Modernists

Introduction

The English-language poets of the first forty years of the twentieth century who called themselves modernists developed their movement in response to several discoveries, disappointments, and disillusions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In the nineteenth century, scientific discoveries led to the development of photography, which made the mimetic value of painting and sculpture less important. Artists, thus liberated, developed Impressionism, stressing the effects of light and color at a moment in time, and post-Impressionism, asserting that significant rendering eludes mere representation. In the realm of poetry, this trend can be seen in the dramatic monologue, which came to prominence in the mid-nineteenth century. This poetic form rendered the world through the distorted vision of driven people, as in “My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning (1812-1889), in which the duke matter-of-factly reveals that he ordered his wife murdered because she was gracious to people. The Romantic William Wordsworth (1770-1850) recounted the moral wisdom of nature, and John Keats (1795-1821) declared with magnificent grace that truth and beauty are mysteriously one; but in the dramatic monologue, the poet no longer mines objective truth or prophetically conveys higher values. The duke’s story reveals a perverse aspect of human character. Punctuated in such a manner as to render the rhymed couplets almost invisible, it is true, ugly and extraordinary, grimly captivating, disillusioning great poetry.

The eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith theorized that under capitalism, enlightened self-interest would lead entrepreneurs to secure increasing wealth by satisfying people’s needs, adequately rewarding workers, and supporting the state that protects their property. In the nineteenth century, technology based on new scientific discoveries led to industrialization, which produced goods faster and in higher quantities. However, the human condition failed to improve. Workers were exploited, and in time, they revolted, leading to the development of communism. The theory and ideals behind capitalism, industrialism, and communism contrasted with reality, producing disillusionment.

Other sources of disillusionment and disappointment were challenges to firmly-held beliefs and ideas. In the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace independently created theories of evolution that contradicted both the biblical Adam and Eve story in which God created all living things in less than a week and the seemingly irrefutable idea that causes precedes effects. The idea that accidental congruence (fortunate combination of genes) rather than intentional design led to a species’ survival brought into question the belief in a beneficent God who created life, who would punish evil and reward the good after death. In addition, in the early part of the twentieth-century, scientist Albert Einstein, with his theory of relativity, challenged the most fundamental phenomenal elements of perception—time, which seems to pass in a fixed manner, and space, which seems unchanging in extension.

Influences and precursors

The veneration of individuals and individualism, represented by Romanticism in the arts, capitalism economically, and democracy politically; of the Christian God; and of conventional scientific wisdom were all challenged in the nineteenth century. Disappointment and disillusionment were the order of the day. Among those dealing with the fallout were poets in England, the United States, and on the continent.

In the United States, Walt Whitman (1819-1892), the poet of democracy, anticipated the modernists by developing expansive free verse that he thought suited to the great American experiment in freedom. Not far north of New York, Whitman’s base, the cloistered New England poet Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) developed an equally distinct voice. Using dashes instead of punctuation, she closeted away terse, insightful poems in ballad form, filled with telling ironies, often underscored by off (or slant) rhymes and words that almost rhymed, producing dissonances that reinforced the troubling thoughts they conveyed.

In France, inspired by the scandalously sexual poetry of Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) and his translations of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), the avant-garde Symbolists, Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898), Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), and Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) wrote shockingly challenging poetry. They embraced musical language in their poetry by trusting imagination more than the mundane world, seeking correspondence with the transcendent, and abandoning direct description in favor of indirect language. Beginning about 1916, the more revolutionary Dadaists attacked art and memory, freeing words from their meanings and thus moving them into the realm of abstraction. Dada poets constructed poems by piecing random words together. In 1918, Tristan Tzara (1896-1963) wrote the “Manifeste Dada 1918” (“Dada Manifesto 1918”), with the purported aim of abolishing the future through Dada. Following on Dadaism, in the 1920s, Surrealism slid back toward meaning through the Freudian unconscious, receiving its manifesto from André Breton (1896-1966), who advocated morality-beauty-and-reason-free thought that accessed the unconscious.

In Germany, the Prague-born poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) brought a blend of Impressionism and mysticism into German poetry, and the manifesto “On Literary Expressionism” (1911) by Kasimir Edschmid (1890-1966) regarded humanity as both elevated and deplorable and declared that the function of poetry was to convey that condition.

In Italy, poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944) embraced the outrageous. In his Futurist manifesto “Manifeste de Futurisme” (1909), published in Le Figaro, he valued emerging power, war, machinery, and speeding objects. Denouncing women and praising the beauty of speed, Marinetti supported the Allies in World War I and the Fascist Benito Mussolini thereafter. His manifesto established the general terms for the theory and practice of the entire Futurist movement.

The beginnings

Modernist poets, who wrote in English, were influenced by and responded to the events and movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They committed themselves to the present, often reacting to or agreeing with continental writers, and also sought inspiration from earlier literature, such as the poetry of ancient Greece, medieval Italy and France, and seventeenth-century England. They also examined the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), a heretofore little-published Jesuit who was conservative in content and challengingly innovative in images and sprung rhythm, and the tightly ordered poetry of Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), despite his religious leanings, which accepted the Darwinian idea that chance was the organizing principle of the universe.

Imagists

In 1912, Ezra Pound (1885-1972) marked up a poem by H. D., signed it “H. D. Imagiste,” and submitted it to Poetry magazine, thereby founding the Imagist movement. Imagist poetry is characterized by subjective or objective presentation rather than description of the poem’s material, a parsimonious use of language, and rhythms determined by musical phrase rather than metrical considerations. Pound edited an anthology of Imagist poetry, Des Imagistes: An Anthology (1914), and wrote the essay “Imagisme” (1914), which was published in Poetry magazine and served as an Imagist manifesto. Because of his interest in presentation, Pound was intrigued to learn that each Chinese word is an ideogram, a stylized visual presentation of its meaning. Pound turned the literal translations of Chinese poetry made by Ernest Fenollosa (1853-1908) into splendid translations in Cathay: Translations by Ezra Pound for the Most Part from the Chinese of Rihaku, from the Notes of the Late Ernest Fenollosa and the Decipherings of the Professors Mori and Ariga (1915). Pound would later abandon Imagism, and Amy Lowell (1874-1925), a member of a distinguished American family of poets, became the new leader and voice of the movement. She wrote some of the most distinguished free verse of the period.

William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was once approached by Pound, who told him that although he was the greatest living poet writing in English, he did not write concretely. Yeats, always intrigued by new ideas and helpful to youths who admired him and those who attacked him, asked Pound what he meant. Pound pointed out abstract words in Yeats’s published verse, and Yeats amended his writing and committed to reworking the poetry that characterized the rest of his life.

Yeats, born Protestant and Anglo-Irish, was intent on leading a poetic and artistic life in predominantly Roman Catholic Ireland. Regarding Christianity and its permutations as but one useful mythology, he explored Irish myth, legend, and history, and Greek and Indian mythology; involved himself in occult movements; sought comparative analyses; and experimented with psychic transport and automatic writing to discover truths about the human condition that Christian faiths could not access. Yeats saw modern life as reflective of events in the distant past. In love with the beautiful Maud Gonne, who admired his poetry and acted in his plays but did not return his love, Yeats made her into a contemporary Helen in “No Second Troy.”

T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), like Pound, an American expatriate who considered contemporary life a thing of disarray, had read chapters of the epic novel Ulysses (1922) by James Joyce (1882-1941) in Little Review. In the work, Joyce had created a heroic antihero, Leopold Bloom, as a version of Odysseus, the main character in Homer’s Odyssey (c. 725 BCE; English translation, 1614). Eliot dubbed Joyce’s innovation the mythical method and argued that Joyce had structured his novel about disorganized modern life by drawing on a work that came from a magnificently ordered past. Eliot had already written “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915), a dramatic monologue in which the tormented protagonist, balding and insecure, compares himself unfavorably to Hamlet and anticipates going to a party, speaking deeply, and then proposing to a sophisticated woman there, only to be rebuffed.

After lionizing Joyce, Eliot drafted what, with Pound’s editorial help, would become The Waste Land (1922). This short epic about the social disasters that followed World War I is based on the legend of the Fisher King, whose wound left his land sterile. The Waste Land, filled with what Eliot called objective correlatives of despair and written while he was recovering from a nervous breakdown, presents the godless world that followed World War I, full of failures embodied in characters such as Lil, who lost her teeth and is advised by a friend who would like Lil’s husband for herself to pretty up for Albert, who is coming home, or be ready to lose him. In keeping with Eliot’s conviction that literature is always written in relation to the tradition that preceded it, the poem begins in April, the springtime month that poet Geoffrey Chaucer celebrated for the awakening it engendered in plants, animals, and people, but that Eliot regarded as the cruelest month because it breeds awareness of loss that displaces the peaceful death of winter. Ultimately, Eliot sought refuge in tradition, renounced American citizenship, and embraced England and the Anglican Church.

The American modernists

American modernists Robert Frost (1874-1963), Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), and Marianne Moore (1887-1972) were more balanced than Eliot. Though Frost wrote metrically and compared free verse to playing tennis without a net, his first book, A Boy’s Will (1913), was positively reviewed by Pound. Frost’s graceful style and the attractive rural settings of his poems played off against the profound insights into human loss, pain, and error that he shared with the less accessible modernists. Stevens, an insurance executive, replaced traditional values and the God of the past with an engagement in life and an appreciation of objects such as the sun, which provided an image of what gods ought to be. Williams, a dedicated physician, celebrated simple things in short free-verse lines of powerful rhythmic value. He claimed to deplore iambic pentameter, but if one strings together the initial lines of his famous tribute to the wheelbarrow, one finds a wonderfully musical iambic pentameter line that ends acceptably in an unstressed syllable. Moore, who conceived of poetry as imaginary gardens containing real toads, was the acting editor of The Dial from 1925 to 1929. She wrote crisp, witty poems, often in syllabic verse, counting the number of syllables per line but not stress or syllable length.

High modernism

The 1920s was the period of high modernism, followed by a socially responsible group of younger modernists led by W. H. Auden (1907-1973), who, under Eliot’s influence, early on wrote in blank verse and then, following Yeats, turned to brilliantly controlled regular forms devoted to political and moral issues and love. Auden then famously expressed the wish that if unequal love was his destiny, he wanted to be the one who loved more. Moving in the opposite direction from Eliot, Auden renounced British citizenship and adopted the United States, where the moral and socially conscious Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982) and E. E. Cummings (1894-1962) had taken up the modernist tradition. MacLeish, in “Ars Poetica,” declared that the poem does not mean but is, and Cummings further extended the relation of form to content, sometimes adding appearance to sound, placing elevated words higher and words that fall lower down on the page than the rest of their lines.

The end of modernism

Despite the grim events occurring in the world, the modernists did not abandon hope. They shared a thirst for meaning, order, and commitment in a world that had lost them. Pound, Eliot, and Yeats moved to the right in search of it. Pound embraced fascism, supported the Axis during World War II, and was tried for treason. Declared insane, he was incarcerated at St. Elizabeth's Hospital, where he continued to work on his Cantos (1925-1972). He was awarded the first Bollingen Prize in 1949 for The Pisan Cantos (1948). With the intercession of fellow modernists, Pound was released in 1958. The once bellicose advocate of radical artistic and political movements fell silent, expressing fragments of regret in verse about his anti-Semitism.

Modernists lived on and continued to write after World War II, but their movement had ended—they had declared themselves modern. The new generation saw itself as postmodern. The quest to respond to discoveries and confront disappointments, disillusionments, and disasters by embracing them or transcending them through unique visions or engagement with the past, to make things new with concrete images and shocking subject matter or forms, was over. What had been shocking had become everyday matters in the world that emerged after World War II—a great period of twentieth-century poetry had ended.

Bibliography

Bradbury, Malcolm, and James McFarlane, editors. Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1890-1930. 1976. Reprint. Penguin Books, 1991.

Caserio, Robert L. The Cambridge Introduction to British Fiction, 1900-1950. Cambridge UP, 2019.

Cleary, Joe. Modernism, Empire, World Literature. Cambridge UP, 2021.

Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era. U of California P, 1971.

Perkins, David. A History of Modern Poetry: From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode. Harvard UP, 1976.

"What is Modernism?" University of Toledo, www.utoledo.edu/library/canaday/guidepages/Modernism2.html. Accessed 20 July 2024.

White, Allon. The Uses of Obscurity: The Fiction of Early Modernism. Routledge, 2023.