Modernist Poetry

Main features
• There were many changes in this period to the
language of poetry.
• Throughout the Victorian period the language
of poetry had a special decorum and was
different from everyday language.
• It consisted of a special diction which gave a
unity to the poem and which was appropriate
for the expression of elevated feelings and
ideas.
• In the Modern period, there is a movement
from poetic diction to a new poetic language.
• Modern poetry contains language that is
closer to the idioms of everyday speech and to
a more diverse range of subject matter.
• Instead of a single unified poetic diction,
different styles coexist more frequently.
• Dialect words, colloquial expressions, specialist
terminology, poeticism, and foreign words may be
found in the same poem.
• Such a rich use of language expresses a view of reality
which is more fluid, uneven, intertextual than before
and which is less patterned and unified. Poetry has
become more polyglot.
• The language mix reflects a sense that there is no
longer a fixed language of poetry just as there is no
longer one English (if there ever was)
T.Hardy –a precursor of modernism
• On the last day of the old century, 31 December 1900,
Hardy wrote what is perhaps his most famous poem The
Darkling Thrush.
• Writing on the bridge between two centuries, Hardy is
uncertain what the future holds. A typically Romantic
situation is described.
• The landscape of the work is bleak and funereal:

The land's sharp features seemed to be

The Century's corpse outleant.
• The voice of a thrush is heard 'upon the growing
gloom'. The beauty of the bird's song does not dispel
the dark vista.
• Unlike Keats's Ode to a Nightingale or Shelley's To a
Skylark, the poet in this poem sees no cause for song
and cannot accept the hope or sense of
unchangingness over time that the birdsong might
express.
• The poem uses a Romantic mechanism, but does not
reach a Romantic resolution.
• So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.
• So the poem ends in suspension, caught
between hope and pessimism.
• Hardy does not accept one single mood;
neither the Romantic hope the bird might
express, nor his own sense of historical doubt.
• He simply acknowledges that, as the corpse of
the previous century is prepared for burial,
both hope and hopelessness coexist.
 E.Pound-logopoeia
• The Modernist poet and critic Ezra Pound noted the
existence of logopoeia in modern poetry, believing it
to be characteristic of much poetry in the early
twentieth century.
• Gr. logopoeia, 'the dance of the intellect among
words'
• Logopoeia occurs, in particular, when different layers
and levels of vocabulary are mixed in a text. Here is
an example from the first stanza of a poem by
Thomas Hardy, After a Journey (1913):
 After a Journey-T. Hardy
 
• Hereto I come to view a voiceless ghost;
Whither, O whither will its whim now draw me?
Up the cliff, down, till I'm lonely, lost,
And the unseen waters' ejaculations awe me.

• Where you will next be there's no knowing,

Facing round about me everywhere,
With your nut-coloured hair,
And gray eyes, and rose-flush coming and going.
• The poem as a whole displays a number of
different styles:
• archaisms and poeticisms
• formal, Latinate, almost technical vocabulary ;
• colloquial spoken grammar and lexis
• romantic, popular song

Find these exp.

• It is almost as if there are several different voices playing
off against one another in the poem and as if the poet
seems unable to stay with any one uniform language or a
single or fixed point from which to register the reality of
the speaker's perceptions.
• The lexical fragmentation encodes a kind of
fragmentation of the self, a profound psychological
disturbance and dislocation which a conventionally
unitary and harmonious 'poetic' diction, consisting of
uniformly elevated words and phrases, could not capture.
• Such play with vocabulary and point of view is,
as Pound observes, common in the poetry of
this period
• poets sought to enact in their poetry a wider
sense of the uncertainties of belief and the
ambiguities of action.
• In Modernist poets such as Eliot and Pound the fragmentation
is reflected in a collapse in syntax ( Language note, page 342)
as well as in vocabulary:
 
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal
• (T.S. Eliot, What the Thunder Said, from The Waste Land, 1922)
 The Imagist poets
• first anthology - Des Imagistes (1914) - was edited by
the American exile Ezra Pound.
• Imagist poems tend to be short, sharp glimpses, which
contrast with the lushness of Romantic and Victorian
verse.
• Imagism was a movement designed to replace the
'soft', discursive narrative voice of Victorian verse with
a harder, more condensed, Imagistic language - 'nearer
the bone'.
• T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, E.Pound.
 T.S Eliot (1988-1965)
• The Waste Land
• Prufrock and other poems
• Plays
• Criticism
• Nobel Prize for literature -1948
• Eliot’poetry is difficult to read.
• A main cause of difficulty for the reader is that
Eliot suppresses all direct connections between
these images.
• The reader has to work hard to build up
meanings without overt explanation from the
poet.
• The reader has to rebuild the fragments by an
indirect process of association.
• The three principal qualities which characterise Eliot's
work have been neatly summarised as:
• first, his particular sense of the age in which he lived;
• second, his conviction that poetry, although using the
poet's emotions as its starting point, becomes
'impersonalised' by the tradition in which the poet
works;
• third, his use of quotations from and allusions to other
poets' work for reference, parody, irony, and a sense of
continuing intertextual communication and community
• Difficulties are created by Eliot's frequent allusions
to other literatures, languages, and cultures.
• Many of these references are difficult to follow,
require a specialised knowledge, or are simply
highly personal to Eliot's own individual reading.
• The Waste Land contains end notes which Eliot,
perhaps not without some irony, supplies himself
and which explain some of the more cryptic
references.
• For example, in the lines:  
Son of Man
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images …
(The Burial of the Dead, from The Waste Land)

T- he allusion to 'Son of Man' is taken from the Bible

(the Book of Ezekiel) and refers to God who
addresses Ezekiel direct.
• One of the aims of Modernist poets was to articulate a
representation of the world and of a way of seeing which
expressed a profound sense of a spiritual and
psychological condition which was not readily definable
and certainly not easily definable within conventional
poetic resources.
• For these purposes the limits of expression in rhythm, the
use of images and symbols, allusion and reference and
word choice were extended: at the same time the limits
of syntax as a resource for the expression of meaning
were explored
 WW I poetry
• At the beginning of the First World War the
characteristic response to it was that to serve in the
war was a matter of duty.
• Poetry was written in order to express a sense of
honour and to celebrate the glories of war. A typical
example is the first part of Rupert Brooke's The Soldier:
•  If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England.
• The poem is a romantic sonnet and is deeply patriotic.
 reactions
The reaction of poets such as Wilfred Owen,
Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, and Ivor
Gurney (Severn and Somme, 1917, and War's
Embers, 1919) was to write vivid and realistic
poetry satirising the vainglory and
incompetence of many in the officer class
whose actions caused the unnecessary deaths
of some of the finest young men
 Dulce et Decorum Est(1)…W.Owen
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares(2) we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest(3) began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots(4) 
Of tired, outstripped(5) Five-Nines(6) that dropped behind.
Gas!(7) Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets(8) just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime(9) . . .
Dim, through the misty panes(10) and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering,(11) choking, drowning.
• 1.  DULCE ET DECORUM EST - the first words of a Latin saying (taken from an ode by Horace). The words were
widely understood and often quoted at the start of the First World War. They mean "It is sweet and right." The
full saying ends the poem: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori - it is sweet and right to die for your country. In
other words, it is a wonderful and great honour to fight and die for your country.
• 2.  Flares - rockets which were sent up to burn with a brilliant glare to light up men and other targets in the
area between the front lines (See illustration, page 118 of Out in the Dark.) 
• 3.  Distant rest - a camp away from the front line where exhausted soldiers might rest for a few days, or longer 
• 4.  Hoots - the noise made by the shells rushing through the air 
• 5.  Outstripped - outpaced, the soldiers have struggled beyond the reach of these shells which are now falling
behind them as they struggle away from the scene of battle  
•  6.  Five-Nines - 5.9 calibre explosive shells 
• 7.  Gas! -  poison gas. From the symptoms it would appear to be chlorine or phosgene gas. The filling of the
lungs with fluid had the same effects as when a person drowned
• 8.  Helmets -  the early name for gas masks 
• 9.  Lime - a white chalky substance which can burn live tissue 
• 10.  Panes - the glass in the eyepieces of the gas masks 
• 11.  Guttering - Owen probably meant flickering out like a candle or gurgling like water draining down a gutter,
referring to the sounds in the throat of the choking man, or it might be a sound partly like stuttering and partly
like gurgling