human.
➢ Some modernist artists viewed modern life from a more conservative
perspective, bemoaning the loss of spirituality in modernity and looking back at
the organic societies of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance for alternatives to
modern life.
➢ Both in the work of T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf (and Auden) the past
is idealized as a utopian pace of authentic existence untainted by the noxious
effects of modernity.
➢ Rather than as one, unified movement, modernism ought to be seen in
terms of smaller artistic groups, which are nevertheless united by shared concerns
and artistic devices.
➢ Rather than trying to work out where the two movements (Modernism and
postmodernism) differ, critics today agree that these consecutive movements
constitute different responses to one and the same unsettling reality. Where
modernism tries to transcend that world, postmodernism willingly embraces it.
➢ Thomas Hardy was a pivotal figure between Victorianism and modernism.
➢ Modernity disrupted the old order, upended ethical and social codes, cast
into doubt previously stable assumptions about self, community, the world, and
the divine.
Literature could not stand still, and modern writers sought to create new
forms that could register these profound alterations in human experience.
➢ Because scientific materialism and positivism, according to which empirical
explanations could be found for everything, were weakening the influence of
organized religion, many writers looked to literature as an alternative. Yeats says
in his autobiography, he "made a new religion, almost an infallible church of
poetic tradition."(poetry was his religion)
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Poetry

an abstract ideal and virtue.

further shattered the familiar image of the universe.

reshaping of the political face of several European nations.

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