Modernism (“the 20 th Century” – especially post WW I)

1. Modernism (“the 20th Century” – especially post WW I) - a movement that took hold in numerous art forms (visual, literary, and the plastic arts) - adopted by British (and American) artists from Continental European models (for Eliot and Pound: French Symbolist poets like Jules Laforgue, Charles Baudelaire, and Arthur Rimbaud) - Baudelaire – Flowers of Evil (1857 poetry collection) – discovery, through association, beauty and order within the otherwise ugly and chaotic urban landscape - Rimbaud – Illuminations (1872) – compressed prose poetry – allusive, play in language, density - “Oh, what a day-to-day business life is.” (“Complainte Sur Certains Ennuis” – Les Complaintes, Laforgue, 1885)

2. Modernism (“the 20th Century” – especially post-WW I and pre WW II) - involved a number of other movements: - Symbolism: highly charged language to evoke emotion, rather than directly express emotion (cf. Eliot’s “objective correlative”) - Imagism: took the aesthetic of Symbolism (with its affinity for music) and turned it towards the visual; developed circa 1912 by Ezra Pound and H.D. (Pound would later discredit Imagism as Amygism, when it became headed by poet Amy Lowell); Pound, by 1914, had turned to “Vorticism” (a dynamic focal point should draw the reader into the work – “the point of maximum energy “) - Cubism, Futurism, Abstract Expressionism, other -isms - Ezra Pound’s famous dictum for the Modernist movement was to “make it new”; to explore new literary subjects; to experiment beyond unified narrative and systems of imagery and metaphor Les Demoiselles d'Avignon Picasso and so a dismissal of tradition...?

3. The mind is doubtless something more divine and impressionable. Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion - consider Eliot’s unconventional traditionalism (“Tradition and the Individual Talent”): - literary works produce an “ideal order” (but this order accommodates all new works) - the “individual” poet uses poetry to lose his or her personality, not to “express it” (thus poetry is to be on the one hand an exploration of individual, often semi-abnormal, psychology – though it is, from the standpoint of the poet, oddly impersonal) - the poet accumulates “fragments” and presents them, without obvious unity - the poet is to be deeply “allusive” – as though all previous writers were looking over the present poet’s shoulder But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things. One of the facts that might come to light in this process is our tendency to insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else. In these aspects or parts of his work we pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man. if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously. we must believe that "emotion recollected in tranquility" is an inexact formula. historical sense obtain it by great labour the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order

4. “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone.” I must admit that "The Wasteland" was quite intimidating, especially considering that many times the footnotes overshadowed the poem itself. I decided [to] just read it through since I wanted to get one read through before going to bed, and I just wanted to appreciate it at the most basic level, and ignored the footnotes for the present. Waste Land [...] I don't completely hate it all of the footnotes are overwhelming and even though I've read them, I still have a hard time figuring out exactly what Eliot is trying to say. “That is not it at all, That is not what I meant, at all.”

5. Modernism (“the 20th Century” – especially post WW I) - WWI undermines faith in “centers”: Western moral, religious, national, spiritual systems seemed neither coherent nor durable – Yeats announces that the “center cannot hold” (“Second Coming” – 1920) - a new literary mode is needed to express this sense of disillusionment, of dissolution, and of fragmentation (ironically during a time when new modes of technical communication are making such things as long distance phone calls possible – the first happened between New York and San Fran in 1915) - 1922 sees the publication of Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, and Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and Joyce’s Ulysses – dense, difficult, allusive works (though in other senses very playful) - in a 1923 review of Ulysses, Eliot wrote that traditional, linear forms were incompatible with “the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.” - “These fragments I have shored against my ruins”

6. “I am Lazarus, come from the dead, Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”— First we had a couple of feelers down at Tom’s place There was old Tom, boiled to the eyes, blind “He do the police in different voices.” – from Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend. The widow, Betty Higden, comments that Sloppy (her adopted son) reads the newspaper and that he “do the Police in different voices." April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire VOICES