Modernism

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Modernism

• Make it new!
• - Ezra Pound

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Modernism

• Fragmentation and disconnection
• Frequent quotations, allusions, and references to
  information outside the poem
• Divided self/detached speaker
• An overall feeling of powerlessness and
  alienation
• A focus on language
• Difficult to understand
• Deals with subject matter that had traditionally
  been considered mundane or trivial
• The presentation of an individual consciousness
  against a panorama of the age

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Imagism

• Led by Ezra Pound William Carlos Williams was a
  later adherent
• short poems that used ordinary language and free
  verse to create sharp, exact, concentrated
  pictures.
• Pounds definition of the image
• Eliots objective correlative

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Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

• Early academic career
• London in 1908
• 1920-1941 London to Paris to Italy
• WWII charges of treason

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In a Station of the Metro

• Remember Pounds definition of the image.
• Whenever you approach an Imagist poem, you should
  ask yourself what complexities of intellect and
  emotion might be packed into this poem?

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In a Station of the Metro

1. What emotional connotations are suggested by the
   wet, black, bough?
2. Pounds main metaphor in this poem involves the
   petals. What does he compare to petals?
3. What does that metaphor add to the meaning of the
   poem?
4. Think about the crowd who do you think they are?
   Why are they riding the metro?
5. Pound was deeply interested in Japanese and
   Chinese poetry. Can you detect the influence of
   that poetry in this poem? How so?
6. How does this poem exemplify the ideologies of
   the Imagists?

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The River-Merchants Wife A Letter

1. Identify the speaker of this poem in terms of
   gender, age, character, and occupation.
2. List the events that occur in stanzas 1-4.
3. In the last stanza, what does the speaker promise
   to do?
4. How is the third stanza a turning point in the
   poem?
5. What does the image of the husband dragging his
   feet suggest?
6. Find three more images in the final stanza that
   add meaning to the poem. List them, and tell what
   meaning they suggest.
7. Why do the butterflies hurt the speaker?
8. How does this poem put into practice the Imagist
   theory of the objective correlative?

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William Carlos Williams

• Multi-ethnic background
• New Jersey doctor
• Influence of Ezra Pound
• But differed in style
• No ideas but in things.

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The Red Wheelbarrow

1. Note the exact visual imagery.
2. What has just happened before this poem takes
   place?
3. What is the one metaphor in this poem?
4. What is it exactly that depends upon the
   wheelbarrow? Why?
5. How does this poem employ the objective
   correlative?
6. Whats the point of this poem? Does it mean
   anything? If so, what?

10
This is Just to Say

1. To whom do you think this poem is addressed?
2. Do you think the speaker really feels sorry for
   what he (or she) has done?
3. Even though the speaker of this poem does
   directly state a feeling (i.e., Forgive me),
   does this poem still employ the objective
   correlative? How so?

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A Note on Williams

• When we read poems like The Red Wheelbarrow and
  This is Just to Say, our first impulse might be
  to criticize and dismiss.
• But you must always remember the context.
• Think of these poems as experiments in poetry.

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To Elsie

• A poem about a devastated and despoiled America
  and about the alienated and self-alienating human
  condition. (characteristics of Modernism)
• Critics have called this Williamss great poem
  about America. In a short, solid paragraph,
  analyze To Elsie as a piece of social criticism
  about the nation. How does Elsie, with broken
  brain express the truth about us?
• Can you connect the form of the poem to its
  meaning?

13
Queen Annes Lace

• Queen Annes Lace is the wild progenitor to our
  carrot.

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(No Transcript)
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Queen Annes Lace

• The critic Sharon Doblin has said that this poem
  is an early example of Williams' use of the
  Cubist model as a way to confuse two frames of
  referenceto subvert the hierarchy of tenor over
  vehicle in the structure of metaphor via the
  poem's enjambments . . .

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• Queen Annes Lace
• Her body is not so white as
• anemone petals nor so smooth nor
• so remote a thing. It is a field
• of the wild carrot taking
• the field by force the grass
• does not raise above it.
• Here is no question of whiteness,
• white as can be, with a purple mole
• at the center of each flower.
• Each flower is a hand's span
• of her whiteness. Wherever
• his hand has lain there is
• a tiny purple blemish. Each part
• is a blossom under his touch
• to which the fibres of her being
• stem one by one, each to its end,
• until the whole field is a

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Spring and All

• Images in 1st 3 stanzas
• Contagious hospital (2 meanings)
• What might the word they at the beginning of
  the 5th stanza mean?
• still in line 25
• Ending
• What overall meaning, theme, or message can you
  read into this poem?

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Spring and All

• Describe the specific images the speaker sees by
  the road in the first three stanzas. What kind of
  landscape does he describe?
• Identify and list the adjectives Williams uses in
  the first three stanzas. How do these adjectives
  contribute to the tone of the first half of the
  poem?
• Contagious hospital is a colloquial term
  meaning a hospital for people with contagious
  diseases. What does the reference to the
  contagious hospital add to the poem?
• If we read contagious as an adjective that
  modifies hospital, and not as a kind of hospital,
  what other meaning can we get from that phrase?
• The first three stanzas are about plants. The
  pronoun in line 16, however, might refer to more
  than plants. What broader meaning might the word
  they have?

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Spring and All

• Williams was also an obstetrician, and he
  delivered thousands of babies in his lifetime.
  How does that fact change your impression of the
  last three stanzas? What specific references
  would apply equally to the coming of spring and
  the birth of an infant?
• Look closely at the last stanza. What two
  meanings of the word still make line 25 a
  paradox?
• Look very closely at the last line of the poem.
  Do you see anything interesting about it? Why do
  you think Williams might have chosen to end the
  poem this way?
• What overall meaning, theme, or message can you
  read into this poem?
• look at the title

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e.e. cummings

• This guy really shook things up.
• Experimental painter.
• WWIvolunteer ambulance driver wrongly
  imprisoned
• After the war, went to Paris to study art
• Experiments in syntax and typography.

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since feeling is first

• Sets up a number of dualities
• Is simultaneously
• 1) a love poem, and
• 2) a poem about poetry (ironically, the
  inadequacy of language)

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in just

• Critics have identified the balloon man as a
  rendition of Pan, the god of the goatherds and
  shepherds. A goat-man, he was akin to the satyrs
  like them, he inhabited the thickets, forests,
  and mountains, all places of wilderness. Upon his
  reed pipe (called a Panpipe), this lesser god
  played music for the dancing nymphs. Like the
  satyrs, he loved the nymphs but was rejected
  because of his ugly appearance cleft foot and
  deformed and aging body. He was a lecher whose
  pursuits of nymphs such as Echo, Pithys, and
  Syrinx are well-recounted in classical
  literature. The haunts that he frequented, the
  urges and appetites that impelled him, and the
  distinctive cleft foot all profoundly affected
  later Christian conceptions of the devil, whose
  humanoid appearance in art resembles that of Pan
  and the satyrs....

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O sweet spontaneous

• Cummings takes issue with the way three groups of
  people treat the earth. What are these three
  groups?
• How do they treat the Earth?
• Cummings portrays them as dirty old men!
• List the adjectives in the first four stanzas of
  the poem. Which nouns do they describe? What does
  a study of the adjectives tell us about the
  meaning of the poem?
• Why is death Earths rhythmic lover?
• What does death have to do with spring? How is
  spring Earths answer to them?
• Look closely at the form of the poem how does it
  create the poems meaning?

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anyone lived in a pretty how town

• Structuring elements
• refrains and repeated grammatical patterns,
  repetition of parentheses
• Complete grammatical chaos! Adverbs, nouns,
  adjectiveseverything all switched around
• What kind of story is narrated in anyone lived
  in a pretty how town? Who are the main
  characters?
• Notice that Cummings repeats the names of
  seasons, but rotates them each time. Why might he
  have done this?
• Why is it that only the children perceive that no
  one loved anyone?
• What does Cummings mean when he says of the
  children down they forgot as up they grew?

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T.S. Eliot

• Born in St. Louis in 1888 father was chancellor
  of Wash U.
• Moved to London just before WWI
• New Criticism, objective correlative
• Scholar
• British subject
• Nobel Prize
• Prufrock first published in 1915 in Poetry
  magazine

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The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

• The most Modernist poem weve read!
• A dramatic monologue
• A type of poem in which a speaker addresses a
  silent listener.
• a poem written as a speech
• stream of consciousness a writing technique that
  depicts a characters random flow of thoughts,
  feelings, and perceptions
• The critic Laurence Perrine wrote that Prufrock
  "presents the apparently random thoughts going
  through a person's head within a certain time
  interval, in which the transitional links are
  psychological rather than logical."

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The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

• The title its all about dry humor.
• Translation of the epigraph If I thought my
  answer were to one who could return to the world,
  I would not reply, but as none ever did return
  alive from this depth, without fear of infamy I
  answer thee. 
• Spoken by Count Guido da Montefeltro, a Damned
  Soul in the Eighth Circle of Hell in Dante's
  Divine Comedy, the Inferno, Canto 27, Lines
  61-66.

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Review for Modernism Test!

• You must know the authors and titles of the
  poems!
• Ezra Pound
• In a Station of the Metro
• The River-Merchants Wife A Letter
• William Carlos Williams
• The Red Wheelbarrow
• This is Just to Say
• Spring and All

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Review for Modernism Test!

• e.e. cummings
• l(a
• since feeling is first
• anyone lived in a pretty how town
• in just-
• O sweet spontaneous
• T.S. Eliot
• The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

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Review for Modernism Test!

• Make sure you thoroughly understand Modernism and
  Imagism, as well as
• Their relationship to each other
• Their relationship to other literary movements
• The historical context
• The 5 changes to which modernism was a response
• Terms
• Pounds theory of the image
• objective correlative

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Review for Modernism Test!

• Know the Modernism and Imagism handout!
• the 8 characteristics of Modernism
• Eliots Few Donts for an Imagist