Genres and Styles
Due to Modernism’s increased focus on the inner self and consciousness, many works did not follow the traditional plot from beginning, to middle, to end. Instead, Modernists used stream-of-consciousness. Stream-of-consciousness is a style where writers depict a characters inner thoughts and feelings without being interrupted by a narrator’s description or a traditional dialogue between characters. This style was used by T. S. Eliot in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
Modernism could be seen as a period that favored poets even though several great novels came out of it. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land has been claimed as the best work of the era. Robert Frost is lauded as one of America’s best poets as well. Other important figures such as E.E. Cummings and Ezra Pound also used poetry as their preferred genre. Still, novels such as The Great Gatsby should not be forgotten. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s best novel is also one of America’s best.
Ezra Pound’s imagism was also a feature of Modernism. Imagism was the idea that a figure should be describe with the least amount of words possible. The style says the text should not be emphasized over the image it conjures for the reader. Pound’s three tenets of imagism were as follows:
1. Direct treatment of the “thing,” whether subjective of 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, not in the sequence of the metronome.
These principle entailed that the composer should give utmost respect to the object being described, remove any superfluous wording, and describe the object musically instead of in prose.
Historical Context
Modernism was formed by a response to several groundbreaking changes in technology and science that shattered previous views on reality. Prior to Modernists, there were Realists who believed that literature should describe life as it really was as opposed to an ideal version of it. Early in the 20th century, scientific findings in psychology and physics completely warped the “real” world the Realists were depicting. Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity showed that time and space are really the same thing. Sigmund Freud created a theory for unconsciousness. This theory stated that most of the brain operates unconsciously; thus, people weren’t truly in control of their own heads.
Moreover, the industrial age was booming. Buildings larger than ever were being made. Urbanization was accelerating, and there were less people farming than those who weren’t. People were increasingly materialistic. Modernists saw the world around them crumbling into chaos and tried to save civilization. They did this by trying to bring back order.Pound and Eliot wanted to create a new tradition. Eliot’s The Waste Land was his way of telling readers to pick up a book and learn about some of the greatness man has achieved.
At the same time, a new form of art was brewing in America. Cinema attracted a huge audience and it may have frightened some authors that writing could be doomed. Paired with Freud’s work, cinema helped influence the stream-of-consciousness style where characters thoughts would randomly appear, so the reader was aware of the entire consciousness of the character. Cinema may have also been an influence on Pound’s imagism. Pound’s second rule on imagism was “to use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.”
The Waste Land
FOR EZRA POUND
IL MIGLIOR FABBRO
I. The Burial of the Dead
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
“They called me the hyacinth girl.”
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Oed’ und leer das Meer.
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days.
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: “Stetson!
“You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
“Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
“Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
“Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
“Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!
“You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”
The Waste Land was Eliot’s greatest poem and may have been the most important poem of the era. The poem is dedicated to Ezra Pound who edited down to a third of its original length. The dedication is written in latin as il miglior fabbro meaning “the better craftsman.” The poem made the attempt of gathering the noblest of mankind’s intellectual contributions and combine them into one master piece. There are allusions to Dante’s Inferno and to writings from the Buddha.
Eliot saw the vast changes in contemporary society as an opportunity to create a new tradition for the shifting civilization. Furthermore, he saw contemporary society becoming lazier. He made the poem incredibly difficult to read as a way to tell his readers to learn about his references. The title is referring to what society will become if it continues with its superfluous and materialistic values.
The Red Wheelbarrow
The Red Wheelbarrow
so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.
This poem by William Carlos Williams seeks to humble the elitism that was so prominent during Modernism. Williams wanted everyone to remember that civilization still depended on farmers, and he uses such an unloved object like the wheelbarrow to portray this harsh truth. Although the wheelbarrow isn’t flashy, it is still a basic piece to keeping our society functional. Without the small things we take for granted, argues Williams, we couldn’t survive. Thus, while his contemporaries wanted to create a revolutionary literary tradition in the new modern era, Williams believed we should not forget our roots. He himself wanted to create an American tradition of poetry, but he vied to accomplish this by making America distinct from the rest of the world. Thus, this poem can be seen as William’s attempt to create a tradition that championed the common man.
William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams lived a conventional life and was a true American patriot. Despite his lifestyle, he was a great experimenter with poetry. The dichotomy of his writing style with his lifestyle comes from his upbringing. Although he had an unconventional mind, his parents tried to instill him with a rigid idealism and moral perfectionism. They wanted him to be a successful doctor and would be appalled at the idea of him becoming a poet. However, Williams greatest role models came from poets such as Walt Whitman and John Keats.
William Carlos Williams was devoted to bringing a poetic tradition to America while following his predecessors footsteps. He was against the actions of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound to become expatriates. He saw them as elitist as well. He believed more beauty was to be found in the “simple things” which The Red WheelBarrow depicts. Others were not so impressed with his style of poetry. He raised many critics from his poem Kora in Hell: Improvisations. Pound called it incoherent, and Wallace Stevens criticized Williams’ “tantrums.”
These attacks made Williams more defensive. He sought to continue his advancements in American poetry without any allies. What he did not see coming was Eliot’s The Waste Land which would become the most important poem of the period. This masterpiece seemed to both dampen his spirits and fuel his determination at the same time. He worked hard and produced a book of poems Spring in All. Among the greatest talents from America, William Carlos Williams was the one most deeply patriotic.
Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound, along with T.S. Eliot, was a part of the Modernist avant-garde seeking to create a new literary tradition. Several lauded him as the single most influential poet in the 20th century. This praise is due in part because he had major influence on other important writers of the era such as T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, and William Carlos Williams. He also praised James Joyce which may have helped increase the popularity of the novelist. Ironically, as Hugh Kenner claimed in The Poetry of Ezra Pound, “there was no great contemporary writer less read than Ezra Pound.” Among Pound contributed to many Modernist experiments such as vorticism and imagism.
In 1905, Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Hilda Doolittle convened to discuss a revitalization of American poetry. They agreed that there was no native model to build on. However, they disagreed on the solution to this problem. Williams believed that they should continue the works of their predecessors in making a new tradition in America. Pound, however, was leaning towards becoming an expatriate. He did end up moving to Britain.
Pound was not only a major poet but also an important critic of literature. He wrote important critiques in The Spirit of Romance and Literary Essays. His colleague Eliot said that to understand Pound’s poetry, one must read his critiques and vice-versa.
T.S. Eliot
T.S. Eliot was born in St. Louis Missouri in 1888. He stayed there until he went to Harvard University in 1906. In 1914, he moved to London where he met his contemporary Ezra Pound. Eliot wrote for a number of literary magazines including one of his greatest works “A Long Song for J. Alfred Prufrock.” After a few years in England, he established himself as one of the top poets of his time. Later, he wrote another master piece in The Waste Land. This poem launched Eliot into a mythic like reverence.
As he was both an American and British poet, his position in American Modernism is peculiar. He was a bridge between English and American literature. He wanted to create a new tradition for literature as a whole. He believed this tradition should not just take the greatest moments of European literature, but also Asian and classical civilization. Some of his contemporaries, mainly William Carlos Williams, believed he was too academic. His American critics wanted to focus on solidifying an American literary tradition whereas Eliot wasn’t as passionate about that cause. Those critics believed that him moving to London was also betraying his predecessors as well who tried to create a distinct American literature separate from European literature.
Modernism - A New Society 