Modernist Poetry

 

                             Day by, make it new

                             Cut underbrush

                             Pile the logs

                             Keep it growing – Ezra Pound

 

I.  Modernism Against the Humanistic Tradition

 

·       The death knell of the old, grand dream of Classical order and symmetry:  Einstein’s new physics and relativity destroy the stable, predictable Newtonian universe

 

·       Romanticism as self-indulgent, sloppy, too emotional:  irony, precision, indirection, objectivity, formal integrity to replace Romantic idea of poetry as self-revelation

Example:  “The Bathtub”

 

As a bathtub lined with white porcelain,
When the hot water gives out or goes tepid,
So is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion,
O my much praised but-not-altogether-satisfactory lady.

 

II.  Formal Innovation vs.  Social Commentary

 

Modernist arts inherit and complicate the late nineteenth century divide between Realism and the Art for Art’s Sake movement.  Faced with the many social upheavals during the 20th C (such as the Wars and the Depression), many artists continue in the realist tradition of social commentary, holding up a mirror to the age, documenting its problems, and working for social justice.  Formalism, on the other hand, radically departs from the idea that art represents reality (or radically refigures the notion of what is “real”) and concentrates, often with wonderful exuberance and creativity, on redefining the medium of the arts.

 

III.  Modernist Poetry:  some of its axioms

 

·       Pare away the inessential:  “use no word that does not contribute to the presentation” (1336).  Get rid of poeticisms, like elisions (“ne’er” for “never”) and empty coordinators and transitions.  Example:  “In a Station of the Metro”

·       “to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective.”

·       Dismantle or use to ironic effect traditional verse forms (e.g. the sonnet or heroic couplet) →  free verse. See Apollinaire’s innovations

·       Coherence (relation of part to part) and formal integrity more important than message-making:  “A poem should not mean but be” (Archibald MacLeish, “Ars Poetica”). See Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons

·       “Depersonalization”: irony, wit, paradox, complexity replace idea of poetry as self-expression. 

 

Modernist vices:  sentimentality; imprecision; sincerity; imitation; didacticism (preaching or teaching).

 

Example:  Yeats’ “The Second Coming” (1354)